Description

Description is the prose type with which I struggled the most. I guess it’s because I’m a very practical and hyperactive person, which means I generally don’t have the patience to write a paragraph of description ;) My biggest task, every time I do a second draft, is to add a lot of description.

On the one hand, this is fine. Description is the “laziest” way to communicate information to the reader. You literally describe exactly what the reader should know. If you can communicate the same information some other way, you’ll only improve the story.

On the other hand, description provides a breather. As nothing is happening, it provides a calm moment in which the reader can catch their breath. For some types of information, it’s even the fastest method to just say it literally. As such, leaving out description is dangerous as well.

As such, for each thought in your head, ask yourself the following …

• Do I need to ramp up speed here, or do I need to calm down (after something tense already happened)?
• Can I communicate this information in a more interesting and active way? Or is description the best option?

The best place for description

If you’ve read my other courses about story, you know that each story has three parts: Promise, Progress and Payoff.

This is similar to the scene structure I proposed earlier (action/reaction), which had a Setup, Buildup, and Reflection.

Many writers advice you to “jump straight into the action”. While the general idea is fine (don’t waste the reader’s time), this isn’t good advice.

You need to start a scene with setup. Without it, the reader has no clue where they are, who the characters are, or why they should care.

And how do you deliver setup? Through description. Open a scene by describing the room you’re in. Open a scene by describing some magical artefact that will become important.

As a scene progresses, the amount of description shrinks, and the action speeds up.

So ask yourself the following as well …

• Do I need to setup something right now that I’ll need later? If so, describe it at some earlier point.
• How far along are we in the scene? The further you are, the less you should grab description as your prose tool.

The typical example of setup is (Checkhov’s) Gun. If you know a scene will end with somebody being shot … you need to describe that gun before that moment. You need to setup that the gun exists in the room and what it looks like before you can use it for action later.

How to describe?

For the first draft, the answer is: any way you like. You have a picture in your head, or at least some idea, so describe that. If you haven’t practice this (much), it will probably come out like a grocery list or a checklist.

That’s fine! Get it out of your head, write it down.

The second question is what to describe. For that, I maintain a few simple rules.

• Describe in a way that ALSO shows the character doing the describing. (So only mention things relevant to that character, if possible.)
• Describe using emotion rather than facts. (Describing facts is the most boring thing you can do. If you can describe facts and mix it with emotional memories or connections for the character, it becomes more interesting.)
• Use all senses. (Not just sight and maybe hearing.)

Telling readers the exact colors, dimensions and history of a house is boring.

Describe how the color of a house scares your main character and makes it look “like a haunted house”. Describe how the dimensions are so large they overwhelm the character. Describe the history only by mentioning events relevant to the character, maybe things they also lived through.

Description is another thing that a second draft can fix. Write it like a grocery list at first, then make the sentences prettier in the second draft.

Also, you only know what is truly essential once you finish the book. Maybe you described a magical object with one line, thinking it was just some minor worldbuilding. But then the story progressed and this magical object suddenly became way more important. Now you can go back and expand this one line into a more full description.

Alternatively, I sometimes spent a paragraph or two describing a place or a memory, which ended up being completely useless. So the second draft just cut those out or changed it to a single short sentence.

Conclusion

Your thoughts should be firmly on “description” at the start of scenes or storylines. Anything you use later, needs to be set up at some point. As you progress further, those thoughts should mostly disappear.

Use description for slower moments after the fast and furious ones. At other times, find more active means (dialogue, action) to show the same information.

And accept that description will read like a boring list in most first drafts.