Lecture Series Three: Notes On Description
The third in my lecture series on the techniques and processes of writing fiction.
Photo by Sixteen Miles Out on Unsplash
Let try a little exercise: Look around at the place you’re currently in – the room, coffee shop, oceanfront cabana – wherever you are. Think about how you would describe this place. What would be your approach? What would you need to consider?
Try this: start by making a list of words and phrases that might go into a description of this place. Be literal but also figurative, if that fits: there is “objective reality” but there is also “felt reality” – what a place feels like to you at the moment.
Think about where you are going to place the reader in this description. From what vantage point would the reader be experiencing this place?
Now go back to your list.
Good description doesn’t describe everything – it leaves “blank spaces” for the reader to fill in. (In this way, the reader engages actively with the description.)
Good description doesn’t rely on quantity of details but the quality of the details: what details are most meaningful? Pick 3-5 of these “telling details”; these would be the details you feel would be essential to your description.
Now, a little experiment. In fiction, much description comes through a character. Often, it’s not an objective or detached author describing, but a character who may be experiencing certain emotions independent of the place itself.
What if your character were sitting in this place having just experienced a painful breakup, or the loss of a loved one? How might that color the description?
Or, what if that character just learned he or she had won the lottery? (Or just got their first novel published?)
These are some of the key considerations for description in fiction (and for the most part, creative nonfiction). I won’t make you write the description of the place you’re in, but do consider these points when writing or teaching description:
1. The importance of details (sensory details especially): specific, definite, concrete, particular details are the lifeblood of fiction. Details convince the reader that what you are saying happened might well have happened.
A detail is definite and concrete when it appeals to the senses.
Details should also be significant: they should convey something meaningful (not just a picture).
Find the “telling details” – those details that are most significant and meaningful. Often you need to write down many more details than you need in order to discover the telling details.
2. The importance of perspective
Decide from what vantage point you are viewing that which is being described.
Often, description in fiction comes through the point-of-view character. What the character describes and how the character describes it, may be determined by who the character is and what state of mind the character is in at the moment.
3. The importance of allowing the reader to participate
Description isn’t a matter of quantity of details but quality of details. You don’t want to describe everything; it’s better to leave some “blanks” to let readers fill in on their own. (This will help them engage with the text.)
Describe only those things that you absolutely want your reader to be able to see or feel or experience in some way. Other details can be left to the reader to fill in.
4. The importance of movement
Description can be given at varying distances – close in, middle range, far away/big picture.
Description can also be presented in such a way that it moves the reader’s eye. Even though there has been no literal movement, because the reader’s eye has moved, the description doesn’t feel stagnant.
Consider the paragraph below, from Haruki Murakami’s novel South of the Border, West of the Sun: (In the scene, a teenage boy who is seeing his first romantic relationship blossom asks someone at school for condoms (just in case), and that person tells the whole school that the narrator is “in the market for condoms.” The girl, Izumi, finds out and asks him to meet her on the school’s roof after school.
“Our school was on a hilltop, and we had an unbroken view of the town and the sea. Once, my friends and I filched some records from the Broadcast Club room and flung them off the roof— like Frisbees, they sailed away in a beautiful arc. Off toward the harbor they flew, happily, as if life were breathed into them for a fleeting instant. But finally one of them failed to get airborne and wobbled clumsily straight down onto the tennis court, where some startled freshman girls were practicing their swings. It was detention for us. That had been more than a year before, and now here I was in the same spot, being grilled by my girlfriend about condoms. I looked up at the sky and saw a bird etching a slow circle in the sky. Being a bird, I imagined, must be wonderful. All birds had to do was fly in the sky. No need to worry about contraception.”
The description is “static,” in that the describer never changes his position. However, it feels as if the description has movement, because what’s moving is the reader’s eye.
We are looking in the distance at the town and the sea; then we are looking at people throwing Frisbees off the room; then we see one land in the tennis court; then we’re back on the rooftop with the character doing the describing; then we’re looking up at the sky.
5. The importance of language and perception
Consider both the literal and the figurative; what something actually is like, and what something feels or seems like. (Factual reality vs. felt reality.)
Copyright 2018 by Mark Farrington