Setup: So, I'm new to the whole writing game. Hell, a lot of people could gather that from the sheer amount of questions I've been posting (sure it's only been three, but I've only been on the site for a couple of days). I'm pretty confident in my characters and the story I have going, but I'm not too sure about my ability to create a plausible setting. Given this, I've decided that how I described my settings (as well as everything else) will be done by giving a general outline of what it is. I understand that no one will see exactly what I see when I write, so I decided that I wouldn't describe every little detail in my mind, but I would instead let the individual readers imagine every unimportant detail. I'm not sure if this is already a common thing for people to do and I'm just uninformed about it, but I think that this approach to it would help the reader sort of, engage themself in the story? I mean, you always care about something more when you yourself come up with it, right? So wouldn't it make sense that if someone reads about "a crumbling tower", they would imagine how every crack looks and become more attached to the image? I don't know, maybe I'm rambling about things that don't make sense. Question: Is a minimalist approach to descriptions a viable option for new writers, or is there a better method?
You're going to get lots of answers, and the truth is there are many ways to skin a cat. I'm reading Martin's ASoIaF books right now and he really goes full bore when it comes to drawing the setting for the reader, especially in the way of clothing. I'm not too much of a fan of this because the story is written from revolving character POVs, and the narrative would lead one to believe that everyone in Westeros is really, really, really, keyed into the fashion choices of others. My personal take is not minimalist, but individualist. When descriptions are given - whatever they may be of - which character is the one whose POV we're using and what would that character notice?
Okay, this is off topic, but I love this stupid phrase. It's just so ridiculous it's heard not to enjoy it. Noted, thanks for the advice.
The omniscient writer needs to know every detail, but he doesn't need to tell every detail. If your own picture of a scene is comprehensive, you can point to a few key details through description (the marble tiled foyer, petunias in earthenware bowls), placement of characters (he leaned against the blistered green door-frame; she walked around her walnut desk) and dialogue ("Quick, duck behind the bookcase!"; "Sorry I tracked mud on your white carpet.") Just enough to let the reader visualize the set - generally, she can then fill in the blanks and he doesn't care anyway. It makes your story more genuine to use specifics whenever possible, rather than generalities: tree - willow; bird - robin; painting - still life, etc. As for clothing, the occasional strategic mention of a single garment or accessory can convey a character's economic and social station, personality and taste, more effectively than a paragraph of explanation. Does he carry a silver-handled umbrella? Does she wear an orange bolero with green flood-pants? If you know everything about your people and places, you can slip in subtle hints for the reader.
If the setting tells you something about the story or about a character, I say describe it. For example, you don't have to necessarily give the reader a completely accurate map of the dude's livingroom that they could use to find their way out in a fire, but describing the rough layout and his style choices will tell us about him as a person. Does he like antiques? Does he get his stuff from charity shops? Brand new from big name designers? Maybe he shops at Ikea because he has no soul (kidding, obviously, but Jesus, I hate their furniture)? To pick on somebody other than Tolkien as an example for once, I really liked Jim Butcher's description of Harry Dresden's place, not least because it sounds spookily similar to my own- minus the chatty skull, sadly- so I could straight away imagine the kind of guy Harry was.
Different strokes for different folks. I don't like reading a lot of description, so I don't write a lot of description. And I'm not a visual person, so I don't have mental images of the places I'm writing about. They're generally just fogged-up backdrops for the stuff I really care about - the characters. Other writers (and readers) have different preferences. I'd suggest doing what feels comfortable and right for you, and then getting some beta readers to let you know if they felt a lack.
I have a character with a lot of outlandish titles, including one or two that's part of a long formal introduction. I never talk about that title. It's likely an astute and interested reader might have his own ideas about what the title means, maybe. But the truth is, I know what it means. I know how important or not it is to the other characters who know it, how many people have it, how the character earned it, and how long the character has had it.
I'd say don't swamp the reader with details, but make the details count. In that sense, you might want to have your character notice what is unusual about what they're seeing. (Presumably you are using a character's perspective?) Don't go overboard describing what is there. Instead, focus on what you'd notice that seems important or odd, if you were that character in that setting at that moment. Especially if it's something you want the reader to notice as well. And ESPECIALLY if it's something you want the reader to remember. A lot will also depend on how fast the character is moving through the setting, or how much time he's got to observe a person or a room or a landscape. If he's got time to sit and ruminate, then you can probably add in more stuff, but make sure the stuff you include is fueling the rumination. On the other hand, if your character only has seconds to get adjusted, or to make up her mind about the way a character is dressed, or what the dress sense says about the new person, you will probably need to focus on only one or two details. Make them pertinent ones. Emotional state will also matter. I'm sure that somebody who is facing a guillotine, knowing that in another minute or two they will be dead, will be noticing and thinking about something entirely different from somebody who stands at that same site, 300 years later, eating an ice cream cone and taking selfies with a guillotine as backdrop. Somebody who is terrified of a man is going to see him differently from somebody else, standing nearby, who may be in love with the man. If in any doubt, go back and read some descriptive passages in books you enjoy. Look at how the authors you like introduce characters and settings. What gets said about these characters and settings when they first enter the story? Of course more can be included later, as the story unfolds. But resist the urge to step away from storytelling in order to 'describe' everything in a setting or every detail about a costume, height, weight, hair and eye colour, etc. Don't treat in-story description as an architectural blueprint, a fashion design portfolio, or a police lineup.
While I don't write direct fantasy I think that the minimalist approach is a good beginning. See what your story needs to work and after that's set you can start to add things to give the world depth. But avoid world gloating. If you just add ton of things that never comes into the story the reader may be confused or angry why they had to read things that were not relevant to the story, while at the same time parts that are relevant can something use some elaboration for why people tend to act a certain way in your setting.
There is no absolute answer, that's why real writing is hard work. I believe the key is using only the proper and necessary words. I know that sounds simplistic, but remember that the reader is not interested in your ability to use a thesaurus, only in reading a story. So look at the site as your characters would see it, more importantly what they would notice at first glance, and what features are necessary to your story, and to its tone. P.G. Wodehouse is a good example, here's how he described a small house on an English estate: "It had a thatched roof and a lot of those old windows with small leaden panes, and there was a rockery in the front garden. It looked, in short, as I subsequently learned was the case, as if it had formerly been inhabited by an elderly female of good family who kept cats." Few words, few real details, but I think it nicely gets the image across. At least I can picture it easily
@LastMindToSanity, I am inclined to say that you and I are on the same page. Having successfully finished my first very full length novel, I used your approach and got favorable reviews. In fact, I got so many good comments on the rich imagery (which I had carefully avoided putting in!) that I think the key is that if the reader sees the scene through their own imagination, it is more vivid than if you the writer forcefeeds them every detail. One of my favorite authors, Diane Gabldon writing the Outlander series, occasionally goes off in exquisitely detailed scenes, which I wind up skipping over, because - all right, I got it! It's a beautiful forest they are riding through already, now let's have them DO something. I think you ar eon the right track, or at least, my track. That said, you can use heavy details to either heighten suspense, or lull the reader into thinking that nothing is going to happen... then gotcha! Or if you have something unusual, such as my characters transiting the Zhangye formation in Gansu... yea, you want to help the reader see this!
My take is that it is much more important to have description consistently written through the story. I feel that exploring different ways of writing the same thing can only make you a better writer. And it comes down to how you want to tell the story and how you want the pacing to flow. As far as audience goes- some love one and some love the other and some are in the middle. I had a roommate that only read gigantic books, no matter the genre. The books were all description. I would get bored reading the back or the inside cover. His idea was that the author is taking him on a journey and better describe and explain everything in detail (in a way it was what he put value in in a book). I want much less description because my value is that the author can keep my imagination going. To use your example of 'a crumbling tower'- We all know what a crumbling tower looks like. What I want to know are things like stone color, maybe size of cracks at bottom compared to top. If an author tries to get me to see their world exactly as they see it, they have lost me, but others crave that.
Surreal, I'd mildly disagree with one part of your comment. I think very few, if any of us, really know what a crumbling tower looks like, except as an abstract phrase, partly because it's almost a stereotype. Even those who have seen a crumbling tower have not seen the one in the story being read; so your suggested details, or some like them at least, would be necessary. But I think too many unnecessary ones would lose too many readers. But it is to some extent a matter of taste, I suppose. I like the story line in Moby Dick but I gloss over a lot of his technical jabberings, but some people like them, I guess (though I would hazard a guess that the educated 19th Century reader would be more likely to want that stuff than a late 20th or a 21st Century reader, due to different social factors). Or simply the quirk of the reader -- my aged mother once read War and Peace but, as she put it, "skipped over the war parts."
In Horror and Mystery/Thriller it can be damn near central to withhold quite a bit to really get the tension flowing. Really depends on what you are writing, cause sometimes you can't really get away with some vagueness or ambiguity for somethings that are not so subtle. For pretty much anything outside of the genres mentioned, use your best judgment. A good mixing of vague and highly detailed will work pretty good. You just have to decide how you use them for each part you are working on.
I'm also a new writer who has been thinking similar lines. I think less can be more if the less is good, if that makes sense? For example - and i don't like poetry - a poem can describe a location perfectly in a few lines just through choosing the right words, and have considered (but not yet tried, admittedly) writing maybe 6-8 lines of free verse poetry to describe a location and get all the good visual words and really paint a picture and then structure it into what may be as little as 2 very descriptive sentences. I am guilty of being a skim-reader so a big block of description for me is just something to whizz through. If you tell me its a dark forest on a rainy october night my imagination will do the rest. And everyone tends to interpret descriptions differently and everyone's mental picture of your locations will be different anyway. Personally, i say give someone enough to let their own imagination take over, but not enough that they are bored of your location before anything even happens there.
Yes. The danger in over-describing isn't always just boring the reader. It also means the reader may skip over or miss something that IS actually important, and can actually screw up the plot. If you give every character a laundry list of looks-related description before it's actually needed ...height, weight, age, hair colour, eye colour, skin colour, clothing preferences, pieces of jewelry, etc, the reader might forget, later on, that this character wears a red belt. This might be the little detail that nails that character's presence in another scene. The POV character in the new scene is attacked by somebody, but just before he gets knocked out, he notices the attacker is wearing a red belt. If you've forgotten or skimmed over that laundry list in a previous chapter—made even worse if you've 'described' every character using the same list—then the fact that this red belted attacker is likely to be the same mild-mannered student as we met previously will be lost.
The amount of description could set the tone of the scene as much as anything else. For example, from a limited third person or even first person perspective, the amount of description would be biased towards items of interest when the character has time to admire them. Lack of description and shorter sentences are much better for showing a sense of haste or tension. A easy way to remember this rule is to liken it to the central character's breathing pace. When we're tense or scared our breaths tend to be shorter and quicker, so matching this would deliver that sense of tension or haste.
I think many new writers think a minimalist approach is the right way to go because it means less work or somehow seems easier. But here's the thing: readers don't want to do all the work. Of course, you don't have to go overboard with description or setting and it's fine to be a minimalist, but thinking you're doing the reader a favor by making them fill in the blanks is not really doing them a favor. Minimalist writers still give readers all the information they need. They don't make them work to "get" or read the story. Readers don't want to come up with too many details on their own or they could just write themselves. And it's often harder to pull off a minimalist approach than it seems. If you want to be a minimalist writer, read more works by them. You'll see that the author still takes care of all the heavy lifting and the reader can just pretty much enjoy.
