This is from: THE DESCRIPTION WORKSHOP

© by Holly Lisle

All Rights Reserved

http://www.hollylisle.com/fm/Workshops/description.html

Description is one of those occasionally reviled writing skills. It gets

a bad reputation from books that include pages of turgid, extraneous detail;

no book has ever been rendered unreadable by virtue of too little description.

Unpublishable, maybe, but not unreadable. Whereas a couple of hundred-word

descriptions jammed into a three-page paragraph can not only kill your

book, but maybe even your editor or first reader. Bad.

So you don’t want to do that. But you don’t want to walk away from description

entirely, either. It gives you powerful tools for bringing worlds and characters

to life. Used judiciously, it can make your readers believe, and that is

a wonderful thing.

You have a number of things you’ll routinely have to describe in your writing

– settings, situations, and characters.

Let’s do setting first, since it’s the first thing

most writers think about when they think about description.

If you’ve done a lot of worldbuilding, it’s easy to get carried away with

this one. You’ve developed a ton of wonderful details, and the temptation

is to use them all, and to do it all at once. At the beginning of your

story, especially if you’re doing a novel and are writing about your own

world, you’re going to have to give people some description so they’ll

know where they are. However, even in a solid block of description, if

you keep the background moving, you’ll bring the scene to life and keep

your readers’ interest.

Here’s an example of what I mean, taken from the novel “Diplomacy of Wolves.”

So Kait Galweigh stood off in one corner at the Dokteerak Naming Day party

and scanned the crowed while she pretended to sip a drink. The Dokteerak

Family women in their gauzy net finery clustered beneath the broad palms

in the central garden, chatting about nothing of consequence. Torchlight

cast an amber gleam on their sleek skins and pale hair and made the heavy

gold at their throats and wrists seem to glow. They were decorative- --Kait's

Family had such women, too, and theirs was the fate she so desperately

wished to escape. The senior diplomats from both Families, Galweigh and

Dokteerak, gathered in the breezeway that surrounded the courtyard, leaning

along the food-laden tables, nibbling from finger servings of yearling

duck and broiled monkey and wild pig and papaya-stuffed python, telling

each other amusing stories and watching, watching, their eyes never still.

Concubines flirted and primped, tempting their way into berths in the beds

of the high-ranking or the beautiful. Dokteerak guardsmen in gold and blue

propped themselves against doorways, swapping racy stories and tales of

bravado with Galweigh guardsmen in red and black. Outland princes and the

parats of other Families and their cadet branches drifted from group to

group, assessing available women the way hunting wolves assessed a herd

of deer.

Now this is a longish paragraph – 214 words. However, the reader gets a

feel for the world from watching people doing things.

Description Rule Number One – People are more interesting than scenery.

When you’re finished reading this one paragraph, you have an idea of the

social and political structure and technological level of this part of

the world, social mores and morals, the weather that evening, the climate

of the region, and at least a suggestion of the social standing of the

characters. And if I’ve done my job correctly, you’re interested enough

in what the people are doing that you don’t see the things I’ve slipped

in with them. Did you consciously notice the palm trees, the presence of

monkeys and papaya on the menu, the women dressed in gauzy clothing? Tropical

climate. Did you notice concubines, decorative women, uniformed guardsmen,

outland princes, Families with a capital F? Complex social structure with

a number of conflicting political models, sexual mores different than those

of middle-class America, and the presence of a definite hierarchy. Torchlight?

The possibility, if not yet the certainty, of a lower-tech world. The Naming

Day Party? An unfamiliar celebration of some sort – and something that

obviously is of some importance.

Description Rule Two – Forms of the verb “to be” are your enemy.

I did not write, It was a hot night, or The Dokteerak women were beautiful

but immoral, or The food on the table was strange. Those would have been

really boring sentences. If you’re telling, you can’t be showing, and when

you describe something, you want to show it. You don’t want to tell about

it. Think about a car salesman. He wants you to buy the car. So does he

tell you how great it is? No, he drags you out, sits your butt in the driver’s

seat, and lets you smell the leather interior, wrap your hands around the

steering wheel, peer through the windshield, and feel the way it moves

with you as you drive it through city streets.

Let your readers drive your world.

Exercise One: List three or four important points about your story-universe

that you want your readers to know. These can be anything from weather

to political structure to the rules of a game characters will play that

is integral to your plot. When you have them listed, write a paragraph

describing them ... but do it using people, and avoid as many variants

of the verb “to be” as you can.

Finished? Like the energy in what you’ve done? Have you managed to sneak

your worldbuilding in disguised as action? If you have, great. If not,

give it another shot, and then let’s move on.

****************

“Fiction, like many other art forms needs a stage, a setting. In order

to pull the readers in, we want them to visualize not only the action,

but where that action is taking place. Unlike a movie, we the writers need

to paint this picture with vivid words. Keeping in mind that your setting

is as much a character as your characters, let's begin to build our stage.

“ (from B126 Lights, Action...Wait a Minute, Where Are We?)

1. Describe the town or city where the bulk of your novel takes place.

The streets, shops, schools, businesses, churches, restaurants, shops,

recreational areas, bodies of water if there are any, mountains, forests,

people, political climate, anything that is important about the place you

have chosen to set your novel. Some people find it helpful to draw a map

they can refer to as they write, and mini-maps are often included at the

beginning of Harlequin novels. Take 300 - 500 words to describe your community.

Remember to use more than just the sense of sight.

2. Choose a place where something happens in your novel. Describe that

place. 300 - 500 words.