Description is the bedrock of storytelling. Good description brings a scene to life and makes it vivid in the reader’s imagination. This is achieved by following one of writing’s sacred rules:
Show, Don’t Tell
If you write your story
by showing the reader what’s happening rather than just telling them, it’s more
involving. It draws the reader in so they have to work things out for
themselves and engage with the story and characters. ‘Showing’ puts the reader
in the centre of the action.
When writing
description, use all the senses: sight, sound, taste, touch and smell, as well
as feeling and emotion. Be specific. If there are trees, what kind of trees are
they? Give us the details, but not too many. The best description is specific
and evocative. You give the reader just enough detail for them to fill in the
gaps. Description should provoke imagination, not dictate it.
Good description makes
your story more authentic and believable, and should answer the five basic
questions:
- Who?
- What?
- When?
- Where?
- How?
Not every part of your
story needs to be shown in great and glorious detail. Some things can be simply
stated (i.e. told) if they’re not that important to the story. If you show
every little thing that’s going on, you’ll get bogged down and your story will
grind to a halt.
So, for example, if
it’s raining in a particular scene but that detail isn’t massively important,
you can just write:
It was raining.
There’s no need to
bring the rain to life by describing exactly how it’s bouncing off the
pavement, or trickling down the window, or whatever. But if you have a
character out for a stroll in the rain and they’re wearing glasses and the rain
is making it hard for them to see where they’re going, you might want to go
into more detail and show us what that’s like:
Archie stumbled down the street, darts of rain stung his face and mottled his thick lenses with rivulets of water.
That’s kind of
overdoing it, but you get the idea.
The Right Verb
Using active verbs
brings your description to life. There’s nothing worse than the wrong verb, it
really puts a crimp in your sentence. In the example above, Archie is out for a
walk in the rain. You could simply write:
Archie walked down the street…
But how is he walking? There are many, many
ways to walk. You can stroll, amble, march, trudge, stride, sashay, etc. I
chose the word ‘stumbled’ above to show Archie was having trouble seeing where
he was going due to the rain clouding his glasses. It wouldn’t work at all if
I’d written:
Archie skipped down the street…
That would just confuse
the reader. Unless there was another reason for Archie to skip, in which case
he would probably be oblivious to the rain on his glasses and you would write
that sentence in a different way.
Description can be used
to slow the pace of the story, build tension, and draw attention to important
details or clues. You can focus the reader’s imagination on anything you like
and direct how they perceive what’s going on. This is particularly important
for the big events in the story, like the main plot points or set pieces. You
can show these events by breaking down the action using vivid details and
active verbs. This will stick these moments in the reader’s mind, and ensure
they carry your story with them when the final page is turned.
Here’s an example of
great description from Miss Smilla’s
Feeling for Snow by Peter Høeg:
“We have eaten without exchanging a word. Partly, of course, because what was not said before is still hovering in the room. But mostly because the soup demands it. You can’t talk over this soup. It’s shouting from the bowl, demanding your undivided attention.
Isaiah was the same way. Sometimes when I read aloud to him or when we listened to Peter and the Wolf, my attention would be distracted by something else and my thoughts would run away with me. After a while he would clear his throat. A friendly, remonstrating, telling sound. It meant something like: Smilla – you’re daydreaming.
It is the same with the soup. I’m eating it from a deep soup plate. The mechanic is drinking it from a big cup. It tastes of fish. Of the deep Atlantic Ocean, of icebergs, of seaweed. The rice has traces of the tropics, of the folded leaves of the banana palm. Of the floating spice markets in Burma. My imagination is running away with me.”
