Working description into your story

Over at Mad Genius Club, a quite funny example of putting description into dialogue.

This ties into the “talking heads” type of scene I linked to yesterday.

“Bill blinked from where he sat at his desk, looking across him at the red spires dotting the desert landscape outside the office window. “My writer’s group said I needed more description and sense of place,” he said. “But then when I put in description, they told me I had stopped the action and given them indigestible infodumps.”

“Ah,” Mike said. “Did you?”

“Perhaps a tadbit, but dang it all, man, how is one supposed to convey things like new technology without a ten paragraph break explaining the history and how it works?”

Also, the last lines of this scene are delightfully unexpected.