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Writing: Description, Details, and Delivering Information

I haven't written here yet.
I haven’t written here yet.
I’m working on converting the Description and Delivering Information class to the on-demand version, along the same lines as the Character Building Workshop and the Literary Techniques for Genre Writers workshop, and hoping to finish it up over the next couple of days, which may be overly ambitious, because a) I am doing NaNoWriMo, b) life is complicated by Orycon and then a Thanksgiving trip on the 20th and c) this is my birthday weekend and I like to slack a little.

So, what’s the difference between taking one of my live online writing classes and the on-demand versions? Let’s look at the cons first:

  1. No live interaction, which is a little sad. You can comment on the class material, though, which you have access to in perpetuity, or at least as long as it’s up.
  2. No chance to hear other people’s work with the exercises or get a chance to chat with them.

Pros, on the other hand?

  1. A bit more lasting. As I said, you do get permanent access, including when the material updates.
  2. Work at your own pace. Want to do an exercise more than once? Go for it. Want to stretch things out or take a break for that trip to Bermuda? You’re fine.
  3. Considerably cheaper than the live version — half the price, usually.
  4. Considerably expanded material and more exercises. The character building workshop ended up being close to 20,000 words; this one will match and probably surpass that.

Want a preview? Here’s an early page, Description as Collaboration:

The Writer/Reader Relationship
Description is a collaboration between writer and reader. You provide a handful of details; from them your reader constructs a three-dimensional experience. You build the funhouse ride, but so does your reader, an experience that will differ — sometimes radically — from reader to reader, depending on their experiences and depth of imagination.

It begins the minute you supply a detail. The author says “red” and immediately a red — perhaps a bright candy apple red, maybe something murkier — appears in the reader’s mental vision. Add “wheelbarrow,” and they supply a wheelbarrow based on the ones they’re most familiar with. Add “glazed with rain” and the possibilities splinter even further.

And that’s fine. It is an inescapable fact and nothing you can do will change it. It is impossible for you to include the depth and range of detailed description that would be necessary to unquestionably determine every nuance for the reader.

Choices Matter
As soon as an author introduces a detail, it begins to grow in the reader’s mind. And unspoken behind every detail is an authorial I selected this detail rather than any other for a reason that will matter to the reader. That is perhaps one way of looking at writing: the art of selecting and conveying details in an order that creates a complete experience for a reader.

How the author presents details — which details are mentioned, the things that are included about them, and the wording and syntax in which they are presented — is one of the major factors that creates style and tone.

Style might be defined as the overall way in which the story is told. It is different than the content of a story, but usually content and style are linked and work together.

Tone is the overall emotion or mood of a story, and is created primarily but not solely by the style and word choice.

Recently spotted in Value Village. I believe this is the god of pumpkin spice.
Recently spotted in Value Village. I believe this is the god of pumpkin spice.
Here’s a photo of a thrift shop object described in two different styles, then two different tones*.

  • Style example #1: There it stood, the proud ceramic, small in stature but twice as splendid. The corn god glared out, positioned, poised, ready to bring autumn to the land.
  • Style example #2: Paul glanced down at the statue. Small. Yellow and orange. Glazed. Corncob-extured body. Why this, he wondered.
  • Tone example #1: The little statue was a welcome find, smiling at her from the shelf, colored like the first autumn leaf. It was solid in her fingers, still smiling up at her as she tilted it to see if there was any marking on the weathered bottom and with a thrill of pleasure saw the mark, right where she had hoped.
  • Tone example #2: Shadows gathered in the corners of the curiosity and her scalp prickled, as though in warning, as she picked up the little yellow statue. It felt ominously solid in her fingers as she tilted it to look at the base. The sight of the marking struck her like a blow.

Same object, four different stories. Stop now and do a five minute timed writing with your own description of the object.

Don’t Jar Your Reader
Because of a reader’s inclination to create what’s happening in a story in their head, experiencing it in something like a dream, or at least that state of fierce inattention to anything else in which a spouse, child, or friend can speak repeatedly before being perceived. That’s the delicious immersion that is part of the joy of reading and part of it is making the reader comfortable enough to forget that they are reading.

An author must lull a reader into trusting them, by letting them know that they will deliver that immersion, in part by not ever reminding the reader that they are reading. Anything that reminds a reader of this fact generally should be avoided, unless you’re doing something funky and metafictional.

And the thing that reminds a reader that they are reading more than anything else is the author supplying a detail that the reader has already firmly fixed in their head. This is a moment which for a reader is like having the GPS in your car suddenly go “Recalculating” because you took a wrong turn. It should be avoided at all costs. Paying attention to the collaboration and what expectations you are creating in your reader is important. Get the hang of that and you can even play with and subvert those expectations.

*I make no claim any of this is good writing, simply a good example.

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"(On the writing F&SF workshop) Wanted to crow and say thanks: the first story I wrote after taking your class was my very first sale. Coincidence? nah….thanks so much."

~K. Richardson

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One of the things I stress to students is that you cannot wait for the muse. And, in fact, the more you wait for her, the less likely she is to arrive.

For example. The last few days I’ve been working at getting back into the flow of writing daily. I held myself accountable and post daily word counts here or on Twitter. And lemme tell you, some of those words were difficult to wrestle out of my skull and onto the page. One way I can tell things are going in difficult fits and spurts is that I’ll hop around a lot from story to story.

One of those projects is “Prairiedog Town” (which is definitely getting a different title). I started jotting down mental notes for it while traveling through Kansas, but only had a thousand words or so on it before last week. It was slow writing, partially because I wasn’t sure how I was getting from one point to another in the story. I knew it was a piece about a woman reclaiming her humanity and I had a good idea of what the penultimate scene would look like.

So I kept jotting words down in sporadic clumps of a few hundred at a time, yerking the story along in an awkward and impatient way. It helped when I incorporated a prompt from Sandra M. Odell, a woman finding an abandoned teddy bear by the road. But it still was slow slogging. Yesterday I took a break from it.

And then, this morning, while working on it, things began to fall into place. A secondary character had popped up, and I understood how to bring her back into the story — and why. A piece that was supposed to take three days suddenly shortened into a single night, and with that, the ultimate scene came clear. I went through, pulling the threads into place as close to a thousand words came spilling out and into the story.

It’s not done yet — maybe another thousand words to go, but I’ve got a map of it, and comments where I need to go back and insert things. Here, for example, is what a section of today’s work looks like:

They end up chatting. Talia asks after father. Relates that he’s died. Talia asks if she’s going to the funeral.

No
It’s what you’d say either way, isn’t it.
That’s true
I’ll be there. On the outskirts.

She freezes again. It’s an old code word they used to use, back in the days when they worked together. It’s someplace close but (some distance) to the (direction).

And most importantly at all, things have come together to a point where I’m excited about the story, feel that some clever stuff has been worked in or has had places made for it. It’ll end up being around 4-5 thousand words, and I know I’ll finish it by the end of this month, because it’s designated as the next story to go out in the Patreon campaign.

And if I hadn’t done that picking away at it — scraping those words out of my skull, even though it felt painful and awkward and uninspired — I would have never gotten to that point at all.

Enjoy this writing advice and want more content like it? Check out the classes Cat gives via the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, which offers both on-demand and live online writing classes for fantasy and science fiction writers from Cat and other authors, including Ann Leckie, Seanan McGuire, Fran Wilde and other talents! All classes include three free slots.

Prefer to opt for weekly interaction, advice, opportunities to ask questions, and access to the Chez Rambo Discord community and critique group? Check out Cat’s Patreon. Or sample her writing here.

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