Writer Unboxed

This is how my backyard looked Sunday morning.

An ice storm rocked my area. Oh, it’s fun to live in the Northeast in winter. I didn’t realize the storm was happening until the power went out, which really messed up Movie Nite in our house. Luckily, we have a woodstove, and we spent about 10 minutes talking about pioneer days and how peoples’ eyesight must have been damaged from reading by candlelight before we gave up and went to bed.

In the morning we woke to the sounds of tree limbs snapping and snow plows salting the roads. And I went out and took some photos and starting writing long passages of descriptions in my head.

Then I remembered. For the most part, readers of modern fiction don’t care for long passages of description. Sure, the hush of snowfall and glittering branches struck me with nature’s awesome glory, but I bet you’re already bored with the subject. Like Elmore Leonard said in Rules 9 and 10 of his famous 10 Rules of Writing:

9. Don’t go into great detail describing places and things.

Unless you’re Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language or write landscapes in the style of Jim Harrison. But even if you’re good at it, you don’t want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.

10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

A rule that came to mind in 1983. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them. What the writer is doing, he’s writing, perpetrating hooptedoodle, perhaps taking another shot at the weather, or has gone into the character’s head, and the reader either knows what the guy’s thinking or doesn’t care. I’ll bet you don’t skip dialogue.

But wait, my muse is crying. I haven’t yet got to the part about the crunch of ice underfoot, the cold air screaming in my lungs.

I know. You don’t care.

But there is a place for description in the novel, otherwise you’re dropping the reader in a vacuum. They might not want to know about howling winds or windows spidery with frost, but they appreciate a taste of description. I think of description as an amuse bouche before you give them the red meat of the scene–the dialogue or knife fight or love scene.

In SELF-EDITING FOR FICTION WRITERS, authors Renni Browne and Dave King call this proportionality. [Check out our interview with Dave King HERE]. In the first draft, allow yourself room for digressions and textures. Then come back to the scene after some time has passed, and read it as if you were a reader not a writer. What bores you? Jumps out at you? If you have a big ole’ paragraph on how beautiful frozen branches are against a blue sky, chances are you can get that down to one or two sentences.

I broke another of Leonard’s rules. I opened with the weather.

1. Never open a book with weather.

If it’s only to create atmosphere, and not a character’s reaction to the weather, you don’t want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead looking for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways to describe ice and snow than an Eskimo, you can do all the weather reporting you want.

Sorry.

Kathleen Bolton is co-founder of Writer Unboxed. She has written two novels under the pseudonym Cassidy Calloway: Confessions of a First Daughter, and Secrets of a First Daughter--both books in a YA series about the misadventures of the U.S. President's teen-aged daughter, published by HarperCollins.

Kathleen Bolton

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