An Educative Article on Description

I'm excited as I'm finally in the midst of content edits for my novella, Irish Dreams, and I'm learning about description in writing. Now I've blogged about description before so I'm not going to concentrate so much on how to do it but more of when to do it. We each have our own unique voice so the "hows" of description should really come out in your individual voice. What are you seeing in the scene? How would you describe in it in your words? How do you want your readers to see it through the character's eyes? Basic thing to remember is to have fun with it.

Now onto the "whens" of description. Here are a few pointers on when you should add more description and why:

The beginning of a new sequel/scene. This is particularly important to orient the reader as to where the characters are and what is going on. What do they see? You need to be careful here as you want these descriptions to be where the pace of the story is a bit slower (basically you are not going to be talking about Persian rugs and paintings when your character is being strangled).
Introduction of the hero, heroine… maybe even the villain and friends. Depending on what your work is about and what roles your characters play, you will want to go into some kind of description with them earlier on. Try not to make the description generic (he had blue eyes and blond hair). Have fun with it butalso don't go overboard. I read a book recently that went on about the hero for near three pages. Needless to say, I put the book down. I got the picture, he's hot but come on, there has to be more to hold our interest.
POV switch or to understand feelings. At times, we will switch POVs in a scene or we go in depth about a character's feelings. This may be a good area for description as it will help the reader understand what the character is feeling and why they may feel that way. Why does a hero want to kiss a heroine at a certain moment? What does he see in her eyes? Is he watching her lips as she speaks and if so, what does he think? Make sense?
To control pacing. Description does tend to slow down or at times, speed up the pace of a scene/sequel but there are times we purposely want to do this. Perhaps we want to slow it down to build up to another climax OR perhaps we want to use the description to build the climax. That is possible too. The question to ask yourself is what you are trying to achieve and how the description would best achieve it.

That's all for today, folks. Hope this helps and happy writing!

Filed under: Characters, Toni Kelly, Writer's Life, Writing Topics [image error] [image error]