The Art of Description
Recreating the Past & Taking Your Readers With You
When you write about the distant past, you’re aiming to take your reader somewhere neither of you have ever been. You’ll need to be both a convincing liar and an engaging one. Some starting points:
1.Absorb the facts, then liberate yourself from them. Your story must be plausible, but it need not be true.
2.Know your period inside out, but don’t push your research at the reader ad nauseam. They want to forget that you’ve made it all up, so don’t keep dragging them back to Wikipedia.
3.You may know next to nothing about sixteenth century Sweden, but human emotions were no different then than now, a daisy was still a daisy and milk turned sour.
When I embarked on my own novel, I realised early on that I needed to know a lot more than I did about a whole host of things: the Luftwaffe, Kindertransports, musical life in Dublin, the physical fabric of pre-war Berlin. I went for total immersion; at my lowest point I could have told you pretty much anything you wanted to know about a Heinkel He-111. When I started to write, though, it was dead on the page.
I put the whole project to one side. When I came back to it a few years later, something strange had happened. The research seemed to have evened itself out, and all those insistent details clamouring for inclusion had piped down. This time, I wrote from the heart. I started with universals – jeopardy, betrayal, isolation, exile, hope, desire – the things that always feel the same. I tried to tell a truthful story and not to worry about the barrier of time between my characters and me. When I needed to know something, I checked it. If I found a little snippet that would light up a scene, I used it. Everything else, I threw away.
Read more: Recreating the Past & Taking Your Readers With You
Using The Five Senses - Bringing Your Fiction to Life
Let’s look at the opening paragraph of one of my favourite novels - Indian writer Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, winner of the Booker in 1997.
‘May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month. The days are long and humid. The river shrinks and black crows gorge on bright mangoes in still, dustgreen trees. Red bananas ripen. Jackfruits burst. Dissolute bluebottles hum vacuously in the fruity air. Then they stun themselves against clear windowpanes and die, fatly baffled in the sun.’
In fifty five words, Roy creates a world in which I can feel the heat, the heavy, heady atmosphere. I can smell scents that are most certainly not in my kitchen (where I’m typing). I am surrounded by colours that do not exist in this room. I can hear those bluebottles. It is a rich setting she paints, in tones that not only make colour explode on the page, but also foreshadow the darkness of the story to come. It is absolutely beautiful, and absolutely stifling. Arundhati Roy was not an ‘experienced’ writer. This novel was her debut.
Read more: Using The Five Senses - Bringing Your Fiction to Life
Place and Setting with Monica McInerney
Sometimes being a novelist is like having a film crew living in your head. There’s a casting agent picking characters, a wardrobe mistress dressing them, a scriptwriter developing plots and dialogue. And before anything can really get going, you need a location scout to find the right settings.
As a child growing up in South Australia’s Clare Valley, I used to sit on the roof of our family home, seeking shade behind one of the chimneys, reading my Enid Blyton and Mark Twain books. Up there, the hot corrugated iron leaving marks on my legs, I read about English villages, snow, frozen lakes, the Mississippi. It was how I learned about the world before I had a chance to see it for myself. When I began writing my own books, I wanted to do the same thing to my characters, and eventually my readers – supply them with fictional round-the world tickets, travel without the hassle.
‘Write what you know,’ how-to books urge. ‘Set them where you’ve been,’ I’ve added.
The Essential Elements of Description
These are the most important elements to remember when it comes to description:
- The reader needs description to paint the picture of a location or scene in their head, but too much bogs down the story, slows the pace and detracts from the forward movement of the plot.
- It’s essential to describe your characters as soon as possible after they’re introduced. But, don’t over describe them – let the reader fill in their own details, this enables them to cement a picture of the character in their mind.
- Use the five senses as much as possible, think about what your character can hear, see, smell. Think about touch and taste. Don’t use too many senses in each scene, but use them to paint a real, tangible picture.
Show Don't Tell
This is possibly the number one rule for writing!
- Showing paints the pictures in the reader’s mind – it engages her and involves her.
- Telling merely informs; it’s flat.
- It is a balance - telling is fine sometimes – too much showing would be wearying.
- Telling is great for first drafts – you can change it to showing on the rewrite.
- Showing almost always involves action, which readers love.
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