Simple Writing Advice

Description The Basics.

Sensory Details

Descriptions are a way to suck your reader into your world. You tell them what’s going on in the world and you do it so well you make it real. In order to make it real, you need to make it feel real. You need to make your reader feel exactly what it is like in that scene.

To do that, you need to make them feel, smell, sound, see, and taste; you need to engage their senses. Sensory details are at the very core of all descriptions and all of them are important.

Sight – Visual description is the most common form of description, since we take details in primarily through our eyes. I don’t need to impress its importance on you. Sound – Behind sight, sound is the other most common sense engaged during description. If we don’t take things in through our eyes, we take them in through our ears.

Touch – You can’t always use this sense, because the character isn’t always physically touching something. When they are, though, telling your readers what something feels like can do wonders for your scene. Even when the character isn’t touching something, describing how something feels emotionally or how the character feels about something is very important. 

Smell – I always feel like smell gets short changed in most descriptive passages. Smell is a very powerful sense, especially when it comes to memory. If I smell Wild Berry deodorant, I’m not sitting in front of my computer; I’m in 6th grade science class in the autumn. Scent is also a great way to tell your readers what something is like if your characters can’t see clearly. 

Taste – We naturally associate taste with having something in our mouths, but we can also “taste” things in the air. Most of us know the “taste” of household cleaners, gasoline, cold air, and garbage.

Adjectives

Adjectives are the describing words that give the reader information about nouns. Nouns tell you what it is and adjectives tell you how it is. Adjectives are your best friends when describing scenes.

Adjectives are fantastic, but remember that adjectives help the noun. They are not the focus of your descriptive sentences. Overuse of adjectives leads to the dreaded purple prose. Likewise, underuse of adjectives leads to beige prose (see below for purple and beige prose). You need to find the happy medium.

You should try to limit yourself to one to three adjectives per sentence. Consider the following sentence:

The cerulean, azure depths of the sparkling sea shimmered with alluring emerald hints.

What I’m trying to say is that the blue sea has green in it. What I’m telling you is a load of mishmash with too many adjectives. It’s too cluttered. Not to mention it contains a bunch unnecessary descriptors. The reader knows that the ocean is primarily blue. They also know it’s sparkling because you mentioned it’s sunny earlier in your description. You don’t need the blue crap or the shimmering crap to create a good description.

The crests of the waves turned green in the sunlight.

There. More specific, less cluttered, and more concise.

You can write descriptions without adjectives, especially by using similes and metaphors (see immediately below).

The woods were a labyrinth.

The leaves burned with autumn colors.

The cactus’ shadow stretched over the old hacienda.

Indeed, I strongly advise you periodically include sentences without adjectives to vary the sentence style in your descriptions.

Similes

A simile is something that compares two things using like or as; e.g. as black as oil; hair like oil

Her hair was as black as oil.

Her hair was like an oil slick.

Keep your similes short, sweet, and to the point. Recently, I was at an essay reading and one of my acquaintances had a beautiful essay about how her grandmother’s kitchen had been a refuge for her during her parents’ tumultuous divorce. She described her parents’ divorce as such:

My parents’ fast-lived marriage was dissolving like dew under the sun’s rays as it rose in its daily path.

It’s a pretty simile and it gets the point across well: the marriage is ending. However, similes sound very awkward if they’re too long – as this one is – and tend to contain extraneous words. The simile would sound better as,

 My parents’ fast-lived marriage was dissolving like dew under the sun.

The reader probably understands basic evaporation or has observed this happening. Also, we know that the sun rises and sets every day on a path, so the “rose in its daily path” is also unnecessary. Here is another flawed simile:

Svhaarnean weather was like a hippopotamus that spent most of its days lazing around in the river until that one day a canoe floated over it and it became a berserker.

The core of this simile is that Svhaarna’s weather is normally placid, but occasionally goes psycho. (Actually, that non-simile was shorter than the simile, but let’s ignore that and look for a simile that will convey Svhaarna’s weather in a shorter word count than the hippo one.) The hippo simile was too long and awkward. I suggest fixing the sentence by splitting it into two parts.

Svhaarnean weather was like a hippopotamus. It spent most of its days lazing around except forthose infrequent days it went absolutely berserk.

(I changed “lazing around in the river until that one day a canoe floated over it and it became a berserker” to “lazing around except for those infrequent days it went absolutely berserk” because it’s shorter and makes more sense.)

Splitting the sentence into two parts made it seem like less of a run-on. I used a period and split it completely, but you could also use a colon because the first part of the sentence states something and the second part explains why that something is so.

Try to keep your similes consistent with what you’re trying to convey. If you are describing your love interest, similes comparing your LI to refuse, pest animals, disease, death, or monstrous entities are similes you should avoid. Think pleasant or admirable things, like clean clothes, cats, or that feeling you get when you curl up with hot chocolate and a good book on a rainy day. 

Metaphors

A metaphor is something that compares two things without using like or as.

Her hair was an oil slick.

The only downside to metaphors is that they require more explanation than similes do. Some metaphors – like the one above – are self-explanatory. Oil slicks are shiny and black, so her hair must be shiny and black. (Oil slicks are also … well … oily, so maybe you should clarify if her hair is shiny because she takes care of it or oily because she hasn’t washed it in awhile.)

Other metaphors are less clear, for example,

Alberic was a dugong.

Firstly, not many people know what a dugong is other than a misspelling of seel’s evolution. (This is a dugong and this is dewgong.) Secondly, even if you knew what a dugong was, the logic jump isn’t obvious or universal. Dugongs are placid, social, slow-moving, tropic-dwelling marine mammals with terrible eyesight. They’re also fat and shy around other humans. There are three ways of going about explaining your weird metaphor.

Ditch the metaphor and explicitly state what you were trying to get at with the dugong metaphor.

Alberic was an easygoing guy with a paunch and glasses.

Use the metaphor and then clarify.

Alberic was a dugong – fat, a little slow, but very sociable.

Explain the metaphor in a different sense

Easygoing, short-sighted Alberic’s Patronus would have been a dugong.

Short-sighted, social, and easygoing … dugongs reminded me of Alberic.