Q

How can I write better descriptions?

A

Too little description will prevent readers from immersing in your story and leave them confused as to how a scene plays out. Too much description will bury readers in needless information and drown the story’s plot. Both issues are likely to make people close your story and put you on their “bad” writers list. Finding the middle ground is a matter of research and practice.

STEP 1: VISUALISE. *

* If you have aphantasia (an inability to visualise in your mind), use the internet to look up images of things similar to what you want to describe. *

Whether you want to describe a character or a setting, close your eyes and imagine it. What do you see, hear, smell? What does this place/person feel like? Use all your senses but don’t visualise for too long. Focus on the parts that stand out, the ones you can’t miss and can’t imagine the place/person without.

STEP 2: DON’T OVER-DESCRIBE.

Readers need to relate to your characters. That should happen on an intellectual, emotional, and physical level.

I don’t mean that you should use vague descriptions for your characters so that they look like everyone. I mean that they should be described in such a way that, when readers picture them, an image of someone they know pops up beside your character. If you succeed in this, you’ll create a bond between the reader and the character.

Describing every outfit your character wears isn’t useful. All you’ll achieve is messing up your story’s pacing. If your character’s wardrobe is essential to who they are, describe it once. Say that she dresses like a bubbly kindergarten teacher, all bright colours and cardigans, that he only wears chinos and button-downs, that her wardrobe is all black except for her socks, which are neon.

If a setting isn’t important to the plot, its description should only last a line or two, long enough to give readers a sense of the place without clogging the story.

STEP 3: START BIG.

Describe the big, unmissable details first. If your scene takes place outside at night, the fact that it’s nighttime should be one of the first things you tell your readers because it will be one of the most noticeable.

Your readers don’t want to be a hundred words into a scene only for you to throw in an essential detail that forces them to reimagine the whole thing.

STEP 4: GIVE YOUR DESCRIPTIONS A VOICE.

A) I have a love-hate relationship with George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series.

On the one hand, he writes incredibly engaging characters; on the other, he describes things like a historian. As a result, I find myself skipping words, sentences, sometimes paragraphs. There’s a 200-word paragraph in A Dance with Dragons in which he does nothing but describe the food at a wedding feast.

His descriptions are lengthy and frequently unnecessary to the plot, but they also lack personality because Martin doesn’t stick to his characters’ POV when describing things. He turns into a scholar describing castles, clothing, and food. No matter how telling these details are about Westerosi culture, most of his readers won’t notice because the descriptions are emotionless and, therefore, unmemorable.

B) Maggie Stiefvater has a talent for using description to further a character’s POV and establish tone. This example is from her book The Raven Boys:

“Outside, a midnight bird cried, high and piercing. The little replica of Henrietta was eerie in the half-light, the die-cast cars parked on the streets appearing as though they had just paused. Gansey always thought that, after dark, it felt like anything could happen. At night, Henrietta felt like magic, and at night, magic felt like it might be a terrible thing.”

Gansey, a boy whose life goal is to discover magic, has just found out that one of his unstable friends is missing. In this paragraph, we see his thoughts on magic change. Not only that but Stiefvater chooses every word to enhance the darkness of this moment (midnight, cry, high, piercing, eerie…). This description slows the story’s pace, ensuring that readers have the time to empathise with Gansey and worry about his friend.

STEP 5: USE SIMILES FOR IMPORTANT THINGS.

Similes and metaphors will lend flavour to your descriptions. They’ll paint a more interesting picture in readers’ minds and give a further impression of what the place/person feels like.

When writing similes and metaphors, avoid clichés. Readers want fresh imagery; they want you to surprise them. They don’t want to read a sentence they’ve already read a dozen times. In To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee wrote, “it drew him as the moon draws water” instead of using the centuries-old ‘like a moth to a flame’ idiom.

Remember that it’s better to have a cliché plot written in a unique way than to have a unique plot written in a cliché way.

STEP 6: STUDY OTHER PEOPLE’S WRITING.

A) In Friends in Low Places, a season 2 IWSC entry, Headmistress Hemlockwrote:

“The man next to Rita smelled of stale tobacco and fungus. He hawked gobs of spittle as he gutted fish and spat each lump of phlegm into a copper bowl where they gathered like boiled slugs.”

Notice how Hemlock doesn’t describe the man’s height, weight, or hair colour. Instead, she describes unpleasant smells and an unrefined habit, elements that work together to create a clear image in our heads.

The man I see probably doesn’t look exactly like the one Hemlock pictured or the one you imagine, but that’s the goal. Our freedom to personalise characters is part of the magic.

B) One illustration of bad descriptive writing that a teacher of mine quoted frequently is an example Stephen King uses in his book On Writing.

“He sat stolidly beside the corpse, waiting for the medical examiner as patiently as a man waiting for a turkey sandwich.”

Read that sentence and reread it. Take a moment to figure out why the description doesn’t work before reading the explanation.

– Firstly, the adverb “stolidly”.

Adverbs are used by what Stephen King calls timid writers. These writers are afraid of not being understood, so they add unnecessary words, which they think will clarify their meaning.

In the example sentence, the writer wanted to give a sense of how the character feels about his situation, but readers can’t empathise with adverbs.

Tell me that your character is staring at a fixed point straight ahead or that his limbs are going stiff because he can’t remember the last time he moved. Those are things that I can relate to.

– Secondly, the simile “as patiently as a man waiting for a turkey sandwich”.

The purpose of similes is to clarify something and make it relatable/easy to picture. This example does none of those things because it’s both random and untrue. Being creative with your similes is good, but they always have to make sense.

STEP 7: WAIT UNTIL THE 2^ND DRAFT.

If you’re struggling to include good descriptions in your story, wait until the second draft to add them.

Let yourself focus on action, conflict, and dialogue in your first draft—things that move your story forward. During the revision phase, take note of when something is important enough to be described and insert a description of it somewhere you want to slow the story’s pace.

Description begins in the writer’s imagination but should finish in the reader’s.

Stephen King