On writing: descriptions

[StillStunned]

"The scenery was as boring as a long descriptive passage."

I don't remember where I saw this, but the author was very aware of a big issue in writing: lots of background detail that doesn't interest the reader and doesn't further the story. Let's face it, when we see a long section describing the room our characters are about to have sex in, from the material and colour of the carpet to the pictures by the bed to the patterned ceiling plaster, most of us will feel our eyes glaze over and our brains drift off to what we need to get from the shops.

Even worse is when Chekov hides his firearms somewhere in the middle, and 5k words later the author springs the surprise on us and expects us to have seen it coming.

As you might gather, I'm not fond of elaborate descriptions. Provide the basics, just enough background to set the scene or the mood, and trust the reader to fill in the details, that's my general approach.

That said, sometimes it can be valuable for the story to colour in the details. And some other writers probably enjoy writing descriptions, probably because their mother didn't love them and they have tiny genitals, and no I'm not insinuating there's a correlation between the two.

So, tips and tricks?

I've mentioned a few times that I keep my descriptions moving in one direction, like a camera panning across a scene. When I first introduce a character, I'll do hair-forehead-eyes-nose-mouth-chin-neck and so on, or maybe feet-ankles-calves-thighs-etc. For rooms, I might starts along one wall, then round to the next. It helps the reader to keep it organised in their mind, and means they have to waste less energy thinking about where the various elements fit together.

I also use paragraphs as units for description. A character's physical appearance gets a paragraph, their clothes get another, their actions a third. A house gets one paragraph for the street it's on, one for its measurements, one for the steps leading up to the front door and the doorman standing outside.

Another important trick, I find, is to provide key information early on. I suspect that readers form a picture in their mind within the first few sentences, or even words. Provide the information in the order in which it will reach an onlooker's brain. So if your character is particularly tall, or short, mention that very early. Hair colour too. An exceptionally long nose, or an elaborate hairdo. Details that become apparent once the initial impression has been formed come next. A scar over the eyebrow. A tendency to suck on their lower lip. A long dangling earring. Smaller details that a viewer might be expected to miss at first glance can come later. But you'd better not be four paragraphs into a fight scene before your POV character mentions their assailant's moustache - unless she's a middle-aged woman who bleaches her upper lip.

These are my basic thoughts. Let me know what you think, why you agree, and what theoretical arguments might be conjured up to disagree!

 

[Imstillfun]

"The scenery was as boring as a long descriptive passage."

I don't remember where I saw this, but the author was very aware of a big issue in writing: lots of background detail that doesn't interest the reader and doesn't further the story. Let's face it, when we see a long section describing the room our characters are about to have sex in, from the material and colour of the carpet to the pictures by the bed to the patterned ceiling plaster, most of us will feel our eyes glaze over and our brains drift off to what we need to get from the shops.

Even worse is when Chekov hides his firearms somewhere in the middle, and 5k words later the author springs the surprise on us and expects us to have seen it coming.

As you might gather, I'm not fond of elaborate descriptions. Provide the basics, just enough background to set the scene or the mood, and trust the reader to fill in the details, that's my general approach.

That said, sometimes it can be valuable for the story to colour in the details. And some other writers probably enjoy writing descriptions, probably because their mother didn't love them and they have tiny genitals, and no I'm not insinuating there's a correlation between the two.

So, tips and tricks?

I've mentioned a few times that I keep my descriptions moving in one direction, like a camera panning across a scene. When I first introduce a character, I'll do hair-forehead-eyes-nose-mouth-chin-neck and so on, or maybe feet-ankles-calves-thighs-etc. For rooms, I might starts along one wall, then round to the next. It helps the reader to keep it organised in their mind, and means they have to waste less energy thinking about where the various elements fit together.

I also use paragraphs as units for description. A character's physical appearance gets a paragraph, their clothes get another, their actions a third. A house gets one paragraph for the street it's on, one for its measurements, one for the steps leading up to the front door and the doorman standing outside.

Another important trick, I find, is to provide key information early on. I suspect that readers form a picture in their mind within the first few sentences, or even words. Provide the information in the order in which it will reach an onlooker's brain. So if your character is particularly tall, or short, mention that very early. Hair colour too. An exceptionally long nose, or an elaborate hairdo. Details that become apparent once the initial impression has been formed come next. A scar over the eyebrow. A tendency to suck on their lower lip. A long dangling earring. Smaller details that a viewer might be expected to miss at first glance can come later. But you'd better not be four paragraphs into a fight scene before your POV character mentions their assailant's moustache - unless she's a middle-aged woman who bleaches her upper lip.

These are my basic thoughts. Let me know what you think, why you agree, and what theoretical arguments might be conjured up to disagree!

In my opinion, if you’re going to describe a room person or scenery, the object has to be important somewhere in the plot even if it’s down the road. If it’s not you should leave It out.

 

[dirk2024]

In a recent story, I had a couple go out to dinner at a fancy restaurant, a place where the MFC "always wanted to go".

So I described the room as they were seeing it for the first time, in wonderment at the beautiful decor. I was four, maybe five sentences of a 19k story. I mentioned the view through the windows, the furniture, the room colors and the artwork. I thought that appropriate for a somewhat slow-burn story.

 

[AG31]

lots of background detail that doesn't interest the reader and doesn't further the story.

It depends on the audience. An author I've followed sometimes sounds like a travelogue writer. It does get too much for me now and then, but he has observed (in the notes at the end of one of his books), that his readers ask for more and more description. His setting is the Lake District in England, so...

Edit: ..or maybe it's the Cotswolds.... or...

There are matters of taste (little description? lots of description?) and matters of quality. Was the description well done? That's a little harder to pin down.

 

[yowser]

Unlike you, I have a fondness for a good detailed description. (Anything, from scenery to facial expressions.) You are right to emphasise the need to eliminate Extraneous descriptions, however.

Descriptions can do a lot of lifting in a story. What details does your character notice? How do they react to them? What feelings are associated with the noticing? You can do comparisons, even, maybe especially, in First Person, who notices that character X has wider shoulders than them, or has the same gait, etc.

But I agree in restraint: paint an elaborate portrait if it serves the story, maybe spare now (to set the outline of the place/person) and shade in more later as necessary. Detail is only a problem in my book if it bogs down the story's movement. In general, I respond well to a perceptive narrator.

 

[BeechLeaf]

I take the action to be a pen sketch, and descriptions to be colouration. After I have the lines, I dab my brush in ultramarine or alizarin carmine and add a little black cat curling around their legs, a Matisse poster on the wall, a chunky amber necklace, a dark green pillow with creases. She looked away. She looked away for a moment and admired the corn witch by the door. It doesn't distract, it's not a travelogue, it's a bit of grounding and realism and personal taste: the events depicted are happening in a real background world of laundry baskets and feeding the cat every morning and choosing that decoration in a small antiques market three years ago.

I don't write about sex, I write about people, and they have sex and feed their cat and like wayang kulit puppets.

 

[SimonDoom]

Everything depends on the story and its needs. What are you trying to say in the story? Motive? Mood? Setting?

Here's the opening paragraph of Charles Dickens's Bleak House:

LONDON. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln�s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes � gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another�s umbrellas in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if the day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

This is a description, and I think it's great. It sets a tone and mood for the novel, right out of the gate, even though it has nothing directly to do with what the characters do, once they're introduced.

To write well, you should have a purpose for every word you write. Your purpose doesn't have to be the same as everyone else's. But there should be purpose of some sort. Sometimes, I like description. Other times, I think it's extraneous. It all depends on the story and the purpose it serves in the story.

 

[Andreas_Kreuz]

Descriptions, when done well, create atmosphere. And you can never have too much atmosphere. And I think this is even more important for erotic stories. There are only limited ways to execute sex. So the atmosphere makes it interesting.

 

[TheLobster]

This is a description, and I think it's great.

I read it three times and I can’t figure out what Megalosaurus bit is about, although I do agree that it would not be wonderful to meet it, on a muddy London street or elsewhere really.

 

[PennyThompson]

I'm usually more instinctive than intentional about my descriptions, but thinking about this made me realize that when it comes to describing spaces and locations, I tend to give a broad sketch and then write like one or two more specific, often tactile details that, in my brain at least, help me visualize everything else.

So for example, in @Actingup and my LW story, the first part of the story takes place in a BBQ restaurant in Grand Rapids MI. The only description that Acting and I gave for it was:

Longhorn Barbeque had changed a little in the last twenty years, just like everything else. The taps were full of fussy microbrews nowadays, though they still sold bottles of my preferred Coors.
...
At least they still had the roll of butcher paper bolted to one end of the table to pull out and use as a disposable tablecloth. And the atmosphere was still great.

It doesn't really describe anything about the space, but to me the roll of butcher paper is the detail that sells the whole thing. I can visualize the entire rest of the space out in my mind just by sitting at that table and feeling the paper

Or in one of my very first stories, I described an empty dorm room:

It was a spartan room with painted cinderblock walls, with a couple of small windows looking out onto the college quad. Both sides of the room were identical with simple twin beds, each with their own study desks and cheaply built closets bolted to the wall nearby.

For me, it's the painted cinderblock walls that sets the entire scene. I can feel that glossy-over-rough texture and coolness just by thinking about it!

 

[ElectricBlue]

I take the action to be a pen sketch, and descriptions to be colouration. After I have the lines, I dab my brush in ultramarine or alizarin carmine and add a little black cat curling around their legs, a Matisse poster on the wall, a chunky amber necklace, a dark green pillow with creases. She looked away. She looked away for a moment and admired the corn witch by the door. It doesn't distract, it's not a travelogue, it's a bit of grounding and realism and personal taste: the events depicted are happening in a real background world of laundry baskets and feeding the cat every morning and choosing that decoration in a small antiques market three years ago.

This is pretty much me, an overlay of my aesthetic and visual interests, but not belaboured in the telling. What I call grace notes, very vivid in my mind as I show them, but not shoved down the reader's throat. They're not central to the story, but they're central to the observation.

This is possibly my favourite paragraph of my own writing:

I saw how the back of her hand was lightly freckled, the veins like a river on a map, and ever so slightly blue. Her skin was quite pale. A long scar ran along the side of her little finger, and I imagined some childhood accident, a young girl running inside to find mother, when only a father would do. I saw a tiny pulse on a vein near her wrist, and counted her heartbeats. Her pulse was quite quick, and I lost count at twenty-two.

I don't write about sex, I write about people, and they have sex and feed their cat and like wayang kulit puppets.

This. More the cats, less the puppets - my equivalent of your puppets is Japanese wabi-sabi, eloquence in simplicity, where the flaw is more beautiful than perfection.

 

[EmilyMiller]

On writing: descriptions​

Descriptive text relating to the environment has the following purposes:

1. Establish a space that is going to be important for the events / people in the story
2. Create a feeling about the environment, one which impacts on either a character or the reader
3. Emphasize some aspect of the mental state of one or more of the protagonists

I’ve used this example before, which is taken from Part II of my novel, The Story of Nix:

—

I debated whether to power down, but decided to survey the surroundings. My short life - if that was the right term to use - had not so far been overburdened with panoramic views, or even simple windows facing out into the world. Everything was interesting to me.

On closer inspection, the needled canopies outside the windows were full of life. Squirrels indignant about territorial infringements. Crows conducting raucous, multiway debates. Cardinals painting streaks of optimistic scarlet across the green backdrop. In one treeless gap, a young buck appeared to be looking straight at me, before sedately moving off into the foliage.

Looking down, wings of the building extended outward from me, forming a not wholly symmetrical cross. It was a very large house, and a seemingly very empty one.

Geolocation was another of my talents; where humans had their phones, my circuitry could talk directly to satellites. Briarmeadow was located deep in the Catskills, with our nearest neighbor some miles away. Money bought you privacy on a whole different level.

For hours, I absorbed every detail, every tableau playing out in front of me. Categorizing flora and fauna. Observing animal behavior. I found it all so enchanting, this dynamic dance of life. Which led me to a question: Was I alive? From one perspective, this seemed the height of foolishness to ask. If you can frame such a question, then there must be a thing doing the framing. René Descartes had made this very observation well over four hundred years ago. And yet...

And yet there was part of me that doubted. Was I an elaborate delusion? Was I so adept at presenting a facsimile of life that I also fooled myself? Was I nothing more than one of the soulless automata that Father had mentioned? Did humans ever worry about these issues?

—

The setting is important, all of Part II happens in Briarmeadow Hall or its grounds. The topology of the building and its remoteness are both relevant to the plot.

The surrounding woods will feature in Part II and Nix spends time travelling through them in later Parts as well. Local fauna and flora are pertinent.

But most of all, Nix’s embryonic consciousness is expanding and I wanted it capture her inate curiosity and ability to perceive beauty. Given she is part AGI, part cyborg, and part human, her perceptions and growing - for want of a better word - humanity are all central themes, ones I come back to again and again.

So, it’s not - at least IMO - boring description, it’s stuff that is interlaced with the plot, the setting, and the main character’s evolving mental state.

 

[MK_Whimsy]

A lot of what I write is very description-heavy. I tend to have the most fun writing detailed descriptions for a few reasons. One, they are usually integral to whatever fantasy I'm entertaining, and two, it probably makes up in some ways for the general lack of attention I give to other things like plot and character development. So I usually use stories as a way to drill into how vividly (or not) I can describe things, which can be a fun exercise for me.

Letting the reader fill in the gaps is probably appropriate in some cases, but a counterpoint is that the reader may be counting on me to do that. I'm the one writing the story, after all! I think there have been times when I didn't describe things enough because I believed the reader would fill in the gaps themselves, but in hindsight I think this was a mistake and the story suffered for it.

One goal I had when writing The Plow was to describe the setting in such a way as to make the dull, oppressive situation the MC is in feel almost tangible. Similarly, Interruption was more of an exercise in seeing how vividly I could bring a confinement fantasy to life (the story's plot notwithstanding, of course).

But this may not be appropriate in every case, and I can see where overdescribing could be a problem or distraction if the story is focused on other things.

 

[anthrodisiac]

Prerotica (not a typo), I was incredibly sparse on detail. I enjoyed letting readers build the world on their own, and thus provided bare minimum to do it. More sketch than painting. Enough to provide atmosphere, but not so much that my own vision for the place crowded in on however the reader wanted to imagine it. Partly, I suspect, because I'm borderline aphantasic and I don't really know what any of my characters and settings actually look like, so it's highly abstracted in my own mind.

However, that sort of thing doesn't as well erotically, and especially not non-human erotica, where most people don't actually have good ideas what the thing is supposed to look like. Sure, werewolf and minotaurs are pretty easy, but shifting to other species and non-standard tropes forced me to paint a more detailed picture because not many people are familiar with what a tamandua looks like, for instance.

I'm not a huge fan of non-work (aka extraneous) description. Even when I have to go into detail about the species I use, I'm not super happy about it, because the primary purpose is to describe something with which most readers are unfamiliar, and thus is necessary to ensure they have an accurate picture, because not providing that context leads to jarring inconsistencies when the thing they've mentally constructed clashes with the anatomy that shows up. I've seen this when writers do poor jobs describing their fantasy creatures or aliens, then suddenly they have claws when there was no indication of such prior to that, or they have a tail when none was described, things like that. It breaks flow and immersion to have to go back and double-check if I missed something, and we all know that's one of the last things you want a reader to do: to go fact check their own mental represntations.

As Emily mentioned, description should serve plot, mood, world, or character. However, the fourth main reason, as in my previous paragraph is the purely non-narrative purpose of giving the reader accurate representations so they aren't stopped in their tracks.

 

[Actingup]

"The scenery was as boring as a long descriptive passage."

I don't remember where I saw this, but the author was very aware of a big issue in writing: lots of background detail that doesn't interest the reader and doesn't further the story. Let's face it, when we see a long section describing the room our characters are about to have sex in, from the material and colour of the carpet to the pictures by the bed to the patterned ceiling plaster, most of us will feel our eyes glaze over and our brains drift off to what we need to get from the shops.

Even worse is when Chekov hides his firearms somewhere in the middle, and 5k words later the author springs the surprise on us and expects us to have seen it coming.

As you might gather, I'm not fond of elaborate descriptions. Provide the basics, just enough background to set the scene or the mood, and trust the reader to fill in the details, that's my general approach.

That said, sometimes it can be valuable for the story to colour in the details. And some other writers probably enjoy writing descriptions, probably because their mother didn't love them and they have tiny genitals, and no I'm not insinuating there's a correlation between the two.

So, tips and tricks?

I've mentioned a few times that I keep my descriptions moving in one direction, like a camera panning across a scene. When I first introduce a character, I'll do hair-forehead-eyes-nose-mouth-chin-neck and so on, or maybe feet-ankles-calves-thighs-etc. For rooms, I might starts along one wall, then round to the next. It helps the reader to keep it organised in their mind, and means they have to waste less energy thinking about where the various elements fit together.

I also use paragraphs as units for description. A character's physical appearance gets a paragraph, their clothes get another, their actions a third. A house gets one paragraph for the street it's on, one for its measurements, one for the steps leading up to the front door and the doorman standing outside.

Another important trick, I find, is to provide key information early on. I suspect that readers form a picture in their mind within the first few sentences, or even words. Provide the information in the order in which it will reach an onlooker's brain. So if your character is particularly tall, or short, mention that very early. Hair colour too. An exceptionally long nose, or an elaborate hairdo. Details that become apparent once the initial impression has been formed come next. A scar over the eyebrow. A tendency to suck on their lower lip. A long dangling earring. Smaller details that a viewer might be expected to miss at first glance can come later. But you'd better not be four paragraphs into a fight scene before your POV character mentions their assailant's moustache - unless she's a middle-aged woman who bleaches her upper lip.

These are my basic thoughts. Let me know what you think, why you agree, and what theoretical arguments might be conjured up to disagree!

I believe in sparse, I really do, but only where the reader's imagination is going to be able to fill in the blanks. Writing about places that the reader has never been to, or where the place is integral to the story, is different.

This is from my 'Remembering the Storm':

A car came slowly, hesitantly down the street, the driver stopping to read the house numbers when he could see them on letter boxes. The car was a recent model sedan, a hire car company logo on the rear window.

He eventually pulled over and got out to stand next to a front fence in the shade of a large banyan fig tree, its thick, buttressed trunk supporting a massive spread of foliage. Figs fallen from the tree or discarded by fruit bats were rotting on the ground below. The atmosphere here was cloying, sticky with humidity and rich with the scent of the figs and the hum of the insects feeding on them, but it was cooler at least than in the sun.

He stood for a few minutes, looking through the vertical bars of the fence and the lush tropical garden towards the house. It was an elevated house, Top End style, with a small, enclosed area underneath and a swimming pool in the backyard. Upstairs, he could see louvered windows and a veranda with the toys of a small child casually scattered across it. There was no car in the driveway, and there was a chain on the gate. A medium-sized, brown dog of indeterminate breed trotted up to the fence on the other side. It was trying to catch his scent, tail wagging gently: willing to be friendly, but unsure. And watching carefully, just in case the visitor was not a friend.

The man stretched out his right hand as a peace offering through the bars of the fence. It was an old hand, leathered skin marked with many small scars and joints a little swollen, but it was steady.

Why is the scene so long, the atmosphere so sticky, the dog important, the hand so leathered? Firstly, because this is an alien place for most readers. But mostly, because immediately after this, the dog identifies his smell, and the house gets described again, this time in terms of the shattered wreck that it was 50 years previously and the place where his wife had died. And that sets up the rest of the story. So I thnk that the lengthy wording is fine as long as it has a purpose. I totally agree with you about burying Chekov's gun in a mass of details, although of course if you *only* describe the gun, the reader will go 'aha!'.

 

[EmilyMiller]

So I thnk that the lengthy wording is fine as long as it has a purpose.

Precisely. It’s like every other rule, break it rather than write something barbarous.

I totally agree with you about burying Chekov's gun in a mass of details

Same with CG, it’s a rule of thumb, not a divine precept. Each story is different, with different needs.

Writing is not paint by numbers. What are rules for but to be ignored when there is an overriding reason to do so?

 

[Kumquatqueen]

I'm usually more instinctive than intentional about my descriptions, but thinking about this made me realize that when it comes to describing spaces and locations, I tend to give a broad sketch and then write like one or two more specific, often tactile details that, in my brain at least, help me visualize everything else.

So for example, in @Actingup and my LW story, the first part of the story takes place in a BBQ restaurant in Grand Rapids MI. The only description that Acting and I gave for it was:

Longhorn Barbeque had changed a little in the last twenty years, just like everything else. The taps were full of fussy microbrews nowadays, though they still sold bottles of my preferred Coors.
...
At least they still had the roll of butcher paper bolted to one end of the table to pull out and use as a disposable tablecloth. And the atmosphere was still great.

It doesn't really describe anything about the space, but to me the roll of butcher paper is the detail that sells the whole thing. I can visualize the entire rest of the space out in my mind just by sitting at that table and feeling the paper

I like that description - a general idea of the type of joint: 'fussy microbrews' and the narrator's opinion of such, then the detail of the butcher paper. I think I've been there. (checks location - possible but unlikely). Two details, one generic, one specific is something that works for me.

Or in one of my very first stories, I described an empty dorm room:

Yeah, been in many of those. Except not with two beds. But the picture is conveyed perfectly.

I like detail, but it needs to be relevant to a character's personality. I don't really care if her breasts are angled slightly sideways, like the coconut macaroons Granny used to make, unless you tell me how that affects her. A list of hair colour, height, width and a set of generic clothing - I'm often left thinking, 'And why do I give a shit?' Mention such info during a conversation or when the detail is relevant to action, and I'm interested.

 

[MrHereWriting]

On writing: descriptions​

Some writers are good at it, some aren't and that's that. I enjoyed reading George R.R. Martin's long descriptions of food. When Scotty Lynch does it, I sigh. It's the same thing by two different writers, one is good at it, the other isn't.

Robert Jordan was great at it in the early Wheel of Time books, but those books had meat. In the later books, where plot and progression were thin, his descriptions and details felt like what they were, filler.

Keep my interest and you can write however you like. Lose my interest, and you're a hack. That's just how life works.

 

[anthrodisiac]

I believe in sparse, I really do, but only where the reader's imagination is going to be able to fill in the blanks. Writing about places that the reader has never been to, or where the place is integral to the story, is different.

This is precisely why my description of non-humans tends to be vastly more detailed than human. Most readers have encountered humans. Most readers have not encountered anthro tamanduas in baggy metal band sweatshirts.

The greater the familiarity with a subject, or the ease with which a reader can imagine it, the less description is needed. Which is not to say that there ought to be less description, just that it's less necessary to go into high levels of detail. Levels of description are a stylistic choice, and as such, it's hard to do it "wrong."

Doesn't stop a lot of people from doing it poorly, though

 

[Bramblethorn]

Another important trick, I find, is to provide key information early on. I suspect that readers form a picture in their mind within the first few sentences, or even words. Provide the information in the order in which it will reach an onlooker's brain. So if your character is particularly tall, or short, mention that very early. Hair colour too. An exceptionally long nose, or an elaborate hairdo. Details that become apparent once the initial impression has been formed come next. A scar over the eyebrow. A tendency to suck on their lower lip. A long dangling earring. Smaller details that a viewer might be expected to miss at first glance can come later. But you'd better not be four paragraphs into a fight scene before your POV character mentions their assailant's moustache - unless she's a middle-aged woman who bleaches her upper lip.

I think this is a good approach as a default, but sometimes flow makes it better to do it the other way around.

I recently read a book where the protagonist enters a room and finds a man manacled to a table. The author gives about half a page of description of the other stuff in the room, before writing "But the thing I noticed before all of this was the man in the middle of the room, manacled to the table".

It makes sense to do it that way because the next few pages are all her interacting with the guy on the table. The other stuff needs to be described at some point, because later on it's going to be relevant to the question of getting this guy off the table. But if the author were to begin with "there was a guy manacled to the table", then go on to the room configuration, then go back to the guy on the table, it ends up being unnecessarily choppy. So in that case it makes sense to get the room description out of the way, even though it's not what the protag registers first.

 

[SkyBubble]

"The scenery was as boring as a long descriptive passage."

I don't remember where I saw this, but the author was very aware of a big issue in writing: lots of background detail that doesn't interest the reader and doesn't further the story.

Some background is usually a good thing. People do tend to get excessive with it.

 

[JGittes]

I'd guess we have few Proust enthusiasts here.

 

[ChuckWolf]

In a story I'm working on, a lot of world-building in the beginning is spent on describing how three separate mansions and their grounds have been repurposed into a huge porn-studio compound.

I worry that it might be a bit much.

 

[anthrodisiac]

In a story I'm working on, I do a lot of world-building in the beginning in describing how three separate mansions and their grounds have been repurposed into a huge porn-studio compound.

I worry that it might be a bit much.

If that's a concern, you can always look at how relevent each discrete bit of description is. Figure out what it's adding to the story. It could be setting the mood/atmosphere, it could be something that has later relevence to the plot, it could be something that lets the character react to it and provide insight into them, it might be necessary so that the reader has a good-enough picture of the place in the event it's not something most people are familiar with.

The other thing you can do is describe it in chunks. So not all at once, but maybe as the character(s) come into contact with it. That way it's not a giant block, but spread out into more manageable bites, with beats in between for the characters to react/comment.

 

[WaxPhilosophic]

I think it was a noir detective fiction writer who once said, "Set the scene and get to the dialog." That pretty well sums it up for a lot of what I write.