A writer needs to learn to notice, and give names to details. A frequent problem of young writers I’ve been told is not giving enough details; to not I think make it clear what is happening where to whom. Or as my English teacher said, Eric, you can’t rewrite what isn’t there.
So the writer must needs learn names, and places, and hues, and little insights.
You have to give enough original detail, enough to make it feel like its a real place. This is in part a result of the character’s detailed interaction with the detailed environment. And the level of detail varies from author to author, and even from the purpose of the scene to another scene. You might not want to describe every sword move of a twenty person brawl, but you might want to get deep in detail on the climatic fight. Then again, there are lots of famous authors who don’t do that, so maybe its just me.
I have discovered a voluptuous love of detail, after all.
But then he must go beyond that to choosing just the right one. Sometimes the right one is a whole herd of them, deepening the feeling, letting the reader feel the moment. This was hard for me to figure out, as I thought you only said something once.
But, there is a converse as there is to most things. My friend J in discussing L. Ron Hubbard described him as the type of writer that if he had a room with a striped carpet in it, he would describe every single one of the eleven million and some stripes.
The hardest thing for a writer to do is to find the telling detail. The one thing that brings the picture into absolute focus, but with startling speed.
Don’t feel downhearted if you can’t do this. A lot of professional writers aren’t that good at it either. But if you can do it….well then….come and explain it to me.
August 31st, 2007 at 9:23 am
I argue with C. J. Henderson all the time about the value of a journal. He says you should never waste time writing something you can’t sell. I say the journal is a terrific resource for saving things that will eventually find their way into things that will sell. One of the first short stories I wrote for a particular application (The Halloween Cat, written for a son’s second grade Halloween party) used several bits of descriptive text I pulled out of my old journals, because I was writing in early September and needed to capture the feel of an October afternoon.
The reason I had that October afternoon feeling was because one October afternoon I sat outside with my notebook and pen, and I wrote what I saw, felt, smelled–captured the sense of that afternoon first hand. The look of the clouds, the depth of the sky, the fading of the grass, the crispness in the air were all in that paragraph, and I don’t think I made more than minor adjustments to it to connect it to my setting.
The journals contain many descriptions, sometimes impressions of things (cars piled in a junkyard as broken dreams), sometimes external character sketches of people (coworkers at lunch), sometimes climate and location (snow by the railroad in Massachusetts). I can strip bits from these. More significantly, though, I practiced when I wrote them: I sat and observed the details. I remember reading advice from a famous photographer once, who said that if you want to be a great photographer, you must ignore the social niceties and learn to stare at people, because you must see them as they really are. The same is true if you wish to be a great descriptive writer: you must stare, you must absorb, you must put to paper what you see and hear and smell and taste and feel, practicing that and forcing yourself into an awareness of the details around you.
From there, you begin to develop a sense of which details will convey the image most effectively. November is best conveyed by stark branches in front of a deep sky; May by lush grass and wildflowers; July by unbearable heat and humidity. (At least, those are the best indicators in the Northeast, where I’ve done the bulk of my observing; they might be different elsewhere.)
I hope this helps.
–M. J. Young
September 1st, 2007 at 6:05 am
It does help–Eric