Whenever a writer sits down to write a story, it’s to achieve a subtext of some sort – an allegory of a teenager going through puberty and learning new aspects of him or herself is quite common (typically known as The Hero Quest). Other times, it’s to achieve a what-if in regards to current societal upheavals – Nelson DeMille’s “Wild Fire” is written especially in this light.
New writers attempt to achieve either these tasks, and countless others, but quite often they tend to fall upon the wayside on the way to their intended goal. Usually the writer sits down with an end goal of, for example, ‘changing the world’. From this goal, they then lose track of what they wanted to do. A great novel is like a great essay, with the difference being one article is entirely fiction and the other is made to make sales (har har har!). Quite often a new writer loses focus as I have done up until this point, and will concentrate entirely too much effort on what is, at best, a secondary circumstance.
I’ll tell you a secret for free. That paragraph you just took 4 days to write about the lush green forest where the elves dance and play and the birds all sing and the dwarves mine for gold and there is a big orgasm going on? 95% of the reading public skip it entirely once they realize what you’ve just done to the reader.
The environment. The setting, the weather, every little last detail of an inconsequential room in an inconsequential location. The minute details of someone’s appearance, and they are also inconsequential. Somehow, in what feels like every day, I come across a ‘new great story’ where the very first sentence – let alone paragraph – is a blancmange of euphemisms, tedious verbiage and horrible comparisons of hair to a long flowing river of silken water.
Hooray. A sentence can be created. Congratulations.
Why devote page upon page of describing something when it’s not integral to the plot? If you’re writing a detective story and the silver inlaid brooch with pure black enamel and slight hard-to-see scratches is going to come up over and over again, then feel free to devote a page. A good technique would be to break the description down to a couple sentences throughout the book though, rather than a solid chunk.
But here’s a neat idea – spend time developing your characters instead. This is a story, not an encyclopedia. Come up with some attractive characters and tell me about them. A tool I like seeing utilized is being inside the characters head the whole way through the story, as in Robin Hobb’s Farseer trilogies, but again this is just one option out of the myriad of seemingly forgotten choices to a budding writer.
The desire to write reams of pointless descriptions can be compared to the young adult’s ‘I can, therefore I should’ mentality.
In a future post, I will explore this method further.