Writing Tip #3 Descriptions

When deciding how much description to add to your writing, you may be wondering how much is too much and how much is not nearly enough. Readers will dislike it if you put too much needless description into your narration, but what about when there’s none? How do you find the balance?

Generally speaking, some description is a good thing—even if it’s not necessarily relevant to the story’s plot. You should give your reader some idea where a scene is taking place, otherwise reading a scene without any description at all is going to feel a lot like that scene from Spongebob where SpongeBob and and Squidward are walking around a void of white and a few colorful tiles. If the scene takes place outside in someone’s backyard, tell us. If it’s taking place in a tiny, cramped apartment, tell us! It’s also not a bad thing to describe briefly and sparingly that it was an autumn day and the tree leaves were already brown. These small details don’t necessarily do anything to the plot, but they do allow the reader to imagine the scene in their head as they’re reading. 

You can also use description of scenery to reinforce thematic concerns in your story, so that it’s doing the double duty of giving the reader and image in their mind, and it’s conveying something. Like, you might have a character who is behaving erratically and angrily and driving when they aren’t in the frame of mind to do so safely, and you might have the scene take place during a thunderstorm to reinforce the chaos and general sense of danger of the situation, so therefore you may be describing the slick, muddy roads that curve while your character brazenly takes them at 60 MPH even though the speed sign says 35. Or you could choose to do the opposite and use scene description to reinforce stark contrasts, like if your character has just lost her husband of 30 years, and she’s upset that it’s sunny, 75 degrees outside, with blue skies, green trees, and flowers in full bloom. What I’ve just described is a pretty lovely day, and the reader would understand, then, that your character probably isn’t upset about the lovely day itself, but rather the idea of things continuing to be lovely after she’s experienced such significant pain. 

So yes, give general descriptions of locations to set the scene in the mind of the reader and to convey tone. What you really need to avoid in scenery description is over-describing specific things that are little-to-no significance. 

Over description of anything can come across as amateurish in writing because you run the risk of your work sounding like purple prose. But there are some situations the warrant a more detailed description, say, an old locket that a character just got passed down as an heirloom that will later go missing and be found by another character. The description is important because of Character A finds it and doesn’t know that it ever belonged to Character B who lost it, they aren’t going to pick it up and say, “oh, here’s Character B’s missing locket I didn’t know she had!” No, you the author are simply going to describe the object Character A found, and the description needs to be recognizable enough that your reader will realize you are talking about the same locket that is Character B’s locket. 

You should only apply this attention to detail to items or other elements that are going to come back into play later in a way that they need to be identifiable, but otherwise brief descriptions are sufficient. You really want to avoid detailed descriptions of things that aren’t important at all. 

Let’s say you’re reading a mystery-thriller, and the author spends a whole paragraph describing a rusty red truck with worn tires, and ugly cheetah print seat covers, and a crack in the windshield, and a big long antenna. With that much detail, I as the reader assume that those details are there because this truck is important and will show up later. It doesn’t necessarily have to be because the truck itself is important as long as it comes back up in the plot. Like, if the victim in this thriller is killed in a hit and run. The descriptive detailing of this truck could just be because that truck and it’s driver are going to be a red-herring suspect, and the story later reveals that the real reason they were on the road that night was to smuggle weapons, and they didn’t commit the hit and run. The detailing about the truck then is fine, because it came back into play later and was a prime suspect. But if that truck is simply never mentioned again and isn’t a significant object to an important character, I’m going to wonder why the author wasted their time and mine describing it such detail. 

These types of needless descriptions are the types of things that usually make it into first drafts because the author is still figuring things out and stretching their typewriter fingers out, but that can ultimately be cut from a final draft to save word-space. The description may be beautifully written and elegant to read, but if it’s doing nothing but describing detail for detail’s sake, cut it. Your readers will thank you. 

You also don’t need to repeat descriptions of things you’ve already described every time it’s mentioned in the story. Character B should describe her locket when she first receives it, but its description need not come into play again until Character A finds it, and the repetition of the description is necessary to identify it. But if Character B is describing it’s faded gold color, and scratches from years of wear, and the spot where the curve of the heart-shape is imperfect every time she puts it on, it’s going to get repetitive and boring really fast. If you tell us the first time a character goes in her bedroom that she still has the hot pink wallpaper from her childhood, then you don’t need to tell us the walls are pink every time she goes in her room. The second, third, and fourth time a chapter is set in her room, we as the reader can mentally refer back to knowing it’s pink and continue to imagine it that way. You don’t need to remind us unless something has drastically changed. Like if suddenly she walks in one day and her formerly pink walls are now space gray because her dad surprised and repainted it, then update us! 

Ok, but what about describing what a character looks like?

Obviously readers want to know what the characters look like when imagining them in their minds, so it is important to describe certain things like hair color, skin tone, maybe eye color. Height or build might come into play if your character is really muscular or way shorter than the average person, or if they have any other unique feature like a scar or a tattoo or a big curly perm dyed red like Ronald McDonald. Describing physical features might also be important to indicate racial diversity in your work, or other forms of representation, like if your character uses a brace to walk. Character descriptions are important. 

But howwwww do you do it well?

First of all, avoid scenes of characters standing in front of the mirror and giving length first-person descriptions of all their features. No one does this in real life, and it will never be realistic in a book either. 

Second of all, you don’t necessarily need to work every aspect of a character’s description into one long paragraph, or it might end up sounding like an info-dump. If chapter one reveals that your character has red hair because she gets teased on the playground for being a ginger, but it’s not revealed until chapter six that her eyes are green, when her grandmother mentions how her grandfather had green eyes too, then that’s okay. If that’s how it fits organically into the story without it feeling like you’re shoving an info-dump of a character’s description down your reader’s throat right off the bat, then hats off! you did well! 

You should also consider descriptions of appearance that do more than describe appearance. Like for example, if you tell me your protagonist Stacy has brown hair and brown eyes, I’m going to gain one vital piece of information from that sentence: Stacy has brown hair and brown eyes. But, if you tell me that Stacy was always jealous of her older sister’s naturally blonde hair because it was beautiful like their mom’s, but Stacy got stuck with her father’s dusty brown hair and dark brown eyes, here’s everything I’m going to assume:

1. Stacy is insecure about her appearance because she describes as being “stuck” with it.

2. Stacy is jealous of her older sister, especially her looks.

3. Stacy has a better relationship with her mom than her dad, both because she favors her mother’s looks and desires to look like her instead, but also because in the description, she called mom “mom” but called her dad the more formal “father.” 

4. Stacy’s mom and sister do not have brown eyes, because Stacy categorized brown eyes as part of her “stuck with” look from her dad. 

See how much more characterization and character-arc building I managed to do just by vamping up how I describe Stacy’s appearance. Yeah you know what she looks like, but you also now know a little bit about her personality and her family too.