The Writer's Guide to Everything

Everything You Need to Know About Descriptions

From Anonymous Reader: Things I Have Problems With: Descriptions.

Ooo, I'm treading into dangerous territory for you. I'm not a complete master at this. But I'll talk about three types of description that could be troubling you:

-Scenery

-Emotion

-People

1. Scenery

This always trips people up. Always. (Harry Potter Fandom crying in the distance)

To remember the proper way to do this, I always think of the way Cassandra Clare describes Alicante in City of Glass. She describes the demon guard towers, the houses and the streets, all in two paragraphs, but she keeps you remembering the scenery by subtly repeating these details throughout the writing. A note about the shimmering borders.

Another about the blood on the street stones.

Another on the quaintness of Amatis' house.

These subtle reminders keeps your reader immersed in your world without overwhelming them. I'll do an incorrect example:

The stone castle was made of type 22 limestone and flint, a dark grey like the colors of a stormcloud. There was a drawbridge at the entrance, made of stained oak, with taut, tan, braided ropes to lift it up and down. The moat surrounding it was a murky green-grey color like how your paint water looks after you've mixed a bunch of colors and used too much green. There were four spires, on the corners, with patterned zig-zags carved on top of the towers. There was a red flag in the middle, on a flat plane of stone, with lots of little archers and guard, ants dressed in silver, red, and gold. The archer's held bows, two mahogany, one cherrywood, and three cedar. The guards had sharp, razor sharp battle axes that shined, and red feather plumes on top of their helmets. There were buckets of oil next to them for dumping on their enemies then setting aflame. The castle itself was 7kmX10km and was really big but then again it's a castle...

See the problems?

-Just say stone. Just say wood. Readers want to know what it looks like, not what it's made of.

-No need to go into detail. We don't need to know numbers and small things like how the rope looked.

-Don't be superfluous. Do not, I repeat do not reuse your description in the same content over and over again.

-NO NUMBERS! No numbers, unless you're generalizing like 'hundreds of soldiers' or 'few women'

-Don't use cliche descriptions like 'tiny ants'. I've decided I'm doing an entire post on cliches...

-Don't list too many colors. Just say 'the colors of the flag'

-What's a patterned zig-zag? D-E-S-C-R-I-B-E what it looks like, don't list.

Best rule of thumb for scenery, describe your main pieces to your setting with just enough detail that the audience can make it their own in their heads while getting the vital stuff down.

2. Characters

Oh dear lord.

Oh dear sweet lord.

Most people mess up on this, so let me go over a few things:

~Don't use a mirror to describe your character. Use motions and actions. "She swatted at the strand of twig brown hair  that flew in her mouth as the wind blew"

~Stick to the rule of three. Use three things to describe a character, no more, no less. "Alvira was a tiny pixie dressed like a bandit, with strawberry blonde hair and a silver glow."

You can still get plenty of information in without over analyzing the character. Basically, in first person don't have the main character describe herself, but do describe everyone around her. Third person, just add a dash of descriptions here and there and you're guaranteed to clean up your work. Same rules for scenery apply to characters.

3. Emotions

This topic will mainly be addressed in a post about cliches and emotions, since there are a lot of fine lines with this, but for now I'd say just try what you think works. Don't make a crooked kind of smile, a smirk, and quit popping p's. Make sure your characters have reasonable reactions *cough* Bella Swan is a fine example of what not to do *cough*

Hope this helped!

XOXO

Kat Loss