Storytellersunplugged

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The first job of any writer is to make a scene believable. To use the ever popular reasoning that is a must: for any story to work you have to be able to suspend the reader’s disbelief. What do I mean by that? Well, most of you already know, but just to clarify for those who might not: Suspension of disbelief is the act of telling a story smoothly enough that even when the preposterous happens, the reader is drawn along for the ride rather than slapped out of the story. If at any point in the telling of your tale, the reader stops and says or thinks “damn, that just doesn’t make any sense” or “Oh, come on! That’s the dumbest damned thing I’ve ever read,” you have blown it. It’s easier to screw up than a lot of people might think, and all the advice in the world won’t change that. Part of that suspension comes in the form of description, and that, folks, is what I’m here to talk about today.

I could say that description is the most important part of the story, but as far as I’m concerned, I’d be lying. Description is ONE of the most important aspects, true enough, but not the end all be all of the tale.

It’s painfully easy to go overboard on description. I’ve done it a few times, so I know of what I speak. Sometimes it’s a necessary evil. Sometimes you need to have that description there to help with setting the mood, but believe me when I say not nearly as often as a lot of writers do it.

So how do you know when enough is enough? Well, therein lies the problem. It’s one of those things where a lot of what you’re doing depends on your audience. Just as much depends on what you’re trying to accomplish.

Like I said before, description can be a part of the pacing of the story. As an example, when the time comes to build suspense, it’s sometimes beneficial to go a little overboard on the details around the character or characters in the story. Why? Because part of any experience that a person has is the input from their five senses, most of which are heightened in a stressful situation. Here’s the thing: if you’re walking down the street and thinking about the groceries you need to pick up, your physical surroundings become less significant. If, on the other hand, you are in a dark alley and you just heard what sounded like someone being violently murdered, you’re more likely to pay attention to every possible hint that can come your way regarding what caused that scream and whether or not you’re going to live through the next few minutes. Don’t believe me? Well, you can think back to the last time you were threatened by someone who meant to do you bodily harm, or if you’re feeling particularly bold, you can run across seven lanes of high speed traffic on your local interstate during rush hour. Either one should prove me right, but personally I recommend the former.

Oh, what the heck. We’ll try an experiment.

***

Example 1)

Joe studied the mess on his desk, avoiding the need to work. His coffee cup still had a crack along the edge, but none of the dark brown fluids were leaking from the container, so he decided it was safe to keep using it. The coffee itself had a thin slick of colors running over the surface, like oil stains on rainwater. The sheaf of papers to his left was leaning hard to the right, and several of the pages had been stapled together in a crooked manner that let him know Mildred was letting her new temp do most of the work. The computer monitor in front of him showed his reflection in the glass, a lean man with a receding hairline and a bad comb over job on the remaining thatch of black hair that had once been his pride and joy, whose nose was skewed slightly to the left. Beyond the reflection, he could see the serene pasture of green grass and the azure blue skies of the picture that worked as his screensaver. A small dust bunny rested at the very far right edge of his desk, teetering, waiting for the gentles of breezes to knock it away and send it God alone knew where. The fake wood grain on his desk was smeared with a hundred passes of his hand across the surface, as sign that he’d been working too many hours and not having nearly enough fun.

Example 2)

Joe swallowed down the taste of the burger he’d almost choked to death on when he heard the scream. The sound still seemed to echo around the dark alley, bouncing back again and again even as the wind picked up around him and ruffled his thinning hair. The darkness was almost complete now, the sun having ducked behind the closest brownstone as he unwrapped his meal. He looked around at the scattered bags of trash that surrounded him and listened for any new noises. Something slithered through the ruptured innards of a dented garbage can five feet away, but he ignored the distraction and strained to hear anything from the darkness ahead of him. Not far away, but beyond his line of sight, a male voice let out a soft hiss, a whimper, perhaps, or a chuckle. He couldn’t tell which past the sound of his heart thumping in his chest. Something wet and heavy hit the ground not far from where he’d heard the voice a moment before.

***

Honestly, how much do you need to know about the layout of Joe’s desk? I could have just as easily said that his cubicle was a mess and moved on to what was going through his head. Most of us have had the misfortune of sitting in an office and looking at the nonsense that’s accumulated on its surface. There were no special clues as to what Joe was thinking or doing, aside from looking around. The only thing significant about the description is we get a brief hint as to Joe’s appearance.

In the other case, Joe is trying to decipher what, exactly is going on around him in the dark. He’s not worried about his coffee mug’s hold capacity, he’s worried about whether or not he’s about to die. It’s a matter of degrees.

That’s not to say that the only time to give a detailed description is when someone is in immanent danger. There are plenty of other times when it’s necessary too, like when you first meet a character. I once ran across a story where I’d read half of the novel before discovering that the main character was African American. Until that point, the author had managed to list only that she had dark hair and dark eyes and that she had a nice body. By the time the revelation came around, I had already painted my mental picture of what the character looked like. Believe me, I was knocked completely out of the narrative flow and forced to go back to double check if I had missed anything. I hadn’t. I’m not saying I needed twenty or so pages of information on the character, but I would think covering the race of a character can be significant.

While there is no right to wrong in this business when it comes to description, I tend to prefer “painting in broad strokes,” at least for most scenes. For me it’s enough to say that the girl of my protagonist’s dreams has blond hair, blue eyes and fair skin. I can add details later as needed. That her hair is exactly four inches past her shoulders, that her eyes are a cerulean blue when she smiles and a darker blue when she is depressed and that her fair skin has a few small flaws like that mole at the edge of her elbow are all things that are just not necessary. I can say that her face is heart shaped, and that her lips are just as ripe as plums, but I don’t need to put it all down in the first five paragraphs.

Why? Because it’s boring and I don’t want to insult the intelligence of my readers. Most everyone has seen a pretty blond girl or twenty in their lives. A few of us have probably even been obsessed with one or two. There’s no need to get into graphic detail about every aspect of her body and clothing for most readers to get the general idea. Just as importantly, it slows down the story’s progress.

I can almost guarantee that before it’s all said and done, I’ll give out all of the details about the Girl of Mr. Protagonist’s Dreams. It might even come out to a full five paragraphs worth of information, but the odds are very good that I’ll scatter the significant parts through the course of several encounters or moments of contemplation for the protagonist instead of all at once. I want the story to move forward constantly. Sometimes at a leisurely pace and sometimes at hyperactive speeds, but the last thing I want is to make any of my readers lose the forward narrative flow.

What’s that? We haven’t talked about pacing yet? That’s next time. Right now, let’s focus for a few more minutes on description.

What do you need to know to make the setting? Well, let’s try for another experiment. This one is a bit long, but hopefully it makes the point.

***

Example 1) The late night was working towards dawn when he crested the last hill and laid eyes on his goal in the distance. Beldam Woods was a small town, nestled in the geography of upper state New York. Not far from Utica, but not in any way a part of that community. In comparison, Utica was positively urban.

“Norman Rockwell, eat your heart out.”

The sun crested the hills to the east, and cast the first rays of light into the town. He watched as the warming beams of molten gold touched the steeples on the two churches, turning the cross on the Lutheran Church into a golden beacon and defining the wrought iron crucifix on the Protestant house of worship. One of the two had been there when he’d last been in the town, but he was damned if he could remember which. The thought brought a thin smile to his bony face. He was, after all, damned either way.

From where he stood he could see the town square, which had changed only in the shapes of the buildings, most of them replaced with brick and modern supplies, instead of the wooden structures he remembered from his youth. There was a modern school down there, big enough to seat a few hundred children, and not too terribly far from that one he could see the campus of the private academy he had read up on. Watersford Academy for Advanced Children, which from what he’d seen in the brochures, specialized in catering to the obscenely wealthy. Between the two was a long stretch of land that was perfectly groomed and well fenced. Even from outside of the town proper he could see the horses munching contentedly on the lawns. The only livestock raised at most of the farms these days were thoroughbred championship equines. Of course, the region was well known for its fresh vegetables as well; at least according to his brother, Patrick, who had never bothered to leave the area.

His hometown had changed a great deal since he’d been near it last.

There were numerous signs in the area, all advertising specials for Halloween. Apparently there was a Haunted Hayride, sponsored by the Watersford Academy. There was going to be a party in the very center of the town for all of the children on Halloween night, and, of course, strangers were welcome. Anyone who wanted to act now could pull off the interstate, enter the town proper and get a prize winning pumpkin at the “Punkin Patch,” where a gathering of local farmers sold the gourds for bloated prices.

Example 2) Fuller Street was in the worst part of town, and even looking at the houses made him want to be somewhere else. Most of the glass from the windows was long gone, replaced by boards in some cases or covered by plastic tarps that had been scrounged from the junk yard in others. A few of the sightless eyes into the buildings had never been covered at all, and the cold he felt sweeping along his body must surely have been chilling whatever lived in the tenements.

The street was littered with debris. Dead leaves stuck to the gutter and shivered in the light winds, while newspapers danced and skittered sporadically down the broken asphalt and clung tenaciously to the remains of a dozen cars that should have been put out of their misery years ago. The wind came from the north, and blew a promise of frost through the darkened street.

Someone had taken the time to scrawl graffiti over most of the buildings; gang tags and illustrations that ranged from the crude to the nearly divinely artistic ran along the faded brick exteriors of the apartments on his left. A painting of Christ at the crucifixion had been rendered in the past and now rested, sun bleached, under a thick layer of harsh black lines spelling out a word in Spanish. On the right side of the street at least a few of the people living in the area had attempted to clean up the worst of the mess, leaving an odd sense of duality in their wake. The worst of the litter was gone and the trash cans in front of most of the homes were upright and sealed against the gusts that carried scents ranging from fresh pizza and coffee to rancid sewage and decay. Even the sidewalk looked better to the right, where there were less cracks and where the gutter hadn’t been chipped away by a collision somewhere in the past.

He listened for sounds, for anything beyond the low mournful call of the wind, but heard nothing else in the night.

***

In roughly the same amount of space I have described a full town seen from a distance and I have laid out the squalor of one unpleasant stretch of road. Both serve a purpose, but I think the first example in this case is slightly more efficient. There’s nothing wrong with the second example, exactly, but unless I’m going to DO something with that description of the street and the odd duality of its tenants, there’s not much point to it. I could have just said the area was desolate and had an abandoned feel to it. The details on the graffiti don’t hurt the story, but they also don’t add to it by much unless at some later time the crucifixion should hold a clue to something more significant.

The first example gives a few more hints inside the details. First, we learn that the individual viewing the town has been there before. Second, we get the set up of the town of Beldam Woods, and third, we learn what season it is.

There’s a reason I chose the second example, by the way. It pertains to a situation I ran across a few years back. A friend of mine who is not a writer but is most decidedly an avid reader was reading a novel by an author I had read short stories from but never a novel. When I asked my friend what he thought of the author’s first novel, his response was: “I don’t know. After reading ten pages about the trash in the gutters, I gave up. There’s setting up a scene and then there’s just being anal about details.” He tried to read it again, by the way, and made it to page thirty on the second try. He said around page twenty-five the plot actually started to form, but by then he had a headache. He also said the alley’s in depth examination had nothing to do with anything else he read. It was just to set up that the protagonist lived in a dingy part of town.

In this case, a writer who is very good at short stories lost not one but two readers. First, the chap who bought the author’s first novel and second, yours truly. I trust the friend well enough to know we have similar tastes and if he had trouble with this particular writer’s novel, I feel no obligation to break down and buy a copy myself. I’d rather save my limited reading funds for something I’m going to enjoy. Frankly, if the first thirty pages of a novel can do nothing but tell me the main character is living in a dive, something has gone wrong. I have always loved this particular writer’s prose, by the way, but apparently the need to fill enough space to fill a novel required massive amounts of bloated description instead of actually story/

I love good prose. I love a good story. I even love a powerful description in a story. But for me, I think you have to be careful of the devil hiding in the details. Tell me about the forest, but don’t feel obligated to give me a forensic examination of every tree in that forest. Personally, I can decide for myself what each tree looks like.

I’d much rather be told a good story.

James A. Moore