To describe or not to describe; that is the question. How much description should you put in a story? What should you describe, and what should you ignore?
If you don’t use enough description in your story, the reader will be taken on a journey where they’ll only have a vague sense of time, place, and surroundings.
Being specific with important details can improve your writing no end. Say your character has a dog, for example. ‘Her fluffy poodle’ sounds more interesting than ‘her dog’.
Colour can also bring a story to life. ‘He spotted her fluorescent pink coat in the crowd’ adds more interest than just writing ‘he spotted her in the crowd’.
Keep it brief
There’s also the danger of using too much description.
What must be remembered is that every single time you describe something – the setting, the building, your character’s nice teeth – you stop the story, because description is a static thing.
So too much description can not only slow the story down, it can bore your reader to death.
If someone skims through your book at a store and reads pages and pages of you describing nice fluffy clouds, they’ll probably put your book down and move onto someone else’s.
Keep descriptions in your story brief, and never describe things that don’t need describing.
Weave it into the story
Description works better when it’s weaved in throughout the story, rather than plonked in as a single big info dump. Add it through thought, action, or dialogue.
In the below example, description is weaved into the story through dialogue:
“Watch your mouth,” Toby murmured, his eyes on a stern-looking security guard standing on a lawn with an unleashed German Shepherd. “Or he’ll set the dog on us.”
WIERD WORD OF THE DAY: BLOVIATE. Meaning to talk for a long time in a boastful way.
Don’t over-use adjectives
You may find at some point that you can’t weave in description through thought, action, or dialogue in your story – you have to describe a scene on its own. When that happens, be sure to watch out for the overuse of adjectives.
An adjective is a word that describes a noun (a person, place, or thing). Sprinkle a sentence with too many adjectives and it gets weakened – one is usually enough.
For example, this sentence has two adjectives:
She looked up at the huge, majestic giant.
Now let’s cut it down to just one:
She looked up at the majestic giant.
Every now and again, you may also like to try cutting out all the adjectives and using one good verb instead (a verb is the action or state of being in a sentence).
For example, instead of ‘she looked up at the majestic giant’, write ‘the giant towered above her’.
The verb ‘towered’ is used to good effect in the sentence.
Description is what makes the reader a sensory participant in the story. Good description is a learned skill, one of the prime reasons you cannot succeed unless you read a lot and write a lot. It’s not just a question of how-to, you see; it’s a question of how much to. Reading will help you answer how much, and only reams of writing will help you with the how. You can learn only by doing.
– STEPHEN KING
Use the five senses in description
Description often involves one or more of the five senses: sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell.
Describing an experience from your character’s viewpoint using one or more of the senses can be used to great effect.
The reader gets the intimacy of experiencing things through the character’s sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell, and it can often evoke an emotional response, which is what it’s all about, right? Anything but boredom is a good thing.
Consider this sentence:
George’s dish was hot, causing his eyes to water and his tongue to burn.
Now let’s change it up a bit, incorporating both character viewpoint and the sense of taste:
George’s eyes watered as the spicy dish exploded inside him, setting his tongue on fire.
Concentrate on what stands out with appearance
When describing someone’s appearance, rather than going into too much detail, concentrate on what stands out.
In the Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling only talks about what stands out about Harry: his thin face, knobbly knees, black hair, bright green eyes, and last but not least, the scar on his forehead, shaped like a bolt of lightning.
She could go on and on if she wanted to, but she doesn’t, keeping her writing interesting and tight.
Show, don’t tell in your descriptions
Why are writers constantly advised to ‘show’ and not ‘tell’ in their stories?
Showing makes the writing more interesting and helps the reader experience the story more vividly.
For example, a character in our story is scared; how do we go about communicating that fear to our readers?
We can simply just tell them:
‘Sally was really scared as the wild boar ran towards her.’
Or we can show them:
‘Sally’s jaw dropped open in horror as she breathed in sharply. The wild boar was running straight towards her.’
We don’t need to tell the reader that Sally was scared in the aforementioned paragraph; it’s all shown through Sally’s viewpoint and her bodily reactions.
You can ‘show’ things like personality, attitudes, emotions, and pain through dialogue, thoughts, and action.
Using the five senses of sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell in your writing can also be very effective when it comes to ‘showing’.
Stories are a mixture of showing and telling, so you’ve got to judge for yourself how much to show and how much to tell. Your judgement no doubt will get better and better with practice.
Which leads me to my next and final point.
Practice writing a lot and read a lot
Ideas are good and useful things, and I can type till my fingers bleed suggesting them, but nothing, nothing, NOTHING beats lots of hands-on practice with writing. And regular reading.
The old writing mantra, ‘read a lot and write a lot’ is the best thing you can ever do if you want to get better at your craft. Nothing beats learning by doing, so even if you’re in between writing projects, keep your practice up, even if it’s just for a few minutes a day.
Get your journal out and practice describing things using ‘showing’, ‘the senses’, and ‘character viewpoint’. Experiment with any or all of the techniques mentioned in this blog or other blogs.
Play around.
Go wild.
Try different things.
See what happens.
And happy writing.
I hope you got something out of my blog on effective description. And now it’s time for:
Drumroll:
YOU SHOULD READ BEFORE YOU DIE: SLAUGHTERHOUSE 5 by Kurt Vonnegut. As a young man, Kurt Vonnegut witnessed the bombing of Dresden, a city in Germany, which claimed the lives of thousands of people. For many years he tried to write about what happened, but struggled with the words. When he did finally write about it, he wrote this novel, an American classic anti-war book. The protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, is a World War II soldier who travels back and forth through time to moments from his past and future.
Check out this quote from Kurt Vonnegut about the concept of time:
All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all…bugs in amber.
If you like this post, please share it!
P.S. I’ve just discovered a really interesting website for you that helps with description: descriptionary.wordpress.com. Check it out when you get the time.