Tips for Writers, Writing Effective Description is not a Sin

Image by Jon Sullivan

Much of the writing advice today says to keep your writing lean, spare, and focused on the action. Readers don’t have time or patience for description, they say. Descriptions bog down the story, they say. Readers don’t care about the scenery, they only care about what happens to the character, they say.

Ahem.

I respectfully beg to differ.

My favorite novels are full of beautiful, living descriptions, that make the scenery an active part of the story. These descriptions make me want to be right there with the character, helping her out of the jungle, or airplane, or wherever she is. If there is no description, I feel disconnected from the characters.

I do quite a bit of beta reading for other writers, and I often read stories set in another time or distant place. But I never make a deep connection to the story, partly because they’re so afraid to write description. I never get a sense of where the story is taking place.

Setting can be as complex as a character

Think of your childhood home. Good or bad, it has emotions attached to it. What things do you remember about it? If you were to describe it, you’d probably mention the things that had the most emotional impact on you.

• I remember our tiny kitchen, no bigger than a ship’s galley, my family all crowding around the Formica table, sitting on plastic chairs with metal legs that squeaked with our laughter, elbowing each other as we passed heaping bowls of spaghetti around the table. My sister would take advantage of the chaos to pinch me on my bony legs. Crushed between the yellow brick wall and the heavy table, wedged between her and my other sister, I had nowhere to run to escape her fingers of pain.

What if, instead of the previous paragraph, I simply wrote,

• My sister would pinch me as we sat at the crowded table in our tiny kitchen, and I had no where to go to get away.

Unfortunately, we’ve had the “don’t write description” dictum drilled into us so relentlessly, that many writers have developed writing so plain and spare that it’s become as dry as yesterday’s leftovers. How do we find a happy medium of just the right amount of description; enough to enhance the story, but not so much that it slows the story down? Here are my personal dos and don’ts.

Do write description that:

1. Is embedded in the story.
2. Activates the reader’s imagination and senses.
3. Is specific and concrete.

Don’t write description that:

1. Is flowery prose that just describes, but doesn’t advance the plot.
2. Uses mixed metaphors and too simple similes.
3. Is full of cliché.
4. Is description just for the sake of description.

I had a writing teacher once tell me I should think of my description as a character. Describe the things that are important to the plot and leave out the rest. Keep the description that reflects the tone and feeling of the story. This takes practice. I don’t claim to be an expert at this by any means. I’m still practicing. Every time I turn on my computer to write, I’m still practicing.

Writing exercise for description:

Choose one or two things from this list and write a description. Make it original enough to be memorable. Try to make it something that would make the reader want to keep writing.

• A stomach ache after eating at a restaurant.
• A child with a fever at 3 a.m.
• An abandoned house in the neighborhood where you grew up.
• A cloudy day, threatening to rain on your outdoor wedding.
• The lamppost and sunset pictured above.