The Challenge of Description

Monday, October 26th, 2009

A few weeks ago I was working on a late scene in The Winds of Winter, and it wasn’t coming together. I was wondering whether I should introduce an element that Shazemar (a sorcerer, the main character) deals with in my imagination, but which I hadn’t written into the story so far.

Somewhat coincidentally, I came across the Story Structure posts at Storyfix.com, and decided as a result of reading them that, yes, I did need to introduce that element, because pacing in the late scenes demanded a turn in the story rather than merely the progression of foreseeable events. But if I don’t set this element up early, it feels forced and arbitrary when I work it into the late scene.

I also could improve the story if I structured the beginning so that it posed more questions not immediately answered.

Both of these things indicate that I need to add material to the beginning.

Currently, Shazemar’s introduction is some ways in. The introductory scene is good. I wish I could move it right after “The Incantation of the Dragoness,” the opening scene, but both the action and the plot-significant remarks in it can’t happen any earlier.  And I need to cover some of what Shazemar’s up to before. So I need a new scene.

Thing is, Shazemar’s introduction is the scene that presently contains the ‘who are the (west) Debroans?’ material — the descriptions that give some idea of who they are, as a race and as a culture. The character description in this scene is in two blocks: first, of the group that’s travelling, so you get a general idea of the Debroans; then later of Shazemar as an individual. So it’s broken up. I don’t have one long chunk of description that makes the reader’s eyes glaze over because it’s too much to assimilate at once.

I tried writing a new earlier scene in which Shazemar is alone, and I’ve been having a problem with it. My description of Shazemar as an individual is good, but it doesn’t have adequate cultural cues, and I’m having a hard time working them in, because it makes the description too long. In my experience, you can ask people to focus on 3-4 elements of a description to form an impression. But if you start adding more than that, you have more an inventory than an image: the mind doesn’t form a coherent impression of so many items. I haven’t successfully licked this problem in this new scene.

I have an idea for a different approach to it, which I’m going to start on now. We’ll see if it works.

On other matters:

I still have more root canal work to be done, and I have a sinus infection. I will be updating, but not very efficiently. Look for a new section of Sigurd this week.

Next post will probably be about cultural cues in description. (Actually, the next post in the series turned out to be about first impressions in description).

Tags: cultural cues, description, story structure, Writing
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Description: Why It Can Be Hard

Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009

In fiction, in order to set the scene — in order to give the reader the sense that they’re sensing what the viewpoint character can sense, that “You Are Thereness” — you sometimes need to convey what something looks like and how it’s moving. It can be difficult to do this well, however.

There are things humans are very good at understanding when they’re conveyed verbally, as the most cursory hints. Most people can easily read the emotional subtext in a novel’s dialogue. They can pick up tension between the hero and the heroine that’s carried in a single phrase. But when it comes to describing what shape an object is, where it is, and how it’s moving — well, we have a proverb for that: “One picture is worth a thousand words.”

And you don’t have a thousand words.

The human mind can only hold on to a small list of words or numbers at a time. If you write a description where the reader can’t even start to imagine your object or your action without holding nine discrete elements in immediate memory simultaneously, odds are it’s going to flop: very few people will hold on to the first elements long enough to put it together with the last. To get the description to ‘take,’ you need to break it down into smaller chunks — to write in such a manner that the reader only has to hold two to four things in mind to start imagining what you want them to imagine.

I can imagine looking up a pebble-strewn earthen path and seeing a thick, slablike, lichen-covered boulder; I can imagine a two-foot-long grey-green lizard on the boulder. I can form an image of the path, an image of the boulder, and an image of the lizard sitting on the boulder, sequentially.

What I can’t do is concentrate on my impression of the path and my impression of the lizard simultaneously. The objects aren’t physically contiguous and there are too many intervening elements; my mind’s eye won’t focus on both at once, any more than my physical eyes would.

Commercially published writers don’t usually fall afoul of this principle in static description. But I wish I had a dollar for every fight scene I’ve read that:

1. Depends, for its suspense, on conveying the sequence of actions in the fight, and
2. Does not successfully convey the sequence of actions of the fight, because four punches, one failed half-nelson, two pivots, five crescent kicks, four blocked chops, three elbow slams, two instep stomps, and a roundhouse in a horse stance separate every description of who’s in what position. Consequently, it’s impossible to understand why anything is happening.

The other reason you don’t have a thousand words to work with is that much physical description is not, by itself, dramatic. To make it interesting, you often need to make it clear that the physical facts are important to a character the reader cares about; and so may you end up interweaving elements that are not purely descriptive fairly quickly.

Tags: description, fight scenes
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