Here is chapter 5 in the Writing Fiction book. This is a great chapter about description and how to make the most out of it.
CHAPTER 5
DESCRIPTION: TO PICTURE IN WORDS
By Chris Lombardi
With fiction, more than anything else perhaps, it's the description that envelops you because really everything in a work of fiction, except for the dialogue, is a description of some sort. When writing this description you want to make sure the reader experiences the story as vividly and continuously as if he or she is watching a spellbinding film.
Describe as told by Webster's New World Dictionary:- To tell or write about; give a detailed account of
- To picture in words
THE FIVE SENSES
You write and read with your brain, but you live your life most definably in your body. To convey that experience, you need the physicality of it.
To bring a reader into your fictional world, you need to offer data for all the senses. Don't be tempted to focus only on sight, as many beginning writers do.
You need these kinds of sensory details (sound, smell, touch, taste) to support more general statements or abstract descriptive phrases.
The most powerful method for luring readers into the fictional world is through sensory experience.
YOUR TURN:
Pick a character and imagine he or she has gone spelunking (cave exploring) with a group of friends. Unfortunately, your character has become separated from the group and now he or she is groping through a pitch-dark passage (without a flashlight), searching for either a way out or the missing companions. Write a passage bringing this scene to life through sensory description. Since vision is limited, you'll have to rely on hearing, smell, touch, and taste. Let the reader physically experience this place through these sense.
SPECIFICITY
Your descriptions can't just offer sensory details, though; the details also have to be specific. The cumulative effect of specific sensory details is verisimilitude--the sense that these events have really happened.
Specificity also prevents a sort of writer's laziness.
Specifics can make the reader believe anything. The specific details weave a world, and the reader is willing to stay in it.
Think of yourself as a collector--of sensations, of objects, of names. Especially names. Name exact colors, for example. Name fabrics, tastes, musical instruments.
YOUR TURN:
Think of a place well known to you from your youth--a street, park, school...Write a passage where you describe this place with great specificity. What color were the bricks? Was the slide straight or curving? How far was the pond from the house? If you can't remember key details, fill them in with your imagination. For a bonus round, do the same for a person you knew from this place.
THE BEST WORDS
What is description made of? Words, of course. If you're bringing the movie in your head to the page, words are the strands of light that determine the colors, shadows, and clear shapes.
Though you don't want to show off by using elaborate words all the time, you should always seek to widen your choice of word possibilities. Keep a dictionary around.
Just watch out for adjectives and adverbs. Like sirens, they can lure you into the perilous waters of weak description. When many people think description, they often think adjectives and adverbs. Adjectives and adverbs can be very lazy words
A sentence with too many adjectives and adverbs is like an unpicked apple tree, the boughs sagging from the weight.
If you look carefully at good description, you'll notice that writers are often quite sparing in their use of adjectives and adverbs.
However, when used sparingly and well, adjectives and adverbs can be quite effective.
Adjectives and adverbs are helper words, what the grammarians call "modifiers." They help refine the impression cast by your true building blocks: nouns and verbs. Are your verbs working hard enough? The stronger your nouns and verbs are, the better they can support your carefully chosen modifiers,
As previously noted, strong verbs alleviate the need for adverbs. She walked lightly vs. She glided/floated.
I'm not telling you to avoid adjectives and adverbs entirely. But first focus on the best possible nouns and verbs, then find the modifiers that enhance these words, adding subtle touches to the foundation.
YOUR TURN:
Pick a person you know. Fictionalize the name, which will also give you license to alter other characteristics, if you so desire. Now describe this person as vividly as you can. Here's the catch: you cannot use a single adjective or adverb. This will force you to use strong nouns and verbs and employ some of the other techniques you've picked up in this chapter. Though challenging, you will probably end up with a very well-drawn picture of this person.
TRICKS OF THE TRADE
Learn to embrace figurative language, a fancy expression for figures of speech, such as similes and metaphors.
A simile is defined as "a figure of speech in which two essentially unlike things are compared, the comparison being made explicit typically by the use of the introductory 'like' or 'as'..."
A metaphor is "a figure of speech by which a thing is spoken of as being that which it only resembles, as when a ferocious man is called a 'tiger.'"
We use them every day.
But in fiction, your task is to use similes and metaphors that are too free, too surprising, to be something you've heard on the phone. Figures of speech are a stealthy way of reaching into your reader's subconsciousness. You're pulling up visual image, remembered experiences, bits of their own dreams, and showing them anew.
By lyricism, I mean prose that plays with sound and rhythm in the way poetry does.
How do you know if you've got lyricism? It helps to read your work aloud and hear the ebb and flow of the rhythm and hear how the words slide and sing. You'll also hear where things start to clunk.
Just like figures of speech, lyricism sinks your story deeper inside the subconscious of the reader. If music says things words can't express, text that feels like music also carries those nonverbal meanings, immersing the reader in the experience in a rather primal way.
To further deepen your descriptions, consider onomatopoeia, achieved when words sound like what they are.
Also consider alliteration, where two or more words have a common initial sound. Alliterations come naturally to us; it's a game we've played since we were three.
Finally, I'm going to pass on one of my own trade secrets, a way of conjuring fresh images that's often got me out of a description jam: use an image or adjective usually associated with one sense unexpectedly with another. It's a poet's trick, known as synesthesia. (The dark chocolate voice. Taste/sound)
TELLING DETAILS
It's important, ultimately, to choose your descriptive details.
There's a fine line between lush description and the kind that chokes the reader. Always ask yourself: Does the description interrupt the flow of the story?
A telling detail does what it says: it tells the essence of what it's describing. A telling detail and speak volumes in a very short amount of time.
Telling details stick with us and define the place, character, or atmosphere.
You may not know which of your details, at first, are the telling one. It's only when all of them have made it out of your head and onto the page, only when you've gotten to the end of your first or second draft, that you'll notice which have borne repeating. You'll know when you've found the telling detail; it's the detail that sticks with you the most.
Until you find that telling detail, however, be generous. As the story in your head starts to move and your hands follow it, try to write it all down, everything that comes to you, especially any sensory detail.
Novice writers just getting their shops, need to worry more about saying enough. You're so familiar with the scene in your head that you may think just a few words are needed to bring it alive. And it's possible that you're right--but it's unlikely that you know, right way, which few words those are. Get it all on the page first, and then cut back as needed.
YOUR TURN:
Return to the previous exercise, where you let your poetic impulses run wild. Pick a telling detail--one particular thing that most embodies the thing you described. Revise the passage this time focusing only on that one telling detail. And while you're in there, this time try to keep the description from being too long or overwrought. You should end up with a description that is both economical and effective.
DESCRIPTION TRAPS
Bad description stops readers cold, yanking them from the spell of your story, the last thing you want to do.
First and foremost, avoid clichés They leave the reader unengaged, painting almost nothing in the mind's eye.
Also problematic are mixed metaphors. You can't want your mother to be a fish, then turn her into an elephant three chapters later.
Sometimes, of course, we just need to get the story down, that first made time, and we put down back descriptions--clichés, imprecise phrases, and such. That's quite all right. Think of those phrases as markers, as blah blah blah written down. You can then tinker in your revision phase, replacing the bad descriptions with specific, precise, and interesting language.
DESCRIPTION OF INNER LIFE
Description is also used to portray the inner life of characters--their thoughts and emotions.
Emotions are physical. They're expressed and felt in sensation or action or both. As with any kind of descriptions, emotions are rendered more vividly when dealt with specifically, through the senses.
Make the reader feel the same emotion as the person you're describing, by naming enough familiar details to evoke empathy.
On a related note, the emotions and thoughts of characters may actually color all the description in a work of fiction.
YOUR TURN:
Describe a character who is going about the mundane job of cleaning his or her home. Write from the POV of this character which means the character's consciousness will inform the description. Here's the twist: the character has just recently fallen in love, and you should let this emotion color the description without being directly stated. Then rewrite the passage, but this time the character has just had a painful romantic breakup. You'll see how different the world looks depending on how people feel.
There really is no limit as to how deep inward description may reach.
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