In terms of personal preference, for both authors and readers, there is a fair bit of leeway in the answer to the question of how much description is too much in a novel or memoir. However, in terms of craftsmanship the answer to this question is clear. What’s not so clear is how you, as an author, determine whether or not your work meets the criteria for the right amount of description. Image by Pexels from Pixabay Too little Whether you’re writing a novel or a memoir, some description of scenes and people is required to set the scene. Without some indication of how people and their environment look, the reader has nothing with which to stimulate their imagination, and reading is essentially an imaginative endeavour. We want a book to carry us off into other people’s stories and into the cities, towns, countries, times and even planets, universes and realms in which the story takes place. Description provides a rich texture that stimulates the readers’ imaginations, helping … [Read more...]

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, … [Read more...]