Writing Description in Fiction
Author Mark Lawrence shares two major keys to writing description in fiction that psychologically hooks readers and builds characters.
To describe something is not to photograph it. In delivering description your task is not to supply the reader with sufficient detail to recreate some actual object, place, or (more ephemerally) experience.
That’s my foundation for description. I’m not issuing a set of instructions here, just giving my perspective on the subject. Writers come in all shapes and sizes and pursue very different paths to getting words on the page. Don’t let anyone tell you how to do it. But maybe listen to a range of writers tell you how they do it.
A common sign that someone is new to writing description and has not yet found their feet is that they use far too many adjectives. Some will not countenance a noun to go unaccompanied by fewer than two of the things. It’s not an unreasonable starting place. We’re taught in school that an adjective is a describing word. So, more adjectives equals better description, no?
Well … no.
Let Your Reader Do the Heavy Lifting
For me, the key to description begins with the self-evident but sometimes overlooked fact that the person reading what you’ve written shares far more with you than they don’t. The overlap between you, that begins with shared humanity, extends to a vast array of experiences, some fundamental, some rooted in different levels of culture, from basic ideas of fairness to the latest pop-culture—though obviously that overlap shrinks steadily as you aim for more and more niche/specific areas.
The trick to description is to let your reader do the heavy lifting. The mind of each reader is a bell waiting to chime. Your job is to strike it just right so that it generates the tone you’re aiming for. If you want to describe a cathedral, don’t start with a functional description of its parts. Your reader will very likely have been in a cathedral before as a tourist or even a worshipper, or they will have been in a church or a temple, or some building built on similar lines, or/and they will have seen these places in films, on television, in friends’ photographs. Whatever. It’s a safe assumption that the great majority of your readers will be able to supply almost all of this architecture themselves if you just manage to remind them of it. It won’t be precisely the same cathedral you’re imagining—but that doesn’t matter. It will perform the necessary role.
With the right key, a description can unlock a reader’s imagination in a manner that seems wholly at odds with the number of words employed. Especially the number of adjectives. If I wanted to describe a tunnel it might, in some circumstances, be sufficient simply to describe the smell of it in order to put the reader in their own tunnel and achieve what I need for them to be immersed in the story. It’s even possible that I might not even have to say what that smell smelled like. It could be enough just to mention that there was one, and again, rely on the reader and their own abundant imagination to drop themselves back into that tunnel they once dared all those years ago.
Thus the description reduces to the task of finding as little as one sentence, as few as one adjective, that will efficiently remind them of this shared experience. A line that will put them there. Another line perhaps that will hand over any important and unusual features that make this place different from the one they are drawing on. And finally, perhaps a pinpoint detail or two.
Pinpoint detail adds authenticity. It ‘proves’ that this place is real. It makes it unique in the general space you’re in (cathedrals in this case). Maybe there is one large marble slab that has been fractured by some impact a hundred years ago when a lesser bell broke free of its moorings. Possibly the pattern of these cracks reminds the person who sees it of something—a lightning strike that burned into their imagination at age six, or a similar pattern on the wall of that house on Elmore Road back when they were a student, or…
Description Doesn't Live in a Vacuum
This brings us to the second important aspect of description. Description doesn’t exist in a vacuum. The writer chose which parts of the scene/object/experience to focus on. And almost always they are choosing on behalf of whatever character is the point of view for this chapter/book. Any good description can’t help but cast light on not only the thing being described but the person doing the describing. Thus every description is also an opportunity to show the reader more of the character who is seeing the object / in the place / doing the deed.
In the hands of two very different characters a cathedral might be described in very different terms. Just as each reader will supply their own version of the unspecified detail (the nature of the carvings, the smell of the candles or incense or musty disuse, the vertiginous feeling of staring up at the distant vaulted ceiling) and so on, each character will link what they’re seeing into the specifics of their past, their hopes and fears for the future, and the reason they are present in the present.
To summarize: Good description is a light that shines both ways, illuminating the watcher and the watched, and it is also a spotlight not a floodlight.
On many occasions I have had readers ask me, with some certainty that their suspicions must be true, whether I have done or experienced the things I’ve written about. Have I been rock climbing? Have I had cancer treatment? And so on. And I haven’t. And it’s not that my description has been so full of detail that I convinced them that I must have personal experience. It’s simply that my description has been so effective at reminding them that they have done these things.
Check out Mark Lawrence's Daughter of Crows here:
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