If you’re in the United States, you may be braving the crowds to get a start on your holiday shopping. Or you may be curled up at home and recovering from yesterday’s feasting. If you’re a writer, you may find yourself at a computer and trying your best to put what you see in your head on paper. If so, you’re in luck! Today we welcome guest writer Lucy A. Snyder, whom you may remember joined us for My Favorite Things back in April. Lucy is teaching an Online Class for the Odyssey Writing Workshops in January, and she’s teasing us today with some advice on how to write description and setting. If you’re like me and setting and description are your least favorite parts of writing fiction, then buckle up: Lucy’s got some great pointers!
First, I’d like to thank Shara White for inviting me to guest blog here this week! She asked me to talk a little bit about description, which is critical in good, immersive stories and novels, whether they’re science fiction, fantasy, mystery, romance or horror.
Description first and foremost enables the reader to richly imagine the world that a writer has created. But good description does more than provide the sensory and physical details crucial in setting, characterization, action, and world building. The ways in which characters see and describe their worlds deepen personality, establish point of view, convey motivation, ratchet up tension, and move the plot. Ultimately, the description is the thread that connects the who, what, when, where, and why in any narrative.
There’s a whole lot to talk about with regard to description! I’ll cover the subject in depth in the upcoming “Riveting Descriptions” workshop I’ll be leading for Odyssey Online in early January.
But for now, I thought I’d talk a little about description as it relates to setting. Setting includes elements such as geography, ecology, architecture, culture, and the historical period of the narrative. If the setting is someplace other than modern or historical Earth, world building becomes a major concern. The setting provides the backdrop for a story and also helps set the mood. It (along with plot, characterization, theme and prose style) is one of a writer’s main concerns when creating a story.
How many (or how few) words you should spend describing a setting depends on the type of story you’re telling. First, let’s take a look at the atmospheric opening of Joseph Conrad’s classic novel Heart of Darkness:
The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable waterway. In the offing the sea and the sky were welded together without a joint, and in the luminous space the tanned sails of the barges drifting up with the tide seemed to stand still in red clusters of canvas sharply peaked, with gleams of varnished sprits. A haze rested on the low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness. The air was dark above Gravesend, and farther back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth.
“In the offing the sea and the sky were welded together without a joint” is not only a much more evocative way of describing “seamless” but also foreshadows the protagonist’s focus on rebuilding (and, later, struggling to keep afloat) the steamboat he’s put in charge of. The sibilants and repeated “n” in the description “in the luminous space” lend it a lovely consonance, and further, it evokes the brightness of the open sea and sky — a world that is lost to Marlow on his journey into darkness.
There’s great color and detail in the middle: tanned sails, drifting barges, red clusters of canvas sharply peaked, the gleam of varnished sprits. These descriptors pop and put the seascape right in the reader’s mind with just a few words. And the repeated “a” in “vanishing flatness” has a satisfying assonance to it.
The final line of the paragraph — “The air was dark above Gravesend, and farther back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth.” — is loaded with wonderful atmosphere. The assonance of the repetitive “ohs” in “mournful gloom, brooding motionless over” make that part of the description read like a lament. And that line further foreshadows the themes of the book. Why is the greatest town on earth so burdened with a hanging gloom? Because the horrors in the Congo have traveled there, psychic parasites on the souls of the men who have survived that darkness.
The other descriptions throughout the book are equally evocative and stylish. If one can look past the despicable characters and racism in the novel, it’s an excellent study in vivid prose and represents a good model for writers who seek to improve the quality of their own descriptive writing.
Now, let’s take a look at a descriptive passage from a much more recent novel: Money Shot by Christa Faust:
The location was one of those sad old mansions in Bel Air. Ostentatious, but had seen better days. Money is so fickle here in L.A. and a big old house is like an aging mistress with a plastic surgery fetish. It’s more economical to just buy a cheap, flashy new one than keep on renovating the old one. Otherwise, you wind up renting the place out for porn shoots just to break even on the roofing bills.
There was a pair of twisted pomegranate trees guarding the open gate and the ground beneath them was gory with broken crimson fruit that crunched and splattered under the wheels of my little black Mini. Pulling into the wide circular driveway, I kept expecting to spot Norma Desmond burying her pet chimpanzee in the overgrown rose garden. I felt better once I saw Sam’s red ‘84 Corvette with its vanity plates that read HAMRXXX. It was parked near a massive wooden door that looked like it ought to open into a medieval Spanish dungeon.
Faust’s descriptions are vivid and as compact as the narrator’s Mini. She doesn’t spend time describing the shingles, or the windowpanes; she lets the reader fill in the rest because she knows most all of us have seen plenty of Hollywood mansions in movies or on TV. Instead, she focuses on the pomegranates, and in doing so creates great gruesomely foreboding imagery. Even better, she continues to build the narrator’s character as she describes the seedy world she works in.
But in some stories and novels, the setting is so crucial that it functionally serves as another character in the narrative. It could be a fantasy wonderland, an ancient house full of secrets, an astonishing spaceship, or a grim alien dystopia. In these cases, the reader will want to see the setting unfold before them and spend more time in compelling descriptions of structures and landscapes.
For instance, this is from The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin:
There was a wall. It did not look important. It was built of uncut rocks roughly mortared. An adult could look right over it, and even a child could climb it. Where it crossed the roadway, instead of having a gate it degenerated into mere geometry, a line, an idea of boundary. But the idea was real. It was important. For seven generations there had been nothing in the world more important than that wall.
Like all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on.
Looked at from one side, the wall enclosed a barren sixty-acre field called the Port of Anarres. On the field there were a couple of large gantry cranes, a rocket pad, three warehouses, a truck garage, and a dormitory. The dormitory looked durable, grimy, and mournful; it had no gardens, no children; plainly nobody lived there or was even meant to stay there long. It was in fact a quarantine. The wall shut in not only the landing field but also the ships that came down out of space, and the men that came on the ships, and the worlds they came from, and the rest of the universe. It enclosed the universe, leaving Anarres outside, free.
Looked at from the other side, the wall enclosed Anarres: the whole planet was inside it, a great prison camp, cut off from other worlds and other men, in quarantine.
Le Guin spends more words describing a wall than Faust spends describing an entire mansion. But she’s not merely describing the wall, is she? She’s using it to convey the isolated culture the characters live in.
Your setting must above all else serve your story. And if you look at the three examples above, you’ll soon realize that good descriptions of setting keep the story flowing. You don’t just drop everything for the sake of pages of static description; adept writers maintain narrative momentum whether the setting is painted in brief, vivid strokes or lovingly detailed.
Lucy A. Snyder works as a freelance developmental editor and is the five-time Bram Stoker Award-winning author of over 100 published short stories. Her most recent books are the collection Garden of Eldritch Delights and the forthcoming novel The Girl With the Star-Stained Soul. She also wrote the novels Spellbent, Shotgun Sorceress, and Switchblade Goddess, and the collections While the Black Stars Burn, Soft Apocalypses, Chimeric Machines, and Installing Linux on a Dead Badger. Her writing has been translated into French, Russian, Italian, Spanish, Czech, and Japanese editions and has appeared in publications such as Asimov’s Science Fiction, Apex Magazine, Nightmare Magazine, Pseudopod, Strange Horizons, and Best Horror of the Year. She’s faculty in Seton Hill University’s Writing Popular Fiction MFA program. You can learn more about her at www.lucysnyder.com.
Author Photo by Mark Freeman
This is a great post! Thanks so much, Lucy, for sharing your knowledge 🙂 Description is something I struggle with all the time.