The Art of Description
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.
Noelle Harrison on Literary Passion
Writing about sex is something most writers find challenging. Yet it cannot be avoided. Sex is a part of our daily lives, and so if a novel is to reflect the human condition, the need to write about sex must be acknowledged.
Often my approach to writing sex scenes is to employ the use of metaphor. Metaphors enrich a novel, providing a poetic dimension and emphasising the transformative function writing can have on the reader. It helps take them out of the perimeters of the plot, into the interior world of the characters and themselves.
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