From masterclass.com:
11 Tips for Descriptive Writing
As any good writer knows, descriptive writing in a short story or novel takes practice. If descriptive passages are too long, they slow a story down. If a writer uses bland words (like describing a character as “nice”) character development will fall flat. Here are 11 writing tips to help you perfect descriptive writing:
- Use your imagination. When you sit down for the first time to flesh out your story, use your imagination. What do you see when you picture your main character? Where do they live? What does their home look like? If you can visualize people and places in your own mind, then it is easier to find the words to make them real to your readers.
- Use dynamic words. To get a scene to jump off the page, create vivid descriptions through dynamic language—choose words that have movement over words that are static. This is especially helpful when you have to build a new world, like in a science fiction novel.
- Engage a reader’s senses. Specific and concrete details are critical to successful storytelling, and the best way to make details concrete is by appealing to the reader’s senses. As the saying goes, “show, don’t tell.” Use sensory detail—sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch—to describe a scene. Use the strongest description sense for the scene. If your character is in a gutter, smell may be more provocative than sight.
- Use point of view to inform descriptive writing. Let characters be the gateway to descriptive writing. Follow your characters around and describe the world through them. Most people take in their surroundings with a traveling gaze, so imagine where their attention will rove. Looking at the world through their eyes in a plausible way will add a subtle effect of believability. In first person or third person pov, describe how the main character views other people and experiences moments. Showing the world through a character’s subjective point of view reveals how they feel about things, which helps character development.
- Write detailed character descriptions. Visualize a character in your own mind. Make them three dimensional by fleshing out both the character’s personality and physical appearance. What is their eye color? Do they have green eyes, brown eyes, or blue eyes? Write down their physical details like hairstyle and hair color—do they have brown hair, blond hair, or dark hair? Describe how they move through the world and hint at what their body language and mannerisms reveal.
- Self-edit for descriptive language. When you review your first draft, make sure there is enough description to paint a picture for readers. Replace weak adjectives with more descriptive synonyms. Replace nondescript character descriptions (“likable,” “nice”) with more interesting traits.
- Use backstory as a descriptive technique. When you’re fleshing out characters, make sure each one has a backstory, then allude to that backstory through specific details. You might describe a woman who is wearing a flannel shirt that belonged to her estranged father. If an old building in San Francisco is rundown, elaborate to show that it’s a survivor of the 1906 earthquake to give it more historical context.
- Do creative writing exercises. To improve your descriptive writing, try simple exercises. For example, try writing one-paragraph descriptions of places or people. Write a description of a room you know well. Take a location every knows—like New York—and describe the city from a fictional character’s point of view. Try picking a word in the English language and brainstorm descriptive alternatives.
- Make descriptive writing feel organic. Descriptive writing can slow a story down. Good description is carefully woven into the action so the story keeps moving. For example, a thriller must keep a page-turning pace to keep readers in suspense, so descriptions should happen as dramatic events unfold rather than stepping out of the scene and stopping the action.
- Let the reader use their imagination. When describing a place or person, be creative and concise and let the reader fill in the visual blanks. Painting pictures in light brushstrokes can be evocative because you’re asking the reader to do the work of imagining.
- See how other writers use descriptive language. Search for good examples of descriptive writing in bestselling books. Study how the writers use language and words that pull the reader into the story. Notice how they describe the physical characteristics and personality traits of their characters and how they incorporate descriptive writing into their story to keep the storyline moving and to paint a picture of their world.
From thewritingcooperative.com:
The novel, short story, poem and other forms in fiction and non-fiction have a very potent component in common. They must paint, through the skilled knowledge of language, clear images in the reader’s mind. Whereas a mediocre film can be brought to vibrant life through the talent and skill of its actors, director, cinematographer and editor — and even elicit emotion through a beautiful soundtrack — writing relies solely on the skill of the writer to captivate the reader, to create for them worlds that never were and characters who’ve never lived.
For the writer, description is an indispensable tool, one that justifies the effort and time it can take to master. Description can control pace and mood and tension; provide the panoramic images that form both the background and foreground for the action; obscure clues, suggest motivations, illuminate emotion and state of mind in both character and reader.
For many writers, the many functions of description are often overlooked or perhaps never learned. Description, other than in parody or the gothically inclined purple prose, should never overwhelm the story or character. It should never be particularly noticeable, calling attention to itself for its own sake, but rather it should provide information invisibly: through character perspective, and within the observations of character. The five pages of itemization of rooms or the characters’ wardrobes can be stricken, and the cherished details of wild, stormy nights in general done away with.
In each and every scene, the reader needs to be oriented to the where and when, why, how and what of the character’s view. In other words, description flows from the point of view chosen for the story — it is what the reader sees through the narrative character, be that a first person point of view, third person close view, third person limited view or omniscient narrator. That point of view can provide a visualization of what is seen — and smelled and heard, tasted and touched — and it can also provide hints as to the mood or mental state of the point of view: happy, sad, angry, suspicious, nervous or terrified.
One of the more useful writing exercises is practising the expression of an emotion through description. In the exercise, the writer chooses a landscape (farm, city street, underwater scientific laboratory) and describes it with an emotional overtone of an observing character, without mentioning the observer or their emotional state. This exercise encourages the writer to choose words for layers of meaning to create mood or tone to any description. A very brief example: instead of a dark sky, to gain a feeling of melancholy, the writer might choose: a somber sky.
So, how can we use description to its fullest advantage, without boring the reader, slowing the action or changing the focus of the scene?
The focus of the scene — every scene — is the primary goal, and every scene in a story must be there for a specific and designed reason. When a character enters a room, or rides up to a castle, or lands on a strange planet, there must be a reason behind it, one that it is pertinent to the story and to the development of the character. The reason gives the character their specific mental and emotional state. That state can then be used to imbue the way the scene is described. Likewise, the reason and emotional state of mind affects pace and tone of the scene. Slower, more leisurely observation slows pace and calms tone. Quick, sharp noting of details speeds pace and suggests impatience or anger or nervousness.
Using Description for Mood and Emotion and Characterisation
Level of observation can reveal character as well as providing visual and plot detail. The detective picking up clues from a quick glance around the suspect’s apartment is a well-known device in mystery and crime novels. A character trained in observation will notice more than one untrained, or a character in an emotional state might not pay attention to detail but glean a broad impression through color and shape.
Descriptive passages have been vilified for stopping pace, killing tension and boring the pants off the reader, and for authorial intrusion. There is no argument that an overload of non-relevant description and a lack of connection to character can certainly do that. When writing description, the writer must discipline themselves to keep within the character’s perspective and to break up the character’s observations with impressions, reactions, opinions of what they are seeing, interaction with other characters or their own action. Think about being in the character’s shoes — what your senses take in and how that affects you, how new information changes preconceived ideas and so on.
As an example of layering a simple piece of description:
Trent walked in the room, ignoring the sickly-sweet odor of decomposition that wafted out. Drab furnishings and gloomy light showed little detail. A bed, some chests and a small closet were old and worn, muted by a coating of dust.
On the bureau against the wall, a battered suitcase and a photo frame, broken and patched with tape, were the only personal effects.
“This all the stuff he came with?” Trent raised his voice, glancing back at the landlady.
She held the bottom of her apron over her face. “All I saw.”
This is a simple description of a room the character enters. It contains little sensory information and only the bare bones of a visualization for the reader. When we add thought and characterization:
Mrs Carmichael unlocked the door and pushed it open. Trent came to a halt at the threshold as a smell of decomposition was carried on the wash of hot air exiting the room. He heard Mrs Carmichael’s wheezing gag but ignored it. Typical of the hotels and motels in the area, the room held a double bed, a couple of bedside tables, a bureau opposite the window and a narrow closet. The carpet was some indeterminable neutral color, the pile worn down in places. Thin light entered reluctantly through the grimy window.
A battered suitcase sat atop the bureau. Next to it, a photo frame, broken and patched with tape, showed a faded picture of a man and child. It wasn’t much to show for a life lived.
“The suitcase and picture frame the only stuff he left here?”
Mrs Carmichael’s muddy-brown eyes stared unblinking above the apron held over her nose and mouth. “All I saw,” she said, the words muffled by the cloth, her tone clear and sour.
The above adds more sensory detail and some of the thoughts of the character, along with greater detail of his observations. The image is sharper, giving the reader a much closer look at the room and a greater sense of both characters. When we add more sensory information and character reactions:
Mrs Carmichael leaned over, her weighty bosom pushing against the worn apron as she unlocked the door. With a grunt, she straightened and pushed, the door swinging open slowly. A rush of warm air exited, carrying a sickly-sweet odor, ripe and gassy. Trent heard the landlady’s wheezing gag and ignored both noise and smell, stepping past and glancing around the nondescript interior. A sagging double bed, flanked by mismatched nightstands, a scarred and off-kilter bureau and a small closet comprised the room’s furnishings. Dust and age had rendered them ugly and forgettable.
Through the grimy window, light entered reluctantly, as if ashamed to reveal the sordid details of Rankin’s pathetic life. It gleamed on the broken and tape-together glass of a photo frame on the bureau, hiding the picture beneath. Trent took a step into the room and the angle of light changed, revealing the faded photo to be a man and a child.
“Did Rankin have anything else with him?”
Standing in the hall, the bottom of her apron scrunched over her nose and mouth, Mrs Carmichael shook her head. “Not that I saw.”
There is a great deal of information description can provide about characters through implication of observation. It can also provide a mood — an emotional overtone — to the scene, through the perspective of the character observing. In practical use, the level of description is determined by the importance of the scene and the information that needs to be given to the reader within the scene. That includes the flow from the previous scene and to the following scene, pace, rising or falling tension, insight into character.
In the same way that location can be described within action, so too are character descriptions more invisibly passed to the reader when given in small doses through action, rather than reading like an arrest report.
It’s pertinent to note here, that no matter how detailed a description a writer gives the reader of any character, that description will be transformed in the reader’s mind based on their personal associations with the words used. Five readers will see a woman with long, auburn hair, fair, freckled skin and large blue eyes quite differently. Description of characters is best left to a strong impression in terms of appearance, and reinforced by the way the perspective character observes their personalities, to make them unique and memorable to each reader.
Using Description for Flow, Pace and Tension
Flow, pace and tension are always affected by the levels and mood of the description. Depth and detail must be balanced in every scene, according to the purposes of the scene. Where high action — a fight, a chase, even a heated argument between characters — is required, the scene should be set clearly before the action commences, so the focus can remain on the characters’ actions during the scene.
This is often a problem in the writing and revision of the first draft, where details occur to the writer on the fly and are frequently not removed to a more appropriate location on the first editing pass. Teaching oneself to read for pace enables needed but inappropriately placed detail to be seen and moved to the right place.
Controlling pace through description requires more than abstention at critical moments. Sentence length and construction, within action and within the descriptions of what is occurring, also control flow and pace through rhythm. Long sentences with a slow rhythm might be used to slow pace down, for instance. Short fragments and truncated impressionistic sentences can be used to speed it up. In action specifically, a long sentence, in a fast rhythm, can emulate the flow of the action. Fight scenes are conveyed more powerfully and more accurately using rhythm in description of what is happening.
Whether the style is lush or spare, description must serve the purpose of giving the reader clarity, allowing them to absorb the backgrounds and see the scenes in their minds so they can focus on what is happening. Too little description results in confusion for a reader, where they must go back and re-read to try to picture how the scene is playing out. Too much description, giving information that is not relevant to the scene, characters or story, can slow pace and kill tension.
Within one’s own style, finding the right amount of description for each scene and moment is a matter of constant practice and thought, with an awareness of the power of this tool in storytelling, the way it can perform far more than one purpose and enhance the reader’s pleasure in reading.
https://writingcooperative.com/the-art-of-description-in-storytelling-7d98e51c552f
From writerstreasure.com:
Writing Tip: Use Vivid Description
What is good writing?
Even though the correct answer is that whether a piece of writing is good or not rests entirely with the reader, many people think that good writing is effective writing. And it’s true.
Good writing follows a flow. Good writing is focused. Good writing is written for a purpose. Good writing is grammatically correct and readable. And…
Good writing uses vivid description.
And I hear you saying: “what is vivid description anyway?”… So here we are!
Vivid Description – What it is
Vivid description is writing which makes you feel as if you are standing there, right there where the author has just described something. Vivid description appeals to the senses — eyes, nose, ears, skin, etc. You use vivid description when you describe something, whatever it may be. And… yeah, you knew it, here’s a note (seems I can’t do without one):
Note: – Vivid description is undesirable in some cases. Too much of a good thing is usually a bad thing (once again!).
How to use vivid description
If you want to use vivid description, then you want to play with all the senses. Don’t just say the wind is fast. Compare it with something that the readers are familiar with. As an example, compare these two sentences:
The wind was very fast.
The wind was as fast as a train.
Which example is better? For most, it’s no. 2.
Rather than leaving the details to the reader’s imagination, why not list them out in your writing? It is incredibly annoying to imagine something based on what has been written only to discover that our image is wrong. (Read this post to see why novels and films differ when writing character description for it). In contrast, if we had the proper details, wouldn’t we imagine better? Wouldn’t we have a clearer image of what the author is saying?
Yes, we would. That’s when vivid description comes in.
Description is necessary but boring, and so you have vivid description. Concrete details. Everything the reader would want to know, and nothing more. You explain it, they understand it, and your writing is okay.
But what if you want your writing to be more than just ‘okay’?
Then you have to write for the senses. Hit your writing with some scent for the nose and make the reader feel as if he’s there with you sniffing. Play with noise. Play with feelings and sensations. Make the writing wash over the reader, as if it’s not there at all, as if he/she is seeing the event or whatever you are describing.
When the reader has that feeling, then you know that your piece was a success. Then you know your work has paid off. Then you know you’re ready to see results, and all from applying a very simple writing tip: just use vivid description.
Concrete Details and Active Voice
When you are using vivid description, it’s better to use the active voice, and for a good reason. The thing is, when you use the passive voice, as for example: “The door was opened by the man” rather than “The man opened the door” your writing loses a bit of its punch. It loses the “vivid” part of vivid description, and along with filler words, can completely weaken your writing. My advice: stay clear of it!
Note: – This applies almost everywhere, but not in exceptions. Is your writing project a scholarly or academic one? Law? Advertising? Then this advice does not apply to you; passive voice and filler words are actually recommended. But not all the time. 🙂
When you use active voice on the other hand, your writing becomes concise and more readable. You reach closer to the goal of having the reader feel that he’s there with you when you describe something. Concrete details means the complete opposite of becoming a fancy writer: more punch, more strength, more vigour. Better results.
Brilliant Writing = Brilliant Description
Brilliant writing is an art form. Only few writers pen down something which may be called brilliant, and they make it look easy. For the rest of us… but the art is learnable. As usual, the main thing you should do is: (drumroll) practise!
When your writing is brilliant, your description automatically becomes brilliant. You don’t need to worry because of it; you need to worry because of your writing. Improve how you write and you’ll improve your description.
As with narrative and dialogue, try not to use too much description. It bores us. It bores the heck out of us, and even if you’ve got vivid description, it won’t help if you keep at it. Mix it up — I guarantee you will see positive results! Try it today. Experiment with various techniques. You may want to use some quotes, lists, charts or anything else to break up the description. All are recommended, so you can use any of them which you like.
http://www.writerstreasure.com/writing-tip-use-vivid-description/
KC Storytellers 