Description: How to Make Every Word Count

When you write fiction, description matters. A lot.

Too much, and your readers will put the book down in boredom. Too little, and they'll walk away wondering what they missed. Use the wrong words and phrases, and they'll toss the book aside because you haven't matched your tone to your genre.

So how do you come up with just the right amount of appropriate description for your fiction?

It's a balancing act. Let's start with how much.

Depending on the tone of your story or novel, you may need more or less description. For example, look at the following passage:

"Kelly hurried down the deserted street, glancing repeatedly behind her. Tripping on a crack in the sidewalk, she hitched her bag more tightly over her shoulder, knuckles whitening as she sensed eyes following her."

If you're writing realistic fiction, you've covered enough detail with just those few bits placed here and there. In nearby paragraphs, You may want to add some detail about her clothing or the street or the buildings along it to build the suspense, but you don't need to describe the entire setting. We'll get the picture with fewer details.

However, if you're writing something more speculative, like science fiction or fantasy, you've probably left your readers wondering.

Why? Because you've made up the world you're writing about, and you have to share it vividly with your readers. Otherwise, you'll confuse them.

If Kelly lives in a fantasy or sci-fi world, you'll absolutely need to add details about her surroundings. Maybe about her clothing. Not all in one or two sentences, but in the paragraphs before and after. In small portions throughout the book or story. Because we're not on planet earth (or if we are, it's probably not the same as we know it), we need to have enough detail to see the world you've created.

If you've read some of the most well-known authors, you've likely seen examples of lots of description, and examples with very little description. Novels written in the nineteenth century tend to be full of minute details. In contrast, Ernest Hemingway wrote very sparse detail in his novels and stories.

Practice writing things both ways. You'll get a lot better at writing description if you try to leave most of it out sometimes, using the barest minimum of detail necessary. Conversely, if you cram every flower petal and blade of grass in, you'll learn how to choose just the bits that count; the most vivid description for each particular scene.

Once you have the quantity right for your piece, the next thing to address is the words and phrases you've used. Your description also needs to match the genre and tone of your writing.

This means if you write romances, you need to match the language to that genre (or sub-genre). Gothic romance will sound much different than a modern romance.

The following description, for example, would be well suited for a mystery:

"The winter-bare branches dug ragged black lines on the lifeless gray sky."

This evokes darkness. Mystery, horror, thriller, crime... all of those would be great for this kind of description. But what if you're trying to describe bare tree branches in a lighter genre?

If you were writing a children's book, that line would be completely out of place. Unless it was a Halloween story or something similar. Instead, you'd want to use wording more like this:

"The winter-bare branches stretched toward the light of the overcast sky, as if reaching for spring."

Both bits of description would fit in a multitude of stories, as long as the style of the story was consistent with the style of that description.

If you can get these two rules right, you'll go a long way toward creating stories and novels your readers can't put down. There's a lot more than that to a good book, but getting your description just right is a great place to start.

Copyright 2009 by Susie Henderson