All About Description
A series of posts about description on Patricia Wrede’s blog:
Fast forward to the 1800s, when the printing press and the spread of literacy made books available to a much wider audience, many of whom had never traveled more than a few miles from home. Descriptions of places became longer and far more detailed, in an attempt to paint a mental picture for readers of a place or event which they had never (and might never) have seen:
“One doesn’t test these truths every day, but they form part of the air one breathes…The colour the thick, dim distances which in my opinion are the most romantic town-vistas in the world; they mingle with the troubled light to which the straight, ungarnished aperture in one’s dull, undistinctive housefront affords a passage, and which makes an interior of friendly corners, mysterious tones, and unbetrayed ingenuities, as well as with the low, magnificent medium of the sky, where the smoke and fog and the weather in general, the strangely undefined hour of the reflection of furnaces, the red gleams and blurs that may or may not be of sunset—as you never see any source of radiance you can’t in the least tell—all hang together in a confusion, a complication, a shifting but irremovable canopy.”—description of London from English Hours, Henry James
And so on, shifting to a discussion about description in modern novels, where one size does not fit all. Then –>
This post is about chunks of description versus working little dabs of description into the story. Also about choosing details to include, and how that depends on the character. This post is making me think of various openings from Jennifer Crusie novels, such as Welcome to Temptation:
Sophie Dempsey didn’t like Temptation even before the Garveys smashed into her ’86 Civic, broke her sister’s sunglasses, and confirmed all her worst suspicions about people from small towns who drove beige Cadillacs.
Half an hour earlier, Sophie’s sister Amy had been happily driving too fast down Highway 32, her bright hair ruffling in the wind as she sang “In the Middle of Nowhere” with Dusty Springfield on the tape deck. Maple trees had waved cheerfully in the warm breeze, cotton clouds had bounced across the sky, and the late-August sun had blasted everything in sight.
And Sophie had felt a chill, courtesy, she was sure, of the sixth sense that had kept generations of Dempseys out of jail most of the time.
Look at the details! It’s not just which details, it’s the sheer liveliness of the prose. Plus the tone. “Happily,” “bright hair ruffling in the wind,” “cheerfully,” “cotton clouds bounced across the sky” — and all those details combined with the trivial violence of a minor car accident — we know it was minor because otherwise something more important than sunglasses would have been broken — plus the line about Dempseys and jail. This is just such a fun example of working the description into the story.
Anyway, then the next post about characterization at Wrede’s blog is description through characterization, a great topic.
When a viewpoint character enters a place, they aren’t just seeing it. They’re experiencing it, and they register different parts of the experience as they become more personally relevant. If I walk into my sister’s house when it’s bitterly cold and windy out, the first thing I register is that it’s nice and warm. I’ll notice the smell of the curry next, and only then realize that she’s rearranged the furniture (and if the furniture is where I expect it to be, I won’t notice it at all unless there’s stuff piled in the chair where I usually sit). On a similar day, if I’m really hungry when I get there, I’ll notice the curry-smell first, and the warmth second.
I particularly like this comment:
A tough-guy character who rarely says anything other than “yup” or “nope” isn’t likely to comment—verbally or mentally—that the cerulean-and-cream brocade curtains remind him of the Greek Key china his Aunt Sophia brought with her when she emigrated forty-two years ago.
Cerulean is such a wonderful word. I need to use that some time.
Wrede adds that doing description as part of characterization is tough because:
This makes it a poor choice for writers who like ornate descriptions such as “the freshness of morning breathed and shimmered in that lofty chamber, chasing the blue and dusky shades of departed night to the corners and recesses,” unless they can actually write a character who talks and thinks like that all the time.
Which I can and do. For me, that’s something I enjoy. Personally, I think the best example of this in anything I’ve written is surely the Death’s Lady series, because diction and allusion are just so different for everyone from Talasayan compared to everyone from America, and I had to stick to Talasayan style for almost all of Shines Now. This wasn’t precisely difficult, but I was aware of it all the way through. This:
He spoke in a calm, level tone, quietly enough that no one farther than a few steps away would hear. “Nolas-e, I thank you for your great mercy, which is far more than I or any of my people deserve. I hope you will continue to hold out your hand to my people even if you judge me harshly for my temerity in asking for yet greater mercy. I mean no insolence when I ask, Nolas-e, that the dead past be left to lie buried in its grave. My name is Kuomat; I have never been called by any other name. I will neither look back through the years nor recall a time when another man might have been called by another name. I will not face Nolas-Kuomon; not in Nerinesir nor in Chaisa nor in Kandun nor in any other place. I will not face her and you will not demand it of me. If you find these strictures acceptable, I will swear to your service and accept whatever judgment you see fit. If otherwise, I will set my face toward Lord Death’s dark country and await his judgment and the judgment of God.”
is nothing that any modern American character could possibly say. And THEN on top of that, Kuomat is also a distinctive character who is very different from, say, Mitereh, even though they’re both authoritative and assured. I’m very fond of Kuomat. That’s one reason we see ALL the vigils in This Hour — because I didn’t want to skip showing Kuomat, and that led to just adding one vignette after another, for everyone I could think of.
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