So I have to ask... Sometimes when someone is asking how to describe something, or they offer a blurb from their text, I read these wonderfully written, extremely descriptive paragraphs. Beautiful wordplay. Poetic. But how sustainable is that? Does someone want to read something like that for 100,000 words? How long before you go from writing, "Joe, reached down hesitantly, and felt the soft curly fur of his golden brown puppy as it winced from the thorn in its paw. He gently tugged at the small wooden dagger while the pooch softly caressed his hand, assuring him that despite the pain he was causing, his little furry companion knew it was for the better." To writing, "Joe saw that the puppy was suffering from a thorn in its paw. He reached down and plucked it out." I'm just curious because I'm about halfway through the story I'm writing, about 60k words in, and at my writing style has become relatively basic. It's all about telling the story now, not waxing poetic about every little thing. I understand that sometimes I have to be a bit more descriptive in order to convey feeling, but for the most part I feel like it would be exhausting for the reader, not just for me. At the same time, I worry about inconsistency in my writing. Is this making any sense or am I creating an issue where there is no issue?
It’s fine by me if it is well-done and I’m in the mood for it. The Gormenghast books carry a dense, descriptive style over three volumes. If it’s poorly done I won’t read very far at all.
One of the people who made the most poetic and beautiful responses to those threads is @Wreybies (former mod and maybe admin?) On one of my blog entries he spoke about that once, and said that he would never write like that in a story, those were exercises to push skills and creativity. I'm saying this rather than let him do it only because he isn't around these days. Sort of like doing vocal exercises before going onstage to sing, or playing scales and arpeggios just before the concert.
You should finish it with your current trajectory, then find beta readers to answer that question. Here are some possibilities: A. Your plotting and writing style actually line up perfectly, making for a well-paced novel. B. Your front-loaded style is so starkly different from what follows that it makes the reader think you phoned it in. The people who really liked the beginning get an unsatisfying latter half, and the people who didn't like the beginning didn't read it in the first place. C. Your first 60k words are royally purple and need heavy editing. D. Your remaining ~30k words have somewhat left the tone back in Kansas, and so need heavy editing. If the readers consider the difference to be quite stark, then you can decide if it is intentional style, or go back and hybridize the thing in editing. My off-the-cuff, lacking info opinion: I think your writing has improved towards the end of the novel. What you're writing is closer to your 'true' style, and likely an objectively better one at that. It sounds like you've gone from zooming the camera in on every little thing to instead only focusing on what matters for what you're trying to convey.
It's very difficult to write in that kind of flowery, poetic style without coming across as ridiculous or pretentious. It's hard to enough to write like that without making egregious errors in grammar or usage. Not many can pull it off, especially for an extended piece. You need to find your actual style, one that's totally sustainable for you, but that hopefully is more than just bare bones. Or maybe you're Hemingway jr. and bare bones is your style? You can probably get away with sliding into and out of something a little more poetic than usual if it doesn't stand out too much. But that's gotta be a judgment call for each individual time it happens. If something stands out as too different it pulls the reader out of the fictive dream and makes them concentrate instead on the words on the page. Your main job is to make sure they never do that.
To answer the OP, I think a lot of those beautifully poetic examples some people post have no place in commercial fiction. Maaaybe once in a while, but a novel of that fluff? Pass.
I'm glad you enjoy it and you have answered your own question, maybe? Everyone has their own style of reading and writing. Suppose you make a perfect book. Will everyone still want to read it? There's not much for me to add to the advice here without some sense of the pacing of what has been completed. In the first case you provide, the reader has no choice but to accept your word for the feeling of the scene. In the second, there is greater room for interpretation. Be careful not to lose your narrative as you work on finishing. Did Joe remove the thorn because he cares for the pooch? Or was the puppy's whining starting to grate on him and he wants to quiet it?
In Enter Night, the guy went on and on describing every other thing. it was frustrating tbh. He did character development for 3/4 of the book. I'm 250 pages in and he's still painting the portrait of the matriarchal mother-in-law that added zero to the story. He boffed her in one paragraph. To me, you should paint a picture, but you're there to tell a story that the reader finds compelling. Too much fluff distracts.
You know, I just read a book that maintained the same level of heavy description throughout the whole book and found that at the beginning I was awed and by the middle I was clapping my hands, telling the author to hurry the heck up. Personally, I put more effort into specific, important scenes and let the writing become more threadbare in other places. The beginning is important, scenes with heavy emotion, scenes you've built up to, etc. Other chapters can become more about being concise while maintaining character.
I believe it falls under the idea of establishing your voice. The setting and MC should be first page goals. While you're squaring those two away, your voice is being set in place. I mean, if the book is supposed to be funny, then the first page better prove it. If you're going to drift into heavy imagery, then you should show that too. Not for the whole page, but at least a little. If you wait too long then it seems jarring. I feel that's why certain imagery fails. It's not that the imagery was bad, but rather that it came from out of the blue and betrayed the voice that had been established. That made it all seem forced, and that made it fake. You always want to be honest with the reader, and so you show them on page 1 who you are. The danger with imagery is that it's describing indirectly, and that indirection can become wearying. The reader wants forward momentum. Or in the case of a story like Memento, backward momentum. Anyway, their needs to be a drive toward a goal, wherever that might be. You can have an author who is too funny (Douglas Adams, for example) and that's okay because the momentum toward a goal is still there. It's almost impossible for him to be "too" funny. But if you're too metaphorical then you're losing the target. You're just twisting in place, always looking in the wrong direction. You're being a monotonous poet and that's pretty irritating. So I guess you can sustain a voice as long as the story has a solid pace. Once your voice wrecks the pacing, the audience will turn on you. You've taken one important element of the story (the honesty of your voice) and allowed it to wreck the other elements.
If you mean sustained AS you write I doubt it. I think even the masters of prose like Nabokov, Katherine Dunn, Angela Carter, Mervyn Peake probably had to go over their paragraphs tweaking, and changing up words for rhythm and beauty. Adding their poetic glitz in layers. That's my guess because I have to do this myself. Occasionally gems fly out but most of the time my sentences can be pretty basic. I have to go back and layer on stuff. And like Steven Crowns says your voice is going to dictate how you go about divulging the information, what slant it takes, what words you chose, and when you decide that in the beginning it's going to make it easier for you to wax poetic because you won't be thinking about scene placement it will be more what so-and-so thinks of his surroundings. You will be in the character's shoes hitched into the mood.
Yeah it gets old for me. I try to be mindful of that when I write. My style has developed to suite my genre and the characters I write. Sometimes is does suite the situation. However, fantasy can be very much as you describe because I think writers are trying too hard to make something sound ethereal. Real easy to get flurfy and nostalgic. When I started the series I'm working on now, I asked a lot of people what they wanted in a fantasy series, and this was a definite NO! So, I keep that in mind as I write every sentence. It certainly has it's place, but an entire novel of it? Pass.
Glad somebody asked about this. As an aspiring new writer, I was afraid people expects us to wax poetic all the way through the book. Until I realized that none of the books I've read so far, whether classics or moderns, actually contains this! I've fallen to this "verbose first chapter" trap before without even realizing it. It's so easy to find ourselves trying too hard to impress, with our first pages mandated to demonstrate big vocabularies and beautifully-crafted strings of words like it's something that, duh, successful writers just do! But yeah, a few more experience points later, we all realize that no one is actually going to write like that and likewise nobody would be willing to read through them either.
This might be a good time to pluck some Hemingway wisdom out of the ether... "People think I’m an ignorant bastard who doesn’t know the ten-dollar words. I know the ten-dollar words. There are older and better words which if you arrange then in the proper combination you make it stick. Remember, anybody who pulls his erudition or education on you hasn’t any"... I have just finished reading a fairly literary work written in third person present. Goodness me. It was like wading through cold treacle in boots two sizes too large. I got to the finish, but it was hard, hard work. I shall now reward myself with a trashy murder story which allows me just to follow the action. Result - total absorption and escapism. One of the best books I have seen on web-page design (nearly as old as the internet itself...) was called something along the lines of "don't make me think". I suppose it depends what you are trying to achieve, but if you want your readers to be absorbed in your world, that is a pretty good mantra.
I want to make people think. But only AFTERWARDS. While they're thinking about what happened in the story.
There is a difference between including plenty of detail, and waxing a bit 'greeting card-like.' Your original is way too overcooked for my taste—soft curly fur golden brown, wooden dagger (instead of splinter), caressed (how?), little furry companion-urkkk—but the second offering is just a bit too plainly 'telling.' A happy medium would be nice. For example, what made Joe think the puppy was suffering? How did the puppy caress his hand? (Licked it, most likely. Maybe whimpered a bit?) Did Joe need to hold the puppy on its back to work on the splinter, or did the puppy remain standing and hold out its paw? Was the splinter of wood hard to remove? Was Joe able to grasp it with his fingers and pull it out, or did he need to use a pair of pliers because it was stuck? Was he worried about hurting the puppy? How did the puppy react when the sliver was finally out? If you can get these details in there, it will help us 'get into' the scene. But try to avoid deliberately trying to be poetic. Just tell us what happened, and how Joe felt, and how the puppy reacted, using ordinary language. We'll feel for the puppy without all the cotton fluff, if you let us see the scene. One of the most important skills to develop as a writer is the ability to see what's 'actually' happening in your scene. Look at the details. Even a couple of realistic details will nail it. You won't need to get sentimental and fluffy.
There is the simplistic blunt amount of description that works for some. The 'just right' amount to be effective. And lastly the purple prose that makes one want to vomit rainbows. It's always going to be a bit tricky to know how much is enough, and when it's too much. It helps getting feedback, cause then they can tell you if you're killing pacing by stopping to smell the roses way too often. Perhaps finding an order to what needs more detail, and what doesn't. And for the things that do require a little extra, only do them once in full the first time, so as not to bore the reader.
Reflect perhaps? Or cogitate? Deliberate? Ruminate... ponder... meditate... (c: But, yes, this completely! Make me think when I close the book. Lofty ambitions indeed (well, for me...), but what a great thing to aim for. An engaging story that I can't put down until it's done, and then I can't pick something else up until I've mulled (mull...) it over. Nailed.
That Hemingway quote was a reaction to Faulkner criticizing his ostensible lack of vocabulary. Kind of funny, because compared to Faulkner (and Cormac McCarthy, who inherited Faulkner's editor at Random House), we're all vocab clods. I like to think of the Faulkner/Hemingway feud as something of a WWF rivalry or Jerry Springer episode. Like whenever they crossed paths, they started flipping tables and breaking chairs over each other's heads. No words, just instant violence with everyone cheering them on. I would probably root for Hemingway, but it would be close.
I've been tossing this in my head a bit today. When I was a younger writer I took Strunk and White's "omit needless words" principle to an extreme no one should aspire for. I think there is a case to be made for prose having vigor, vitality, and vivaciousness. That doesn't mean flowery or fluffy language to make the author look like a Master of Words. Let me describe with an example: A careful eye may detect my plagiarism. Here is the original opening: Now I may have missed a tiny detail or two, but all the information Hemingway wrote I captured. And more concisely! But I think I would be hard pressed to find an admirer of my revisions. Why? Because despite having the same imagery, Hemingway's word choice and order immerses us in the scene better. And I think that is the key point. Prose should be immersive, and both language that is too plain and language that is too flowery inhibits immersion. And I don't want to think of it on a spectrum or dichotomy either. I don't view Hemingway's version as more flowery than my version, just better. The antidote to plainness is vigor, not a sprinkle of floweriness.
