Bradel Bookwork – Creative Writing with Brandon Sanderson (Description) · 9:22pm Apr 20th, 2013
And as promised, I'm back! So now that the discussion of viewpoint is out of the way, let's move on to the other half of lesson three: description.
Fundamentally, description serves the purpose of giving the reader necessary information. There are different kinds of necessity at play here, though. We have story necessity – information the reader needs to follow the decisions characters are making and the plot of the story. We also have engagement necessity – giving the reader enough detail to give them a clear mental image representation of the events in the story. I haven't read a lot of Stephen King, but what I've read makes me think that the engagement necessity side of description is pretty minimal. Readers are willing to deal with some very broad strokes in storytelling. My personal feeling is that engagement necessity is more about making a story stick with a reader after it's done, by giving them great scenes rather than great events. Scenes are easier to remember, even if they're a little more cumbersome to read. Personally, my feeling is that any description that doesn't serve story necessity or engagement necessity is a waste of words.
Brandon has four central rules for writing description: be brief, be concrete, do more than just describe, and use multiple senses. I think it makes the most sense to work my way through these ideas sequentially, just as he does in the class.
Be Brief
This is one of my own cardinal rules of writing. Writing stories, that is. My blog posts tend to be very different creatures: see my discussion of Flesch-Kincaid readability statistics. My attitude tends to be that words are like the marble from which stories are carved, and like Michelangelo, the task of a writer is merely to set that story free. I suspect I focus on this a lot more than some of my favorite authors on Fimfiction, but there are few things that sour me on a story faster than reading a block of long text that serves minimal narrative purpose. I'm more forgiving in professional literature – and by extension, I'm more forgiving in fanfiction that's very well written – but I always remain quite worried, in my own writing, that inefficient description is just going to make people close my stories and look elsewhere for entertainment.
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, though, I think one of Brandon's big points here is something we really don't have to worry about much in fanfiction. The learning curve for most of our stories is pretty minimal, since we're all working forward from some shared knowledge base. Sure, an OC story can increase the learning curve considerably. GhostOfHeraclitus's "Whom the Princesses Would Destroy" spends a lot of time creating new characters and establishing a new setting, and it does this very well. One of my current projects, "The Account of Waning Promise" faces the same sorts of problems. But most of the stories on Fimfiction revolve around well established characters and settings, and that gives them a very gentle learning curve. In terms of our main topic here, this means these stories aren't don't need lots of description to establish themselves. On one hand, that frees these stories to be a little more recreational with their description, since they won't have such a burden of set-up they need to balance. On the other hand, though, it makes overuse of description substantially less forgivable, because it's often not serving as important a role in supporting the story.
Be Concrete
And here is one of the reasons I love Brandon Sanderson. I've gotten in more than a few show vs. tell debates in my three months here, and I remain firmly convinced that (1) there's a germ of an important idea in the show-tell debate and it's an important thing for writers to focus on, and (2) a fair chunk of the people harping on how stories need more showing and less telling have no clue what they're on about. Case in point, check out the EqD Omnibus's section on "Show vs. Tell". It's meant to be a nice, easy demonstration of how showing is better than telling.
It's a complete train wreck.
Whoever wrote that section of the omnibus took two lines of telling and blew them out into eighteen lines of showing. Sure, the writing may be marginally more engaging, but two lines of telling is utterly forgivable. Eighteen lines spent describing something that just doesn't matter is a huge, huge writing mistake. Unless Twilight being too tired to write her mentor a letter is a central plot point of your story, you'd have to be insane to substitute the telling version for the showing version.
So, concrete is good. Yes. This is what the show-don't-tell advice is all about. But it needs to be balanced with brevity, because concretizing language almost invariably adds words. If you can get your description across (1) equally well and (2) more concretely, (3) in a comparable number of words, then you should probably do it. Because yes, showing is better than telling – all else being equal. Which it often isn't.
You know, Brandon is really knocking this out of the park and beating anything I could hope to say on the matter, so let me just put up the video of his Pyramid of Abstraction discussion.
Do More than Just Describe
Now here is a good reason for giving a description a few more words. As I said above, my attitude is that descriptions should fundamentally serve the needs of story and/or reader engagement, and if they aren't, then they're wasted words. I stand by that, but it must be mentioned that descriptions need not limit themselves to those two purposes. A description can also tell a lot about your world and your characters in the 1P or 3PLi viewpoints. Word choice allows the writer to add some foreshadowing, some world-building, and some subtle judgments about the things being described. Take the following passage from Chapter 2 of "Bell, Book & Candle" where Time Turner is introduced.
As if on cue, a brown stallion entered the room. He had a dark mane and an hourglass-shaped mark on his flank, a match for Minuette's own. And he was an earth pony.
The purpose of this description is to let the reader know about the new character entering the scene. It provides enough visual detail for any MLP fan to identify this pony. And it does three other things. First, it gives a hint of theatricality in Time Turner's characterization, which is borne out by further interaction. Second, it draws an immediate and important connection between Time Turner and Minuette. Third, it reinforces Bellbray's prejudicial view of pony society. I don't think my writing is usually anywhere near that efficient, but I have to say, I'm pretty happy with those three sentences.
ETA: Scramblers and Shadows makes a good point down in the comments that I forgot to mention here.
Use Multiple Senses
I've heard it said before that the best descriptions – speaking purely in terms of imagery here – tag three senses. Descriptions that extend beyond the visual are usually much more powerful, and a powerful description is one that's less likely to lose reader interest. Sight and sound are easy senses to hit, and there's very little reason not to incorporate aural stimuli in descriptive passages that are longer than a line or two. Bringing in other senses can be a little more difficult. Smell is usually the most obvious route to take, but while certain scents often stick in our minds, most of us don't perceive the world as a never-ending assault on our nostrils. Personally, I prefer using tactile senses. Let characters feel objects, if possible. If not, it's often easy to slip in a couple words on whether a room is warm or cold, whether the air is dry or muggy, things like that. It may seem like a small thing, and in a way it is, but I find in my own reading that just a little extra tag of description like this really solidifies a scene in my mind.
And I think that's about all I have to say about descriptions right now. I'll be back next week, with Brandon's thoughts on character. Happy writing!
Previous Lesson: Viewpoint
Next Lesson: Characters
Bloody hell. It's been a while since I read EQD's Editor's Omnibus. I'd forgotten how absolutely abysmal that section was. It does more to harm their credibility than all the opaque rejection slips quoted on this site.
Beyond that, I'm not sure I have much to add. The points here cut to the heart of the issue pretty well. For my own writing I try to use the viewpoint character's subjectivity as a guide. Things get described to the degree that the character notices them. Stuff the character knows but isn't concentrating on is stuff that should be told rather than shown (if it's necessary to give context, at least). And what the character notices will depend on the situation, the sort of person the character, and so forth. It communicates a great deal, which is illustrated well in your do-more-than-just-describe example.
1024265 That completely slipped my mind to talk about! But yes, aside from a certain measure of narrative forcing (e.g. describe the thing in the room that's about to become relevant like the chair someone will sit on next paragraph), I always try to stick to the things that the viewpoint character would actually notice and care about. In the MLP arena, say, Rarity is going to notice fashion and devote a lot more attention to it. I personally feel like the filtering effect is less pronounced with most of the other characters, but then again character subjectivity is something I tend to do more out of instinct than out of planning in a lot of cases. I'd say it's a bit of a method acting approach, and maybe I could improve it by working on those techniques, but to be honest it just feels pretty natural for me to slip into someone else's perspective.