Writers and readers of description
can be cruel.
Beginning writers, especially in
genre fiction, often use a well-known technique in their first-draft
manuscripts when they reach a necessary description. They type “Add description here” and
immediately move on to quicker page-filling action or dialogue. The description, seen as too difficult or
boring, is left for later.
And the readers of genre fiction
might avoid description even more. Some
readers have admitted—if in low and embarrassed tones—that they often “skip those passages” in order to hurry on to
more immediate excitements. Then, worse,
they never come back and read them anyway.
Such realities raise questions,
serious or not, of ever-narrowing attention span, of more quickly-gratifying
media affecting reader and writer expectations (some fiction teachers lament
that their students “write like they’re watching a movie” and thus, for
example, have no understanding of point of view), of ever-accelerating
narrative pace, or—if the commentator is in a bad mood—of personal laziness,
lack of confidence, or just outright fear (“description is so hard to write”).
These are more-or-less
historical issues of taste. We must
accept that all reader/writer preferences change as the times evolve, as media,
expectations, and the entertainment environment develop their own forms of
momentum. But, nonetheless, based on
just the few comments above, there’s room for some discussion about the writing and reading of description.
I teach workshops on the writing
of description and hope to complete a full book on the subject, focusing
strictly on genre fiction, with a special treatment on science fiction. The tools I discuss can be applied to all
forms of fiction-writing, but I stress popular fiction because most “how-to”
writing texts focus more on literary writing and I’d like this approach to take
a different slant. Also, and more important,
the question of reader expectation is
so crucial in genre narratives that the writer needs to balance fulfilling genre
expectations with being new at the same time. “Giving more of the same but in a
different way” is a genre cliché that is nonetheless accurate. Also, the brewing cross-pollination occurring
among popular genres (where hybrids such as paranormal romance, urban fantasy,
slipstream and “interstitial” fiction have produced new sets of reader
preferences) makes an exciting arena of texts and writing styles. Finally, how we manage the tools of fiction
(plot, character, theme, etc.) is influenced and often determined by the genres
we write in, or the genres we write against or “around.”
So, though the methods I offer
are useful to all writers, in both genre and mainstream fiction, I especially
address those writers struggling to fill up empty sections where “add
description here” was typed or scrawled—to the point where that statement might
not have to be used at all. The methods
cover ways for writers to generate description more easily and quickly, and they
show how readers can get more from it than what they expect, not just
information but a whole realm of sensory, emotional, and intellectual
participation in alternate fictional worlds.
Authors on craft usually
approach the subject of description through a focus on selecting just the right
details, on the balance between “telling” and “showing” (or narration and
scene), on an emphasis to use more of the five senses, and on a reminder to
simply be more observant. These are
important suggestions and all writers should pay attention to them. But what I hope to offer is a different
addition to the subject, a break-down or “taxonomy” of description methods that
provides a variety of skirmishes and tools, and even a fundamental framework
for any descriptive passage. Specifically,
four types of description are explored—scientific,
sensory, emotional, and poetic—which thus provide more ways than one in
writing better examples of it.
The workshop, soon to be given
at the MFA in Writing Popular Fiction at Seton Hill University, thus aims to
help writers, caught up in churning out plot and dialogue, to write more
confidently the descriptions that make a special appeal to the readers and open
a door to them. Description is a type of
intense focus within the standard flow of a narrative. Its detail and concentration, its inviting
and almost coercive effort to get the reader “into” the story, its need to make
the topics real (or at least “realistic”), all make for a required peak of
writing skill and clarity. The reader is
not just given information in a description but is transformed by it. The best descriptions refer to more than just
the object described; they inform readers not only of place but of mood,
attitude, point of view, character, theme.
It thus makes the readers sense, feel, understand, and “emote” in
relation to those subjects—the passage gets more than its money’s worth.
Though description can bring
problems of its own, like readers who feel it’s only window-dressing or
backdrop and thus easily skipped, something crucially necessary in fiction is
provided by it. Ellen Meloy, in The Anthropology of Turquoise, lamented
historical narratives, like family histories or genealogies, because of the feelings they leave out. She says in reading them you get people’s
names and activities but none of “the spaces that bound them . . . the way they
carried choices and grasped time.” And
she implies that life can be brought to non-fiction through the descriptive
techniques of fiction. “So many accounts
of long ago give a narrow way of seeing, a matter-of-factness . . . that verges
on abstraction. Landscape is missing, what could be seen. How the green land and white lanes sloped to
the blue-green sea” (195). Description
takes abstraction and adds precision, a focused realistic detail that provides
information, sensation, emotion, and a creative poetic interaction between the
reader and the text. And we get all this
just through an exact choice of words.
Description allows readers to participate in the work of fiction, to
build the worlds of the stories themselves.
In the end, it makes reading as
creative, and thus as rewarding, as writing.
Ellen Meloy, The Anthropology of Turquoise: Reflections on Desert, Sea, Stone, and Sky. New York:
Vintage, 2002.
