posted
It depends a lot. I have a fair amount of imagination, so I'm willing to put up with few descriptions. However, no details certainly turn me off. You need to ground the story, otherwise it's just characters talking or acting in a vacuum.
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posted
Details that pull their weight stay, those that don't go.
Making an artifical division between "details" and "story" doesn't help. A story is made out of details. It's like asking how many letters you can cut from a word. All the letters that help spell out the word you want must stay, all the letters that don't help spell out that word must go. A detail that helps the reader understand what is happening must stay. When a detail is distracting the reader from the story rather than helping to illustrate it, then it has to go.
Don't tell us about stuff that doesn't affect the mood. If you are going to detail the colors of a sunset, you'd better be prepping our mood for something.
Generally, if you spend more than a single sentence, in between action sentences, doing pure description, you'd better have a good reason.
We might need to know that the city walls were sixty feet high and made of seamless adamatimithridiamond if someone needs to get around/through them in unconventional means. If we don't then don't spend six paragraphs describing them and their history. If we just need to know that they are a city with controlled access, say they have impassable walls and get on with your story.
posted
Description should have something to do with the plot. If it's just there for fluff, strip it out.
Does it matter what color the character's hair is? For the most part, no. If the character has bright red hair, and because of it has a hard time hiding among the masses when evading pursuit, then yes, hair color matters.
Overly florid prose interrupts the reader. It does not contribute to the smooth flow of your story. Too many adjectives and adverbs are the writer's equivelent of stuttering. Most people who overdo description error because they are describing things that don't matter, or they are shoving the description at the reader in the form of an infodump -- too much, too fast, and too irrelevant IN THE MOMENT.
In short:
quote:Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.
— William Strunk Jr. in Elements of Style
Edited to say I found that quote on Writing Concise Sentences which has a lot of helpful advise about writing lean.
[This message has been edited by Elan (edited April 28, 2006).]
posted
The last couple of stories I've finished and liked enough to send out, I sat down and tried to eliminate most of the adverbs. I used the search feature to hunt down words ending in "ly" and rewriting to remove them. (Two exceptions: in most cases, I couldn't come up with satisfactory alternatives to "only"...and I left most every adverb within dialog intact, figuring characters should speak as suits them.)
Why I focused on this particular bugagoo, I can't say. It just seemed like a good idea to use something on my word processing program to try to improve my writing. (Maybe it was one too many choruses of "Lolly, Lolly, Lolly, Get Your Adverbs Here"...)
I can't say it made things that much shorter, but it somehow seemed better when I reread it, like the adverbs hadn't been needed. Stripping the nut? Could be...
posted
I never until just now understood the significance of Lolly in the adverb song. (That being that it ends in -ly.) Ironically, the sentence "Conjunction, Junction, What's your function?" contains no conjunctions.
I feel it's safe to say that I didn't learn anything from Schoolhouse Rock. I was just too young when it came on. They were just nonsense words to me. Do you think anyone will ever come up with the sinister deconstructions of Schoolhouse rock?
posted
There are numerous parodies of "I'm Just a Bill" around...notably one on an episode of "The Simpsons" that also scraped up the guy who sung the original.
I can't say I learned anything from them...they came on just past the critical learning time in my childhood and instead became beloved early adolescent cartoons. Though I've always had a fondness for "A Noun is a Person, Place, or Thing." (Yes, I bought the DVD complete set.)
posted
Details don't just describe a scene, they also give insight into the POV character.
Think of a detective novel. Philip Marlowe wouldn't be Philip Marlowe if he didn't describe "hard wet rain" or a door "which would let in a troop of Indian elephants" (both from the opening page of The Big Sleep).
This goes for both first person and third person narration. The way details are described, what the character notices and what the character misses, tell the reader about the POV character's personality.
Readers are sensitive to detail overload. If you throw too many details into a scene, the reader learns either that the writer doesn't understand POV, or that this POV character is boring. Sometimes a writer wants to achieve the latter, but it is a fine line.
posted
The trick with description is to find the critical detail(s). The most evocative ones. That's why a long, accurate but boring list of details fails while an inspired metaphor oftentimes works.
Also, active description is usually more memorable than static.
You could say Mike was tall, seven and a half feet. Or you could say that he stooped to enter the door and bent aside to miss the hanging lamp in the nine foot entryway.
I find the incessant mentioning of hair color annoying unless the story happens to be set on Bradley's Darkover where color IS important. That's just a personal peeve. I realize that sometimes hair color is a clue and I should remember it, I just usually don't. I'm building my own image of whoever and whatever is being described. I need the critical details like he's in a wheelchair or she took off her glasses, wrapped them in a silk scarf and tucked them away in her briefcase. I want to be shown these people rather than be told about them.
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