Words ignite the reader’s imagination. They form concepts and visual pictures in the reader’s mind, and so knowing how to write descriptions is a vital skill for anyone writing a novel. Descriptions give the reader a full experience; they help make the reading an immersive experience. Novels without description are barren, like a desert. They may still have their beauty from other aspects such as riveting action, but they will still lack the depth and fecundity of a landscape lush from rain.
Even a little description can add a great deal of flavour to your writing, especially if you write it so that it deepens characterisation and uses aspects of the character’s sensory experience in a symbolic way. The lack of sensory cues means that I’m not pulled as deeply into the story as I am when the words paint a picture or, better still, flow through my mind with the vividness of a movie.
So descriptions are important, but there are some traps in writing descriptions that you can avoid, and some pointers to set you in the right direction. Of course, I didn’t know these things when I wrote my first draft of my first book, and so I made every mistake I’ll be pointing out to you. That’s why I can teach you how to avoid them!
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1. Don’t assume
Don’t assume that the reader knows the setting. You need to set each scene with some description so the reader knows where the action is taking place. Books set in our Western world tend to have less description because the author assumes the reader knows what an office or a city street, for example, looks like, but city streets don’t all look the same.
A filthy, garbage-strewn street adds flavour to a scene where the character is doing something underhand or illegal, whereas a clean street indicates a city that is cared for and such an image could communicate a sense of safety or a fresh start. Old buildings creak and their floors are not even, making the reader feel unsafe, but if the building is lovingly restored, they have a cosy cared-for feeling. New buildings can feel sterile which gives a hard edge, a sense of uncaring, or they can feel light and spacious. Old furniture can have individual character and aesthetic merit, or it can be dark and dull, scratched and an indication of poverty. It all depends on how you describe your setting, but if you don’t describe it, you miss an opportunity to deepen your reader’s experience, to make the reading of your book an immersive experience, and therefore a rich and rewarding one.
So don’t assume that the reader can see the office or the street or the home where your scene takes place. This is particularly important if you’re writing a fantasy world where everything is different. In this instance you must create the world of your story—known as world building—with your descriptions of the scenery and culture.
2. Create mood with your words
Take a look at this:
A wind kicked up, scattering the autumn leaves across the sidewalk and sending a chill down Tom’s spine. A car screeched past with hard-rock music blaring, and a taxi splashed through a puddle full of icy water. Desperate to get to Sally’s place before it was too late, Tom pushed through the crowd, frustrated at how they slowed his progress.
This description gives a feeling of cold desperation with the words ‘chill’, ‘icy’, ‘desperate’ and ‘frustration’. Even the rock music adds to the feeling with its heart-pounding beat, screeching guitar and harsh voices. Autumn is a time of death and descent into darkness and fallen autumn leaves are dead, so this also adds to the feeling.
The same street on a sunny in summer would give a completely different feeling, so you aren’t just describing a place, you’re adding mood and feeling to your writing. The quality of the light in a scene is important; the way light falls on a character (sharp or soft), the colour (warm or cold), the general atmosphere of the environment (tense or relaxed), and the time of day all make the writing more evocative.
3. Use all the senses
And don’t just describe what is seen, include smells, tastes, sounds, and touch as well. In our example, Tom feels a chill and hears the rock music, but he could also notice how the petrol fumes sully the fresh air. In this instance, the addition of the sense of smell is symbolic of how Sally’s dilemma has sullied his pristine life.
That doesn’t mean, of course, that every description has all senses, just that you use different senses at different times to describe different things.
Want to add symbolism to your writing? Look at adding in the character’s sensory experience. Putting yourself in a character’s shoes, noticing what they would notice, is one way to encourage symbolism to emerge in your imagination.
4. Add character
A character’s office or home tells us a lot about the character. What kind of furniture have they chosen? Do they have photos of family on their desk? Are they messy or neat? A tidy office or home indicates a tidy mind, and a messy desk indicates a disorganised person, or perhaps someone with a unique filing system that could be pointed out as a quirk of the character.
When writing in a character’s voice in first person or third person intimate, what they notice and the language they use is particularly important for deepening character. Let’s look at our example again. As written above it’s in the voice is one of a narrator, and that’s fine, but what if you use the voice of the character?
A freezing wind scattered a bunch of wet leaves across the sidewalk—more stuff to wade through. As if he didn’t have enough trouble already struggling through the crowded sidewalk and fighting the chill that ran all the way down his spine. He hoped it wasn’t a premonition of what he’d find when he finally got to Sally’s place. He shoved past a girl giggling into her phone and shouldered a man out of his way, getting a curse in return. He didn’t care. Sally needed him—now. A beat-up car screeched past with hideous music blaring—a perfect expression of his frustration. Should he take a taxi? One headed his way. He stepped closer to the road and waved it down, but the taxi didn’t slow, it just splashed a puddle of icy water all over his shoe.
This version uses the character’s voice. You still get a description of the scene, but seeing it from the character’s point of view deepens the characterisation. This is not necessarily ‘better’ than the other version; both are good descriptions. Which approach you use depends on the point of view in which you’re writing, and third person intimate often uses some description in a narrator’s voice to transition between character points of view. If you’re writing in omniscient point of view, then, of course, your descriptions are all in the narrator’s voice.
“What a character chooses to notice and how they describe it tell us a lot about them; a cheerful person is more likely to notice the sunshine than the shadows for instance, but when miserable, that same person would be more likely to dwell on the deep shadows in a room. A teen uses different language to an adult and the words they use indicate not just what they’re seeing, but also how they feel about it. For example, what is a ‘stunning Rueben’s original’ to the adult with the art history background is ‘some kind of old picture’ to the teen more interested in stealing the flat screen TV. So your descriptions can deepen your characters.” The Elements of Active Prose: Writing Tips to Make Your Prose Shine
5. Make your descriptions action based
Our example description is action based; things are happening to Tom as the scene is described. Unlike this version of the same place:
A wind blew autumn leaves across the sidewalk. The street was full of cars, taxis, and puddles of icy water, and people crowded the pavement. Would Tom get to Sally before it was too late?
Same scene, but the description is static and devoid of any reaction or involvement by Tom. The wind blew, which is some action, but it doesn’t scatter or send a chill down Tom’s back. The cars, taxis and puddles are just there, they don’t do anything. Description is much more interesting when it’s tied into the action.
6. Don’t write your description in chunks
A mistake I made in the first drafts of my first book was to write description in chunks of a couple of paragraphs at a time. Many beginning writers do the same, and some fantasy books, even famous ones, do have chunks of description. If they’re written through the eyes of a character and have action in them, it can work okay, but without action such chunks simply slow the story down.
Have you ever found yourself skipping over the descriptions while reading a book? That’s what readers do when the description is in chunks that add nothing to the action or characterisation. But why write descriptions in chunks when you can break up the blocks of description by peppering sentences into the action?
Don’t think of descriptions as something separate from the story. If you stop the action to give a paragraph or more of description, the reader who just wants to know what happens next will be tempted to skip it. Instead, write what the character notices while he or she is engaged in the action.
This example is from Stalking Shadows, book two of my Diamond Peak series:
Ariel and Nick crossed a muddy stream on conveniently placed rocks, wound around enormous clumps of granite, and climbed continually on a gentle grade. Ariel glanced back across the open landscape at the Observatory tower fading into the distance and wondered if she’d ever see the delightful Englishman and his manor again.
Nick and Ariel are doing something. They are crossing, winding around, and climbing. Ariel also looks back and wonders something. Also note the words that reflect Ariel’s feelings about the landscape—conveniently placed, gentle, suitably gloomy.
7. Don’t overdo the detail
Readers need enough description to give them an idea of the setting and of what’s happening, but don’t fall into the trap of writing every action in detail because that’s not only unnecessary but also tedious. When a character boards a plane for example, we don’t need to know that he walks up the stairs, one foot after the other, with one hand on the railing and the other holding his cabin baggage. We all know how to get onto an aeroplane! However, if the character walks across the tarmac to get to the plane, that’s an indication of a small or backward airport and so may be worthy of a mention.
The important thing is not to bog action scenes down with detailed description or thought processes. Some scenes need more description than others, of course, and that’s one way to play with pacing—detailed descriptions slow the pace, so leave them out when speed is important.
8. Drop the hads and withs
Try to write your descriptions without using ‘with’, ‘that’ and ‘had’. These words aren’t very interesting and can make your descriptions clunky and, if overused, amateurish. We can’t avoid these words entirely, and to do so would be unnatural and unnecessary. The point is to try not to rely on them. If you try to write descriptions without such words, you’ll find your descriptions become more interesting and lively.
Example:
Dull: Sally was tall and had long, messy blond hair with red streaks.
Lively: Sally’s blond hair, streaked with red, hung in rat tails around her shoulders. She towered over George.” From The Elements of Active Prose: Writing Tips to Make Your Prose Shine
9. Be Specific
Vague words like ‘strange’, ‘something’, ‘handsome’, ‘beautiful’ and so on don’t really tell us much. For example, ‘An eerie wheezing sound came from the kitchen,’ is better than ‘A strange sound came from the kitchen.’ And ‘She noticed his long lashes, full lips and chiselled bone structure, and felt a little flutter in her chest,’ is better than, ‘She noticed how handsome he was and felt a little flutter in her chest.
Being specific gives a much clearer visual image to the reader, and that’s the whole point of descriptions.
Examples to illustrate these points can be found in my book The Elements of Active Prose: Writing Tips to Make Your Prose Shine I wrote that book in response to the common faults I saw in books I reviewed or appraised. In it I share my hard-won knowledge gleaned from various sources during my journey from being a teacher to being an editor.
Yes, I made all of these mistakes in my early writing, so if you look at your work now and think, ‘Ouch, this is really bad,’ it’s only because you didn’t know these things. Don’t think you are a terrible writer, you just have some things to learn; that’s all. Now that you have these tips, you can work with them to improve how you use descriptions.
I hope I’ve inspired you to take a look at your descriptions again.
How do you feel about your descriptions now?
This is part of a series of blog posts on how to write a novel. It won’t just cover the technical details, but also the emotional journey we take and the personal challenges we meet on the road from potential author to author. Join the journey now, and don’t miss a post, click here to sign up to get my Novel Revision Checklist and links to the articles sent to your inbox.
Writing a novel? Feeling overwhelmed? Get new insight and inspiration with my FREE Novel Revision Checklist.
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You’ll also get weekly articles on writing sent to your inbox.
