DESCRIPTIONS or THINGS I HATE TO WRITE
We took a little detour to announce my big book news, but now back to our scheduled program.
Part SIX of my series of WRITING FROM THE BONES UP: How I Write.
I don’t know why I hate writing description so much? My first draft has zero description, you have no idea what any person or place looks like. Maybe I’m a secret screenplay writer at heart? I find descriptions hard to write and tend to slow me down. So I just skip them leaving XXX as a marker for me to remember where I need to circle back.
Once I’m sure my events are pretty solid, and my plot/character arcs aren’t going to change for the time being, I do the dreaded description pass. Using find/replace in Microsoft Word for XXX I go through the book chapter by chapter chronologically and fill in detailed descriptions of settings and characters.
I try, where possible, have descriptions also do some of the work of betraying the narrator’s feelings about a place or person, in this early draft extract, which could use deep editing, Nina, a poor criminal is present at a ball peopled entirely by the nobility. Nina’s criminal upbringing has taught her to see the Nobility as nightmarish monsters, she is scared, wary, and her descriptions reflect both her current feelings, as this is the first time she is faced with such luxury, as well as the deep-seated prejudice towards nobility in general – :
The ball is a snarling chaos of gold, crystal, and glass. The light of a hundred chandeliers shimmering and bouncing off mirrored walls. The air is thick, heaving with the heat of over a hundred bodies made wild by drink, their voices merging into a blur of shrieks and cries falling from wine-stained lips. Their faces are terrible painted masks of white. Their lips blood red with rouge. They carry their cages, giant unwieldy skirts, corsets so tight they can’t breathe. Wigs so tall they must keep their necks stiff, and sparkling shackles of jewels weigh down their limbs. The nobles are monsters, their merriment a lying laugh that never meets their cold hard eyes. The wine loosens the masks from their ghastly painted faces, unable to hide the same fever that burns in the Hyènes; a strange violent madness, here laced with velvet stays and clothed in bone and silk.
I also tried to liven up some descriptions with character backstory :
Father smiles, a mouth full of gold teeth. He cut them from the lips of soldiers dying on the battlefield and paid a butcher to put them in for him when his own rotted away.
When describing specific places such as the Tuileries Palace, I will research online, so as to have some idea of what the buildings/rooms looked like. I keep these images in my scrivener file, along with research on the era and buildings in particular. However if a particular place doesn’t live up to what I am trying to write in the scene, I draw inspiration from other sources. The ballroom at the Tuileries was actually based on the Galerie des Glaces at the Palais de Versailles.
I also got super bored of describing the various rooms of the palace and my boredom led to very succinct descriptions that were a product of my annoyance, and by chance happened to suit my MC narrators voice perfectly:
The room is the size of Thenardier’s inn, and weighed down with an oppression of gilt…
I also tried to make sure to describe people and places in light of my MC’s outlook on life. She is a cat-burglar so she tends to notice jewels, fine objects, potential weapons, and traps.
