On writing: descriptions

[TheLobster]

"Dear Christina Koch, congratulations on your wonderful Artemis II mission. If you have a moment, I would love to ask you some questions, particularly about weightlessness. I'm an erotica writer, and..."

"No, sir, that is not what we've been doing during those 40 minutes behind the Moon. The 'trans lunar insertion' is very much not a euphemism."

 

[liliput1]

You'd think that the anti-gravity bra would be one of the first inventions of a space-going culture. I mean, who wouldn't enjoy that?

25 years later I still think about the dress Dan Simmons wrote in the Hyperion Cantos that was all pixels that would cycle through colors and transparency.

 

[liliput1]

Nor am I, but my readers love them when done right. Even in long series where every 3 weeks they're reading the new adventures of Josh and Veronica, they want to re-discover the joys of Veronica's body and Josh's southern charm. It gets boring to write but if you do it right it's delicious to read. I keep a side window open using Microsoft One Note where I have descriptions of my characters and all associated information I will need later where I can copy/paste the highlights. That tool has become invaluable to me, especially in long form works. I can even store maps I created, images of my characters, and cover art for books. Having an image of my characters at hand is also a great tool because I'm very visually predisposed.

There’s an old complaint about how nobody who wants public office should be allowed to have it.

Maybe the person who doesn’t like long descriptions is the one you want to write them.

 

[liliput1]

I just had a whole scene pass in front of my eyes. The testing stage; huge, clunky, unwieldy devices; boobs floating up and bopping the people testing them in the face. A tragic nipple-eye gouging incident on a particularly frosty evening.

Which will hereafter be called The Incident, if we must ever speak of it at all, which we won’t.

To the brave soldiers who walked so that we could fly. Float. Whatever.

 

[AG31]

A number of replies here recommend being sure that the description serves the purposes of the story, or plot. Isn't there a place for description that is simply creating a vivid world that the reader can enter?

 

[Britva415]

The 'trans lunar insertion' is very much not a euphemism

So... literal insertion?

 

[Britva415]

Isn't there a place for description that is simply creating a vivid world that the reader can enter?

Yes: Poetry.

Serious-not-serious. I've called what you're talking about "impressionism" before. A piece of impressionistic prose does what you're talking about, but it isn't necessarily a story. It can be part of a story, but it isn't part of the plot. It can be part of story telling, we're just mostly advocating to not do it to excess.

What does "excess" look like? We've already talked about it: People quit reading, or, people can't follow the plot or miss important facets of it because they're obfuscated by thick clouds of "atmosphere," or they follow the plot just fine and wonder why tf it called for 50,000 words.

Or, they just enjoy it as presented. Can the author achieve that/make that work? That's a question of whether they're able to, not whether they should or shouldn't. To a lesser degree, it's also a matter of different tastes among the audience.

 

[BeechLeaf]

Don't do anything to excess. That's what 'excess' means. But creating a vivid world doesn't mean spending three to five paragraphs on omissible fine detail. It can be one or two sentences, half a sentence, a small brushstroke, intertwined with the actions and dialogue. She puts her handbag down. She puts her silvery handbag down beside her on the couch. She puts her handbag down, twiddling with the catch. It means you can see the people more clearly, and time flows better. None of it is necessary, but writing the story isn't necessary either.

 

[Britva415]

I'd argue that writing the story is necessary to the story. Sure, we don't have to do it at all, but if we're going to do it, we can employ the tools safely, sanely and tastefully, or we can fuck it the fuck up.

 

[AStrangeDesire]

Sounds like a job for duct tape to me.

If you can't fix it with duct tape and zap-straps, is it even worth fixing?

Sorry, what were we talking about again...

 

[anthrodisiac]

A number of replies here recommend being sure that the description serves the purposes of the story, or plot. Isn't there a place for description that is simply creating a vivid world that the reader can enter?

Sure, there's plenty of place for that. The key is not to go overboard with it. There are some styles and genres and reader bases that love insanely flowery, totally unnecessary description that goes on for fucking forever a whole page. If you're writing a story that works well with that or for a base that eats that shit up, then while the description isn't necessary to the plot, it is an expectation for the reader and par for the course.

A good example of that style is overseas romance. One of the people in a writers group I was in wrote romances set in France, where some American would go there and fall in love with a smoking hot French dude. The descriptions were so flowery and over the top, but it was one of the things her readers absolutely loved about her stories. Her audience was primarily middle-age American women looking for escapist romance, so being able to immerse themselves in the streets of Paris or the rural landscapes of, uh, whatever part of France that is, was absolutely crucial for appeasing her base. She also enjoyed writing it. Also lots and lots of food stuff, totally unnecessary to the plot, the characters, or anything other than what I call "description porn." But people like it.

And it's not just story or plot that can make descriptions necessary. For things that most people don't have experience with, or can't easily visualize if you just say something like "giant alien monster," the description doesn't serve the story or plot, but it does serve the reader's ability to conceptulaize the scene, so it's not just a series of abstractions (although I've written highly abstracted short stories as experimental pieces, and those are actually kinda fun; hard, but fun).

 

[ElectricBlue]

A number of replies here recommend being sure that the description serves the purposes of the story, or plot. Isn't there a place for description that is simply creating a vivid world that the reader can enter?

Absolutely yes. That echoes what I call "grace notes" in a story, those little touches that make a story really shine, both in terms of place and character. Without them, description can be like a slab of concrete, functional for the purposes of the story, but it's dull and featureless. A story needs those little gems, sentences or phrases that can be subtle and seemingly effortless, but without them, it's a lump of leaden prose. "Vivid" is absolutely the right word here.

 

[StillStunned]

A number of replies here recommend being sure that the description serves the purposes of the story, or plot. Isn't there a place for description that is simply creating a vivid world that the reader can enter?

Some stories are all about the description. As @anthrodisiac notes above, overseas romances, or else Gothic stories or classic tales of exploration, modern sci-fi with elaborate worldbuilding, or even Regency or billionaire romances - anything where the exotic, luxurious or otherwise unusual background is a vital part of the tale for whatever reason.

Jack Vance goes heavy on his descriptions in a lot of his sword & sorcery, but also in his "Planet of Adventure" sci-fi series. True, the characters often end up wearing brown corduroy caps, but the scenery he describes is almost always vivid, imaginative and alien.

By the same token, Georgette Heyer will elaborate on dresses and ballroom decorations to paint pictures for her Regency novels. I remember reading some serious colonial/post-colonial books at uni where the "un-European" setting infuses the entire story. A bit like the 1980s television series Tour of Duty, if you remember that: everything the characters experience is affected by where they are.

Of my own stories, I think Upstream and Into The Night depend heavily on description. The first was deliberate, the second came about from trying to create a flowing, continuous picture in the reader's mind.

 

[EmilyMiller]

A number of replies here recommend being sure that the description serves the purposes of the story, or plot. Isn't there a place for description that is simply creating a vivid world that the reader can enter?

That’s serving the plot, if such a world is important.

 

[AG31]

That’s serving the plot, if such a world is important.

Not important to the plot, just important to the reader's experience.

 

[EmilyMiller]

Not important to the plot, just important to the reader's experience.

My point - such as it is - is that we create dazzling (or grimy) environments in which to place our characters. The reader invests in visualizing the world and the pay off is in the characters inhabiting an interesting place; one whose characteristics will impinge on protagonists and plot. Otherwise, I agree, it’s more poetry.