Taking the Scenic Route

This week's blog post centers around a rarely discussed fiction construct. First though, I'd like to establish a middle ground between elusive facts and lazy opinions both of which can rephrase Newton's 3rd Law of Motion: for every expert there is an equal and opposite expert. I'll label this midpoint a 'considered position' and begin discussing what I refer to as 'prop writing'.

Scenes are essential to any novel but since I don't write literary fiction (I've read many discussions of it and still am not sure what it is) I spend minimal time describing the props they contain.

Novels evolved at a time when only royalty and armies ever ventured more than 10 miles from their place of birth. Books permitted the only opportunity to 'travel' and so writers engaged in lengthy descriptions of the visited milieu. We've inherited this writing form almost intact and it still fills many a page within the modern novel. The hero/heroine crests a hill, descending into a jungle. Let the detailed narration begin.

But everyone reading this post has a vast, visual library accumulated over a lifetime of television, movie, and of late, web viewing that a novelist should take advantage of. Add a few adjectives (steamy, dark, vine-filled) to jungle and a reader can draw from any number of mentally stored images to immediately fill in the rest.

Often, however, a richer view of what the reader should see is essential but loading a few paragraphs filled with descriptive narration slows the action, dulls the suspense, dims the drama. Instead, intersperse environmental details with the character's actions. Interrupt dialogue with the need to clamber over a fallen, moss-slick tree from which startled insects leap. Halt a machete from slicing the hanging vine that slithers into a snake. Stop the heroine's reflections with a shrieking howl from the leafy overhang. By the time the scene's purpose begins, the reader will be filled with vivid imagery, an immediacy of presence, and a sense the story 'moves'.

Now, boring page-filler or padded word count is one thing. Deliberate detail quite another. Consider the following.

Mary never tired gazing out her kitchen window. The riot of color approached something she sensed as divine. Swollen, eager rosebuds needed just days to burst into crimson bloom. Pale, pink peonies swayed to a gentle breeze. Orange, yellow, purple pansies laughed and danced, bumping against snapdragons that scowled before joining the festive mood. She closed her eyes, breathing the pungent, musky, mulch spread across the flower beds. It masked the death stench of corpses rotting beneath.

As an ex-soldier, I've adapted a well-appreciated military dictum to guide my scene and prop writing. He who defends everything, defends nothing can be rewritten as he who details everything, details nothing. Indeed, my sparse, spare descriptions of a street, a bedroom, a hallway (note that each unadorned noun, of its own, evoked an image) serve a greater purpose. When I do begin to include detail essential to the scene that extends even to props, the reader's alert level rises. With heightened anticipation, the suspense pulses.

Beware of movie tricks, however. Don't provide rare detail and then make the noise only a banging door, or the scratching a scurrying mouse. Delivering on the raised suspense serves to heighten it when the detail begins anew seven chapters later. Making the echoing plunk a leaky faucet diminishes a novelist's credibility. Indeed, the only thing raised will be a reader's scorn and annoyance.

As I said, this is nothing more than a considered position. Not dogma, but not offhand opinion either. I joined GR with the hope interaction with other novelists would improve my writing and provide deeper insights into how to do so. Are there other perspectives describing scenes and their included props?

As always, I welcome your thoughts and comments.