The Description Workshop © by Holly Lisle
All Rights Reserved
Description is one of those occasionally reviled writing skills.
It gets a bad reputation from books that include pages of turgid,
extraneous detail; no book has ever been rendered unreadable by
virtue of too little description. Unpublishable, maybe, but not
unreadable. Whereas a couple of hundred-word descriptions jammed
into a three-page paragraph can not only kill your book, but maybe
even your editor or first reader. Bad.
So you don’t want to do that. But you don’t want to walk
away from description entirely, either. It gives you powerful tools
for bringing worlds and characters to life. Used judiciously, it
can make your readers believe, and that is a wonderful thing.
You have a number of things you’ll routinely have to describe
in your writing – settings, situations, and characters.
- Let’s do setting first, since it’s
the first thing most writers think about when they think about
description.
If you’ve done a lot of worldbuilding, it’s easy to get
carried away with this one. You’ve developed a ton of wonderful
details, and the temptation is to use them all, and to do it all
at once. At the beginning of your story, especially if you’re
doing a novel and are writing about your own world, you’re
going to have to give people some description so they’ll know
where they are. However, even in a solid block of description, if
you keep the background moving, you’ll bring the scene to life
and keep your readers’ interest.
Here’s an example of what I mean, taken from the novel Diplomacy
of Wolves.
So Kait Galweigh stood off in one corner at the Dokteerak Naming
Day party and scanned the crowed while she pretended to sip a
drink. The Dokteerak Family women in their gauzy net finery clustered
beneath the broad palms in the central garden, chatting about
nothing of consequence. Torchlight cast an amber gleam on their
sleek skins and pale hair and made the heavy gold at their throats
and wrists seem to glow. They were decorative- --Kait's Family
had such women, too, and theirs was the fate she so desperately
wished to escape. The senior diplomats from both Families, Galweigh
and Dokteerak, gathered in the breezeway that surrounded the courtyard,
leaning along the food-laden tables, nibbling from finger servings
of yearling duck and broiled monkey and wild pig and papaya-stuffed
python, telling each other amusing stories and watching, watching,
their eyes never still. Concubines flirted and primped, tempting
their way into berths in the beds of the high-ranking or the beautiful.
Dokteerak guardsmen in gold and blue propped themselves against
doorways, swapping racy stories and tales of bravado with Galweigh
guardsmen in red and black. Outland princes and the parats of
other Families and their cadet branches drifted from group to
group, assessing available women the way hunting wolves assessed
a herd of deer.
(You can read
the entire chapter here to see how I continued the use of people
to describe setting.)
Now this is a longish paragraph – 214 words. However, the
reader gets a feel for the world from watching people doing things.
Description Rule Number One – People are more interesting
than scenery.
When you’re finished reading this one paragraph, you have
an idea of the social and political structure and technological
level of this part of the world, social mores and morals, the weather
that evening, the climate of the region, and at least a suggestion
of the social standing of the characters. And if I’ve done
my job correctly, you’re interested enough in what the people
are doing that you don’t see the things I’ve slipped in
with them. Did you consciously notice the palm trees, the presence
of monkeys and papaya on the menu, the women dressed in gauzy clothing?
Tropical climate. Did you notice concubines, decorative women, uniformed
guardsmen, outland princes, Families with a capital F? Complex social
structure with a number of conflicting political models, sexual
mores different than those of middle-class America, and the presence
of a definite hierarchy. Torchlight? The possibility, if not yet
the certainty, of a lower-tech world. The Naming Day Party? An unfamiliar
celebration of some sort – and something that obviously is
of some importance.
What other rules did I use in this paragraph? Description Rule
Two – Forms of the verb “to be” are your enemy.
I did not write, It was a hot night, or The Dokteerak
women were beautiful but immoral, or The food on the table
was strange. Those would have been really boring sentences.
If you’re telling, you can’t be showing, and when you
describe something, you want to show it. You don’t want to
tell about it. Think about a car salesman. He wants you to buy the
car. So does he tell you how great it is? No, he drags you out,
sits your butt in the driver’s seat, and lets you smell the
leather interior, wrap your hands around the steering wheel, peer
through the windshield, and feel the way it moves with you as you
drive it through city streets.
Let your readers drive your world.
Exercise One: List three or four important
points about your story-universe that you want your readers to know.
These can be anything from weather to political structure to the
rules of a game characters will play that is integral to your plot.
When you have them listed, write a paragraph describing them ...
but do it using people, and avoid as many variants of the verb “to
be” as you can.
Finished? Like the energy in what you’ve done? Have you managed
to sneak your worldbuilding in disguised as action? If you have,
great. If not, give it another shot, and then let’s move on.
- Next, let’s work on situation description.
In order to start a story, you have to let the reader know where
your character is, what the problem is, and why it matters. This
requires description – but again, description shouldn’t
be something your reader has to drag himself through out of obligation.
It should, instead, reach out of the page, grab him by the throat,
and drag him kicking and screaming into your story and your world.
Here’s a situation description I did for Hunting the Corrigan’s
Blood. It is, in fact, the first paragraph of the book, and
this time it is straight description – no action.
The corpse's left eye squinted at me from mere centimeters away.
Decomposition lent her face an increasingly inscrutable expression;
the first time I'd regained consciousness, when I found myself
tied to her, she looked like she had died in terror. After a while,
she started leering at me, as if she had reached the place where
I was going and took perverse pleasure from the thought that I
would join her there soon. Now, having had her moment of amusement
at my expense, she meditated; beneath thousands of dainty auburn
braids, her face hung slack, bloated and discolored, the skin
loosening. Threads of drool hung spiderwebbish from her gaping
mouth. Her eyes, dry and sunken and filmed over beneath swollen
lids, still stared directly at me.
(You can read
this paragraph in context here to see how I used description
to create situation.)
Technically, it is a description of a dead body. However, it is
a bit more compelling than a simple description of a corpse, because
the narrator is telling you about the corpse in the first person
while the two of them are handcuffed together and locked in a locker.
It is, I think, one of the catchier openers I’ve done. From
this short description, the reader understands immediately and completely
that the narrator is in terrible trouble, that the trouble is premeditated
and the stakes are high, and that there is at least a bit of a mystery
ongoing – people don’t refer to those they know as “the
corpse” – so the dead body to which the narrator is bound
must belong to a stranger. We get confirmation of that in subsequent
chapters, but I’ve planted the seed in the first one.
So what rules did I follow in setting up this situation? Description
Rule Number Three – Lead with the biggest gun you’ve got.
I didn’t start by mentioning that the narrator was badly hurt
– though she was, and you get a hint of that from the fact
that she’s been unconscious more than once. I didn’t lead
with the locker, or with the narrator’s confusion over the
fact that the woman was a stranger, or with a description of the
space station or Cadence Drake’s job, or any of the events
that got her where she was. I started her out eyeball to eyeball
with the body of a dead stranger, and took a bit of time and a number
of gritty words to describe the stranger. (I also followed Rules
One and Two.)
Exercise Two: Figure out what the most compelling
detail is in a situation you’re trying to set up for your character.
Weed out all the things you wish the reader knew, and all the things
that are secondary, and just dig into that one compelling detail.
- Finally, let’s look at description of character.
Everyone knows about this one –
Missy looked at herself in the mirror. She liked her short, pert
nose, her perfectly blonde hair – natural, of course –
and the way her enormous breasts complimented her tiny waist.
She didn’t think she was perfect, of course. She thought
she was too skinny and plain, but everyone else kept insisting
she was beautiful, so maybe she was.
If you have ever written a paragraph like that, don’t feel
bad. Most of us have at one point or another. But it is dreadful,
and there are much, much better ways to describe character.
I had to dig for an out-and-out description of a character, because
I rarely do a block of text telling what a character looks like.
I’ll sneak a detail in here or there, but for the most part,
I let characters describe themselves by their actions. Every once
in a while, though, someone comes along who deserves a real description.
This is from Chapter Two of Diplomacy of Wolves.
Crispin and Andrew both grinned at each other. As they did, Anwyn
slouched into the dungeon. Marcue had thought from his name that
he would be human. Anwyn was a good Parmatian name, like Crispin
… or Marcue, for that matter. The thing that skulked into
the dungeon wasn't human, though. He might have been one of the
Scarred---one of the creatures from the poisoned lands whose ancestors,
stories said, had once been men. If he was Scarred, however, he
was from no realm that had ever traded in Calimekka. And if he
wasn't one of the Scarred, then he was a demon from the lowest
pit of Zagtasht's darkest hell. Long horns curled out from his
forehead. His scaled brow beetled over eyes so deeply set they
looked more like hollow sockets. His lips parted in a grin that
revealed teeth long as a man's thumb and serrated like a shark's.
He hunched forward, and Marcue could make out the ridge of huge
spines that ran down the center of his back beneath his cloak.
His hands were talons, though five-fingered, and while one of
his feet fit in a man's boot and grew from a man-shaped leg, the
other was a cloven hoof attached to a leg that, beneath a man's
breeches, bent backward at the knee. That leg he dragged forward
as he moved into the room.
231 words, most of it straight description. I used ‘to be’
verbs in this, and interspersed a line-item description with reaction
description from the scene’s point-of-view character. The only
reason I wrote the paragraph this way is because Anwyn isn’t
human, or anything like it, and I wanted to get that point across
quickly and with as much visual and visceral impact as I could manage.
Description Rule Number Four -- Describe by list only as a last
resort. Contrast the treatment above with the initial
description of the young woman who is the actual focus of the scene.
The stone walls, rough-hewn and slime-coated, gleamed in the
torchlight. The chill of the place, and the stink and the darkness
and the skittering sounds of the rats, wore on Marcue's nerves
even when all the cells were full and the men in them talked and
quarreled and wondered about their futures. Now the dungeon was
empty except for one prisoner, and that was a girl---a child,
really---and she rarely spoke, but frequently cried. Her crying
was worse than the rats.
That’s it. That’s all you learn about her in the first
paragraph. I dole out bits and pieces of descriptive information
throughout the rest of the scene, so that by the end of it, the
reader has a very clear picture of Danya Galweigh – but it
comes only a line here and a line there. You can read
all of Chapter Two here: Take a look to see how description
of a major character can be made subtle and spread out, and compare
to how it can be blunt and in- your-face, and remember Description
Rule Number Five: Only describe what is different.
Exercise Three: List the characteristics
that make your character different. When you have that list, write
two samples – one in which you do straight description, and
one in which you spread out the salient points about your character
over paragraphs or pages.
Description doesn’t have to be the part of your writing that
readers skim to get to the good stuff. If you pay attention to the
five basic rules of description, you’ll make description part
of the good stuff.
One-Pass Manuscription
Revision >>
Reprinted from Holly
Lisle's Vision: A Resource For Writers, Issue #8 (Mar-Apr,
2002)
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