The last couple of months have been full of travel, and I’m happy to say that I’m finally back for an extended period. I won’t be traveling for a few months, and I’m really looking forward to this time when I can hopefully get some major work done. There’s going to be a lot of writing in my life, but I also hope to make a lot of these videos because I’m really enjoying it.
This last weekend, I was at a writer’s retreat. A writer’s retreat is a bit different from a conference because it’s smaller, more intimate. You spend more time one-on-one and in small groups, and you also have time to write. It was absolutely fantastic. I can’t tell you how refreshing it was to slow down for a moment, step out of the busyness of normal life, and talk with other people who are just as passionate about their craft as I am about mine.
One of the speakers at the retreat had a lot of great tips to share, so I thought it would be fun to do a series of posts breaking them down. Not because I want to steal her content—I’ll put a link to her in the description below so you can find her for the next few videos—but because teaching something after you’ve learned it is a really good way to cement the lessons for yourself. In fact, that’s one of the reasons that I make all of these videos. I’m right there with you, learning about craft, learning about how to be a writer, learning about the business, and by teaching it, I can cement it in my own mind.
Today we’re going to be talking about how to write description. This is something that I have always struggled with, because I don’t write what’s called purpley prose. I don’t mind reading purpley prose, and purpley in this case just means sort of fancy, but I don’t write it. I tend to have fairly sparse word choice. I tend to be very direct and to the point, and I typically leave out a huge amount of description. Now for me, that works because I can imagine what I want to imagine in my head, but some readers like more description, and one of the most common comments that I’ve gotten back from editors is, “Hey, you need more description.”
Now I’m not going to be changing my style to a more purpley style, but I do think it would be a good idea to have that tool in my toolkit. So the question is, how do you write good description? And I love this way of breaking it down.
First, you identify the place. This is a macro scale. Where are you? This could be a forest. It could be a mountain. It could be an ocean. It could be a desert. It could be a city. It could be a tavern. It could be any place, but you want it to be sort of generic, and after identifying the place, the second step is to zoom in. Imagine you have a camera and you can zoom in on any particular part of that place. It’s sort of your establishing shot. So instead of just in the tavern, you say in the tavern by the hearth, or at one of the empty tables, or squeezed onto a bench seat. Each of those descriptions can take place in the same macro place, but because you are zooming in, you’re starting to add a little bit more detail.
Third, add a tether. This is a comparison that you can use as sort of shorthand so that somebody understands exactly what you’re getting at. So if you were to say somebody is in a wide open flat plain, and then if you say that the gently rolling hills looked like the ocean, people have an idea of what it is. It’s incredibly big and expansive and stretches all the way to the horizon, right? Because that’s what the ocean does. So by giving somebody the tether, you’re actually shortcutting a huge amount of description that you have to add because you’re comparing it to something else. This thing is like that thing.
Number four, establish the time, and you can use lighting for this. The stars twinkled overhead. Well, what time is it? It better be nighttime, unless in your world you can see stars during the day. The harsh sun beat down on his head, casting no shadow. Well, what time is it? It’s noon because the sun is directly overhead. Light is a great way to mark time, and that can help fill in a lot of details for the person who’s reading the scene.
And then number five, we finally get to the actual details, and these are details that we want to add in order to set the mood. If we are describing a night scene and there’s a bright full moon that casts soft rays of light across the forest floor, that sets one mood. If we say he looked up and saw the moon glaring like an eye in the sky through the skeletal fingers of the trees, that’s a different mood. So you can use small details like the moon is casting soft rays, as opposed to the moon looks like an eye in the sky and there are skeletal fingers around, and use that to adjust how both the character and the reader feel about that scene.
And then last but not least, we want to set the players. Before a play can start, all of the actors have to know where they’re supposed to stand, and description allows us to do that very same thing. If we say that somebody is in a tavern sitting by the fire, but he’s talking to the bartender who’s all the way across the inn, we now know something about them. They have to speak louder than normal in order to hear each other, even more so if there are other people scattered around at tables, and each one of them is talking as well. We don’t need a lot of details in order to set the tone, and set the mood, and set the players in their places, but we do need some detail.
And so this is the process that I’m going to use, these six steps. Once again they are: set the place then establish your shot, zoom in on a particular spot. Next, add a tether that’s a comparison between like items so that we can shorthand a bunch of detail. Next, establish the time, and we do that through lighting. After that comes the mood, which we do by adding little bits of detail that give a sense of what we’re going for. Finally, last but not least, we set our players in the scene.
What I really like about this methodology is that it’s a super quick checklist that you can run through every time you walk into a new scene, and you don’t have to spill everything at once at the beginning, though a lot of writers do like to do that. Instead, it is possible to drip feed it throughout your scene. What I would just recommend is that you try as much as possible to keep them in this order. It’s a little bit awkward to try and have an establishing shot when nobody knows where you are in the first place. So this is a great order to make sure that your details are layering on one another to provide the best scene possible.
YouTube Video Link: https://youtu.be/c-bS7YRPUv8
Thanks for reading and watching.
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