By Katharina Gerlach
How To Write Great Descriptions
I’m a bilingual author from Germany and I
learned many things the hard way. One of my biggest obstacles was (and still is
to some extent) my tendency to write lean. I do not much care for lush
descriptions. Why use 20 words if 5 will suffice? The reason is quite simple:
Reading is the only
known way of thought transfer. Sure, it’s a buggy process but it works if (yes,
if) the author knows the difference between show and tell, and description
plays a major role there.
As a child, I loved the books of an author who
lived in the middle of the 19th century. His stories were
adventurous and had deep meaning. However, I skipped whole pages due to big
blocks of descriptions. I wanted the action to keep moving. So when I began
writing in earnest, I left out descriptions wherever possible. Either extreme is wrong.
In a blogpost on this site in October, Rayne Hall has
already given you some pointers at how you can make your descriptions more
engaging. Use your scene character’s POV to your advantage. You can reveal or hide facts you’ll need in
later chapters by mixing them into well thought out descriptions. You can also
use description to characterize your POV character or characters the POV
character interacts with.
Example: “How I hated the smell of his car. The scent of
cold cigarettes, french fries, and stale beer made me gag, but I had no choice.
If I wanted life to continue, I had to sit in his grimy VW bug where a mass of
mingled rubbish had overtaken the backseat. There were scientific papers, sheet
music, food, empty beer bottles, some records and even a guitar with ripped
strings and a coating that must surely be a century’s worth of grime.”
Right here, the description is only there to
set the scene, the reader thinks. But later on, when the young detective
discovers that all murder victims have been strangled with a guitar string,
this scene gets a whole new layer of importance.
The key to great description is the use of
specific details. Rayne Hall has already shown how different the perceptions of
your characters should be, depending on their jobs, their hobbies, and life
experiences. But even with that foundation, the choice of detail is crucial.
Why does the architect notice this house rather than the one next to it? Does
he really notice the whole house or is it the contrast of the blooming geranium
in the cracked pot against the once yellow sandstone that symbolizes the
district's downfall to him?
It is also important to keep in mind, what the
POV character is doing in the scene you’re trying to describe. Naturally, a
thief fleeing from the police will not notice how lovingly cared for the garden
looks that he’s passing through. He’ll only be on the lookout for the gate or a
place where he can jump the fence or a hiding place. While an old widow
visiting her late husband’s grave might point out to him in minute detail what
has changed on the neighboring graves since her last visit.
Description should also use all senses if
possible. Our normal modus operandi is sight, which is why most of our
descriptions center around things we see. But we’ve also got smell, hearing,
feel, and taste (which is pretty hard to put into story but not impossible).
And some people claim to have a sixth sense, perception.
A final consideration is your genre.
Description can be used very well to set the tone of your novel. Description in
a gritty detective story will focus on different elements in the scenes and a
different, more chopped up writing style than a chick-lit story with its
fluffy, feel-good descriptions. The genre also determines the amount of
descriptions you need.
Readers of Romance expect a lot of sensual descriptions
mingled with strong emotions whereas Horror works with the unseen in complex
settings. A heavily tech-oriented SciFi story will need more expository
description (beware the pitfall here) than a coming of age story set in the
real world.
Make your descriptions as varied as you can,
because description is what makes your stories become a movie in the readers’
minds. Skimp on it, and your stories will fall flat no matter how engaging the
characters and how intriguing the plot. Put in too much, and the reader will
skip paragraphs or even whole pages.
Play
Along:
Describe your room twice. The first time,
pretend to be a mother fetching laundry from her son’s/daughter’s room. And
second, pretend to be an alien that crashed through the window of this room, so
this is the first glimpse of humanity it gets. Keep it under 100 words.
Feel free to post, and I’ll do my best to
comment.
