How Much Description?

Just for something different I decided to start a SF novel last week, this time without much more than the central concept and ideas for the two main characters. This is quite a departure for me as I usually plot things out well in advance and also spend a lot of time on backstory.

The thing I noticed was that what I was writing was quite spare on description. This is probably partly because with this off-the-cuff style I was more focused on dialogue and character, but also because I think I tend to be less focused on description generally when I write SF.

This really got me thinking. So does that mean that I use too much description for my fantasy work? How much description is the right amount? Does my SF need to be shown only on Black & White TVs?:)

There are a couple of competing theories here. One is that you should deliberately use less description and let the reader fill in the blanks. The other is that you should attempt to really draw things out for the reader, make immersion in the world and the scenery a key feature for the story - like how Tolkien used his descriptions of the scenery as a major element of the experience of LoR, even to the extent some argue it is a character in its own right.

I guess as I inevitably go back to redraft these first chapters I will have to decide whether I need to put more description in to match the usual balance of my style, or whether I stick to the purity of the storytelling voice.

How do people decide how much description to use? I don't think I have really ever made a conscious choice about this until now. It is usually just part of what arrives when I imagine the scenes.

I do remember one comment from a reader of my mixed-genre novel Warriors of the Blessed Realms. They said that the fantasy worlds seemed more real than the contemporary sections (set in Brisbane). Maybe I have to work harder to envisage a completely new world? At the time I did not see any problem with this - after all the fantasy world was more real to me than this one:)

How Much is Enough?

Re-reading some old favourites lately, I have been struck by the differences in the degree of description. One of the books was so spare that little more than a single line was offered to describe new characters on introduction, and then only a repeat of this key image when they appeared at other times (yes the exact same one, over and over). Balance is everything - but I like a little more than this.


I guess 'less is more' is often a good rule to follow. The problem is things like that can be very hard to judge. This particular author had removed a lot of the casual description and attribution you might find between dialogue. That's fine from the PoV of the author, but what seems alive and accented to the peculiar viewpoint and personality of the character within the author's mind can read very flat indeed to an objective reader. In this case I found that the scenes dominated with dialogue offered me very little. I could not tell from the dialogue whether the character was being sharp, dim, sarcastic, excited or whatever - and there was not enough else to propel the story.


I know that very clever writers can manage to convey all this personality through the dialogue itself in the absence of all but the most minimal attribution.


For myself, I am very tolerant of description. I like to get atmosphere. I like to get a direct line to what the character is feeling. What starts to gripe me is long backstory infills on the geopolitical setting, or scenes that seem to have no point - except the fact that I am supposed to be in so in love with the character I really want to see them walk through the docks for two pages.

So what are your thoughts? How much description is enough? And how do you tell? Is it even possible, or do we all need a savvy test reader?

There's a whole world in my reader's mind

Reading is a form of enchantment.

Perfectly simple really. It is a kind of magic transmuting by means of little black glyphs a bland piece of paper into an entire world, a place so full and rich and with such images in it, that they are REAL (at least while the spell holds).

And yet... we writers are fairly inept magicians. Our attempts at turning people into newts almost inevitably end up with them getting better (even those who were rather newt-like to start with, tend to return to this state.) While this has undoubtably saved a large number of politicians, bank managers and people who were unfortunate enough sign rejection letters from a life of swimming around in small muddy brooks avoiding herons, it does bring one back to the question of just how reading enchantment is done.

And the answer is not so much by what is written by the author as by what is already in the head of the reader. The writer does not so much put the wonderful world there as to allow the reader's imagination and background to paint a picture so rich and detailed it would take a thousand volumes to describe. It can work for backgrounds, it can work actual things happening. Actually that's what put me in mind of writing this piece - I wrote a bit in my Flinders Island blog about a suicidal tree-frog ( http://flindersfreer.blogspot.com/2010/05/one-for-frog-n-toad.html )
in which I sort of hinted at the possibility of a heavy sofa being dropped on my head. I didn't actually say it was (it wasn't) but the image was conjured... by what was left _unsaid_. Matapam made a comment on what she'd imagined, and I thought that I must actually talk about this.

Tolkein was probably the grandmaster of this. Here is a piece from his "On Fairy stories" - which in its original form was a lecture Tolkein gave at St Andrews University as his Andrew Lang Lecture explaining how the reader (hearer) 'saw' that magic. "If a story says 'he climbed a hill and saw a river in the valley below' the illustrator may catch or nearly catch, his own vision of such a scene, but every hearer will have his own picture, and it will be made of all the hills and rivers and dales he has ever seen, but especially of The Hill, The River, The Valley which were for him the first embodiment of the word."

Look, cinematography has come a long way. There really is no need for those poorly lit scenes where you don't quite know what is happening, you just catch glimpses of it. Hell, there is more of that now than in 1950 movies. You think that's because directors are all plonkers? (well, okay... incompetant then). No. It's because they have learned to hack into what Tolkein writes about there. They've learned they can NEVER give an actual, precise image which is MORE real, MORE convincing, and nearly as 'wide' as the one you conjure in your imagination... given the cues.

And, dear writer, is the true magic-working of the writer. Not showing the pictures but shaping the reader's imagination to show the pictures. Filling in the pieces of framework, often very precisely, so that the image the reader creates in his or her imagination fits the story. Any fool can describe something precisely. And a fair number of people can come up with colorful language usage to do so... but to take the reader into that magical world, you have to frame and direct the reader's imagination to release it.

The trick is running the fine line between too much and too little. And often little cues like the choice of diction can have disproportionately large impacts.
So who does it well? And had you actually realised it was being done?

The Empty Room Versus The Filigreed Flourishes

Sarah talked yesterday about a tendency to genericise, to reduce the details of our imagined worlds to the bare bones and let readers put their own filigree and flourishes into the story.

There is a certain amount of validity to this, since the world inside our heads is always much richer than anything on paper. But at the same time, if we strip down too far, we run the risk of talking heads in empty rooms (guilty, yeronner).

Heinlein was a master of putting in just enough to make the scene spring to life - and choosing the perfect detail to do it, usually something that implied a whole bunch more and built the world in our heads for us. Pratchett does the same in his fantasies, building on the more or less common heritage of fairytales to layer the details in a way that the more you know about history in general, mythology and the just plain weird, the richer his books become. As a quickie example, in Making Money, the parrot's squawk of "Twelve and a half percent!" has at least four layers of meaning that I've identified. There are probably more.

Who do you think gets it just right? If you feel like some examples where the author's gone too spare and left you with the talking heads, or too lush and given you way too much description instead of plot, feel free to mention those as well.