Young Writers Society

I just re-read Metal Swarm /space opera/ by 'Kevin J Anderson' and 'Interesting Times' by Terry Pratchett. I read these books before, but now, after over eight months of being an aspiring writer and YWS member, I had a different perspective. I noticed that although both guys have radically different styles, plots, characters and indeed genres, that both have something in common - they don't describe ANYTHING. I mean that. They totally do not describe anyone or any place or any weapon, suit, spaceship - nothing. And yet they totally get away with it.
Neither Anderson nor Pratchett describe anyone except if someone is very fat or thin, or very tall or short. Then they say that the person in question is is very fat or thin, or very tall or short. That's it. When someone is dressed expensively they just say he/she's dressed expensively. If their clothes are in tatters, they say the clothes are in tatters. No details whatsoever. None. Rincewind enters an inn. And that's all. Inside are a few people. Enough about that. A spaceship enters orbit. It's big and military. And that is all the description we get.
Now, I've tried to see how they bluff the reader into not noticing the utter lack of descriptions. Pratchett is obvious - it's the humor. A humorous one-liner characterization of a person, place, weapon, situation, city or town makes us laugh and we forget that we were in fact shown nothing. We were just enouraged to 'feel' through humor what goes on and put our own details into the situation.
J Anderson is humorless. He fills everything with endless recounting of who did what, thought what, felt what, but without an atom of actual description of the external world.
Compared to both guys James Patterson is Charles Dickens description-wise,and he's not known for being a description fanatic. He is today's minimalist Spillane incarnation.
And yet both Pratchett and Anderson are accepted as serious representatives of their genres, are respected, and widely read.
Lesson: a lack of description is totally irrelevant to what you write, as long as you have something else up your sleeve to compensate
Anyone agree or disagree?

I actually find minimalism the better way to go, mostly so passages don't get bogged down with details about stuff that's not tremendously important.

However, I can break my own advice if the details reveal something important about what's going on. Like, "finger combed hair." The description provides a bit on their personality, as well. So it's not useless.

It is an interesting lesson, though, for those who feel the need to describe everything that's in the book. You really don't need all that much description.

I agree for the most part. However, there are some out there who are incredible at descriptions. I'd say if you're good at it, go ahead and keep describing. If not, don't try to do it.

For me personally Chandler, Hammet, Len Deighton and Ian Fleming are examples of the perfect balance between tight description and minimalism. Here's a bit from Chandler's The Lady In The Lake. A guy throws a heavy stone into a lake in a fit of anger and this is what happens:

"For a moment the water was a confused boiling, then the ripples widened off into the distance, coming smaller and smaller with a trace of froth at the middle. An ancient rotted plank popped suddenly through the surface, struck out a full foot of its jagged end, and fell back with a flat slap and floated off."

...For me - this is a perfect description. No needless metaphores, no enumerating of various elements of stuff happening, no flowery stuff. The elegenace here is in the functionalism, but the functionalism is so good that it describes the whole scene as a collection of vital, interconnected elements developing in a period of time. The water boils from the impact of the rock, small waves radiate from the point of impact, a plank swims up from the bottom - that's the time-slice Chandler chose through which to illustrate how the rock falls into water. Perfect.

I also love the purple descriptions of Lovecraft, like this bit from The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath for example:

"The ground sloped upward to the foot of Ngranek, thinly covered with scrub oaks and ash trees, and strewn with bits of rock, lava, and ancient cinder. There were the charred embers of many camps, where the lava-gatherers were wont to stop, and several rude altars which they had built either to propitiate the Great Ones or to ward off what they dreamed of in Ngranek's high passes and labyrinthine caves."

...the above pulp noire description was perfect for it's functionalism, this one here is perfect for it's puple quirkiness. It reads like a saga told by an old sayer from another world, close to ours in some respects, but nevertheless different.

Tolkien uses impressionalist brushstrokes without the purple bits. Sometimes he's nausiatingly poetic, but sometimes functionalistically neutral, almost like a high fantasy Hammet:

"The leaves of trees were glistening, and every twig was dripping; the grass was grey with cold. Everything was still, and far-away noises seemed near and clear: fowls chattering in a yard, someone closing a door of a distant house."

...and this also works. It gives a totally adequate sensory life to the described scene making it as real as it can get.

...I tend to feel physical pleasure when I read a good burst of description, this new hedonism appeared in the last months, so I was quite surprised when I realized that some people, like the two with whom this thread starts are Servants of the Descriptionlessness

I like first-person descriptions that say a lot about the describer, as well as the thing being described. For example,
"He was wearing a brown vest" is a very bare bones description, whereas,
"He was wearing one of those vests that were cool when your dad was in diapers" shows both a fashion-unconscious person being described, and a judgemental character doing the describing.

Or the classic Scott Westerfeld opening line:

"The early summer sky was the colour of cat vomit"

Which immediately gives us the season and the character's mood state. And it's not what you expect from a sentence beginning "the early summer sky".

One of my favorite authors, Cormac McCarthy, gives very little description beyond the necessary environmental stuff, at least in certain novels. His most recent one though, The Road, is kind of an exception. Let alone characters themselves, which he barely describes whatsoever. If he does it's only the most sparse descriptions, like maybe one or two per character for the whole novel (if at all). Personally I like this a lot, as it allows the reader to fill in with their own imagination. Nonetheless it depends on the type of story I'm writing. Sometimes I like giving detailed descriptions, whereas other times I prefer to leave it blank. Sometimes I'll do both within the same story, usually leaving the main characters undescribed and giving more detail to the less important side-characters, since they have less "page-time", and thus less of the reader's focus is applied to them.

Francis Michael Buck wrote:One of my favorite authors, Cormac McCarthy, gives very little description beyond the necessary environmental stuff, at least in certain novels. His most recent one though, The Road, is kind of an exception. Let alone characters themselves, which he barely describes whatsoever. If he does it's only the most sparse descriptions, like maybe one or two per character for the whole novel (if at all). Personally I like this a lot, as it allows the reader to fill in with their own imagination. Nonetheless it depends on the type of story I'm writing. Sometimes I like giving detailed descriptions, whereas other times I prefer to leave it blank. Sometimes I'll do both within the same story, usually leaving the main characters undescribed and giving more detail to the less important side-characters, since they have less "page-time", and thus less of the reader's focus is applied to them.

What McCarthy books have you been reading? I've read Blood Meridian, All The Pretty Horses, Cities of the Plain, Suttree, The Road, The Orchardkeeper, and No Country for Old Men. The reason I love McCarthy is for his description. His overwhelming, unique, original and lush images, word choices, adjectives. He is a master of description. In all of his books except for No Country for Old Men, he utilizes this prodigious mastery. If anything, his descriptions are also his fault. In Blood Meridian, his most famous novel, I felt he was overly verbose and descriptive.

Sorry. Just had to defend McCarthy. Now, if you want a minimalist, turn to Hemingway.

-Kylan

To be honest I've only truly read three of McCarthy's books, No Country For Old Men, The Road, and Blood Meridian, so they're the only ones I'm going off of. I read BM several years ago and didn't absorb a lot of it, but I own NCFOM and The Road and have read them both probably four times at least (plus countless random sections). In both of them, he seems to give very little character descriptions whatsoever. NCFOM has almost nothing in that sense. The Road, of course, has a ton of environmental descriptions and such, but even so I'd consider both of them to be skewed to a more minimalistic approach than your average writer. I probably didn't phrase by original post very well. Either way, my main source of inspiration as far as McCarthy goes is NCFOM, so maybe that's a bad indicator of the rest of his work. I've checked out some of his earlier stuff and didn't like it nearly as much as NCFOM, which in my opinion is one of the most perfect stories (both technical writing and plot-wise) I've ever read. BM's style, while extremely good, seemed almost too over-the-top in its prose, almost Biblical. Which doesn't make it bad by any means, just not my preference. To me, NCFOM was sort of a "less is better" type of thing.

I'm going to be very unknowledgeable and tourist-in-NYC like and say that J.K. Rowling's descriptions suck. They are just horrible in my opinion. At times, she spends 3 chapters describing one fight that lasted a half hour then half a page describing 8 months. Psh.

I'll be leaving now.

Interesting.

I like to give enough description so the reader can see in his mind without having to break from the story, and visualize the characters, objects and places. (sometimes the name gives enough description)

In post(post-infinity? lame)-Modernism it's not really clear to do any style that long (contrast to Maupassant and Realism or Poe and Gothic Romanticism)...so one over the other is kind of silly. Minimalism is cool and all, but unless you're on Hemingway's level, writer be warned. Not that I disagree that description isn't always needed, but it's not like an excess or moderation is a bad thing.

I would say that I agree with you. I like it when people put in detail; I think that it gives the story more flare and that it sets the writer apart, depending on how he/she uses their descriptions. When people use hardly any detail I tend to lose interest in the story and end up not finishing it. Like Ernest Hemingway. God, I hated The Old Man and the Sea with a burning passion. I was about ready to burn that book! We were reading him in 8th grade and I had to ask someone how it ended so I could take the test, that was how much I couldn't stand that book. There was no detail at all. I felt like I was going to die of boredom. Authors who use detail, like Melissa de la Cruz, Anna Godbersen, J.K. Rowling, they rule!

I'm gonna go ahead and say that think that minimal description is the way to go. To me, that's really good writing, because as the reader, you're allowed to imagine the characters for yourself. This isn't something Pratchett or Andersong are getting away with. They just know what they're doing. The reason why you don't miss the descriptions of characters/armor/everything is because you can imagine it for yourself. What the characters look like isn't even the point -- and, frankly, I find that when writers stop to describe what color their protagonists' eyes are, it slows down the narrative. And this does tend to be more of an issue in fantasy or just regular genre fiction I think. Which I get: there's a lot of crazy stuff going on, that seems like it needs to be described beyond just "sword" or "spaceship" because this is a special sword or spaceship. Unless there is a very specific reason, though, as to why the sword has to be described that is intrinsic to the plot, there is no reason to describe it too much. Same thing with characters. Maybe tall is all you really have to know.

This is obviously all just my opinion on the matter. There are good writers out there who have a lot of description (Fitzgerald is the only one who comes to mind, honestly), and I am by no means the authority on this matter, but I kinda do feel that a lot of description is like telling not showing. It tends to be a way for writers to just tell you things about their characters without doing anything to develop them or just show these characteristics as the story goes along. Not that all description is bad. It's when you use it, I guess.