Describing stuff can be the hardest part of writing prose
fiction. You have a scene in your head, with all the dialogue and action, but
now you have to fill in what everything looks
like. There’s nothing more boring to write, or read, than a long descriptive
passage — but here’s how to spice it up.
Descriptive passages are something I struggle with, both as
a writer and as a reader. If I’m reading a book and hit a long paragraph of scene-setting,
I have to struggle to keep from skimming a bit. And when I write my own
fiction, I often find myself skimping on description, because I get bored doing
it. How many ways can you describe a face? Or the layout of a particular
building? How many ways are there to say “he had a square face and brown
eyes.” Probably the fact that I have a certain amount of face-blindness
and no eye for décor doesn’t help.
But descriptive passages are important — they make the
difference between your story feeling real, and it feeling like sketchy.
Stories that don’t provide enough description, or vivid enough description,
feel like one of those 1970s Hanna-Barbera cartoons where people run past
endless doodley backgrounds with no differentiation. The more you can engage
your reader’s senses, the more they’ll feel present in the scene.
So how can you create description that engages the reader
instead of activating the dreaded “skim” reflex? There is no magic
bullet, but here are some things that could help.
Commit to never being
boring. To avoid boring descriptions, you first have to make a decision
that you won’t settle for blocks of dull text. And stop thinking of the
descriptive passages as wallpaper. You put a lot of effort into making your
dialogue zingy and quotable — do the same for your descriptive passages. This
sounds obvious, but it’s an important first step.
Engage all five
senses. Again, starting with the obvious. Description isn’t just visual and
auditory, but also includes touch and smell. And maybe taste, if it’s a kitchen
or restaurant. Smells help a lot, especially vivid ones. Like a really pungent
ammonia smell, or a dreadful musty smell. Mentioning the temperature of a room
also helps sell that it’s a real place. Ditto when you’re describing a person
— what do they smell like? What do their clothes feel like if you touch them?
Try being super
terse. Description can be vivid without being lengthy — in fact, you could
argue that less is more when it comes to vividness of description. You can
convey a lot with a few well-chosen words. Like: “The Apple Genius Bar had
a gleaming white counter lined with eager T-shirt-clad acolytes, but the odor
of stale coffee and fried motherboards assaulted her nostrils as soon as she
approached.”
Make it dynamic rather
than static. This is a huge one. Things change, and no person or place has been
the same forever. Often, the best description tells a story. Like:
“Judging from his bulk, he’d been a bodybuilder once, but then he’d run to
seed.” Or: “Someone had obviously bought a simple two-storey mock
Tudor house and tried to add extra turrets to it, after which a second owner
had tried to add some Japanese-style rice-paper screens to the front
room.” Description that takes you through the evolution of a person or thing
is more memorable than a static snapshot.
Make fun of the thing
you’re describing. Depending on the
tone of your story, of course, you can go for humor. Like in one story
I published in Lightspeed a while back, I describe a character thusly:
https://gizmodo.com/what-does-it-mean-when-people-say-your-storys-tone-i-790979741
Peter had never liked looking at
pictures of himself, because photos always made him look like a deformed clone
of Ben Affleck. His chin was just a little too jutting and bifurcated, his brow
a little too much like the bumper of a late-model Toyota Camry. His mousy hair
was unevenly receding, his nose a little too knifey.
I remember being really happy about
that, because for once I managed to describe a character in a way that sticks
in my mind. Between “deformed Ben Affleck clone” and “late-model
Camry,” I have a strong impression of
what this guy looks like, even if it’s kind of cartoony. Obviously, use in
moderation, unless you’re going for a full-on gonzo tone. A self-loathing POV
character can describe him- or herself with alot of vitriol, though.
Project feelings onto
an inanimate object. When you’re describing a person, you can give him or
her some emotion, like a perpetual scowl or habitual laughter. But when you
describe a thing or place, you just have to describe it, because things don’t
have feelings. Except that we project feelings onto them all the time. A chair
might be friendly, or a particular pair of shoes might have it in for you. A
building might look as though it’s trying to drive you away, with its
unwelcoming awnings and grim windows. Instead of a detached, factual
description of the columns and arches, tell us how they’re gritting their teeth
at the main character. This is also good for setting a mood, and maybe a bit of
foreshadowing.
Give your POV some visceral
or emotional reaction. In the same vein, try showing how a particular setting
or someone’s appearance affects your POV character. Maybe your main character
really hates a particular building, and feels her spine stiffen and her
shoulders go up as she approaches it. Maybe the smell of someone’s basement
makes her nauseous. Maybe seeing Mr. Bullyfrog’s filthy teeth and smelling his
foul breath makes her recoil. Vivid description often depends on depicting a strong
personal reaction to something.
Use less dialogue.
If you’re like me, then you’re using the descriptive passages as a backdrop for
your snappy dialogue — but what if your descriptions are so good, dialogue
becomes unnecessary? It’s worth trying, anyway — try taking a speech-heavy
scene, and replacing half the dialogue with actions and descriptions of stuff
that convey the same information and emotion. Maybe someone picking up a pair
of binoculars that used to belong to the main character’s grandfather, and
holding their black leathery outer casing up to the light, can convey a whole
world of stuff about grandpa. After all, the most interesting stuff in a scene
is often what people don’t say, and that’s stuff they convey with body language,
and the objects they stare at.
Use description to
set up a punchline in dialogue. Again, this is assuming you’re more into
writing dialogue, which seems to be the case with lots of us who were raised on
TV and comics. If you want to have your character say something snappy like
Oscar Wilde’s famous last words, “Either that wallpaper goes, or I
do,” you’ll need to make the wallpaper vivid in our minds way in advance
so the line works. Sometimes you can force yourself to create vivid descriptions
of surroundings by including verbal jokes that only work if the scenery is
fixed in the reader’s mind.
Those are some of the tricks that help to make a scene more
vivid — what techniques have you found useful for writing descriptions, in
your own work?
