Frequently in my writing I've run into the question of how much description I need. I've seen this question before on the message boards, but I thought I'd discuss it a little since it's currently relevant to a couple of the stories I'm writing. [True even of the story I'm currently working on! For "The Liars," I'm actually finding myself going back and adding a few things.]
My general rule for description (of people or places) is that you need to stick with the rule of relevance: if it's relevant, describe. If it isn't, don't. It sounds simple, but evaluating the degree of relevance in any location is where the tricky part starts. There are three big kinds of criteria I generally use to assess this: point of view criteria, plot criteria, and story criteria.
Point of view criteria are my first concern. I consider the mental state of my protagonist and decide whether it allows them any contemplative time to look at themselves, others, or their surroundings. First impressions are huge deal for me in this context. What, I ask myself, does this person notice when they see X for the first time? If they are in a place where they can be held spellbound and simply observe, they'll probably see a lot. If they're in a fight or in a big hurry, they probably won't notice nearly as much, and I'll be looking for some key characteristics of a person or location that will help it be recognizable in the reader's mind if it reappears. I also look out for opportunities for a character to get things wrong on first impression, and pick up the superficial aspects of something in a way that will allow for a change in that person's opinion later when they get a closer look. I also keep in mind my general parameters for the character's mental state to see how to approach the description - as in my last post, when I talked about using negatively judgmental words in initial descriptions for the character Nekantor.
Plot criteria I've already mentioned a little above when I talk about fighting or being in a hurry. Depending on what's going on, you may not have time to do much describing - and if you have your character slow down in the middle of a battle to the death to notice the clothes that his opponent is wearing, it will seem ridiculous.
I find both point of view criteria and plot criteria easy to keep track of in the moment of writing. Harder for me is keeping track of the third type of criteria: story criteria.
Story criteria are things like, "we're early on in the story and if we don't have some description here, people will feel disoriented." Story criteria are tricky because they can actually work directly against one's instincts in the point of view and plot areas. In some cases, story criteria will give you a good reason to change your plot, to put your character intentionally in a position where some observation is possible.
We're all familiar with stories that place their protagonists in a high vantage point or in front of a mirror in order to allow for description of the setting or the character themselves. Be careful with this. If it takes you away from your main conflict, it may not be a good idea. Push yourself to create opportunities for description that have more subtlety, and make sure not to ignore the effect that vantage or mirror scenes have on your character - vantage scenes tend to make that person seem more contemplative in general, while mirror scenes can make them seem vain. The story need for description isn't enough to justify creating those scenes in and of itself; you need to look to bolster their relevance in other ways.
In "At Cross Purposes," (Analog Jan/Feb 2011) I added an extra paragraph of description when my protagonist first meets the aliens. Why? Because first readers thought I made the aliens too much like Earth otters. It was a good point. My stories are complex, and I'm always trying to keep lots of balls in the air, so I missed that one on first draft. Fortunately, my main character has a penchant for wry observation, so I got to play with first/second impression in two paragraphs that immediately followed one another. I had her think, "Otters!" and then go, "But wait a minute..." and describe a bit. There was room in the plot for it, and it was appropriate to her character. And now I've fixed the problem of the aliens being alien in physiology, which is of course terribly important!
Another example comes from the novel I'm working on, and involves a question of orientation in the world (another story criterion). I got to a certain point and realized that I hadn't established that servants to the nobility can be either male or female - and males can work for females, and vice versa. With the way I approach the story, I don't have the option of just telling the reader this. So I went back over the material I had and looked at the first instances of seeing servants. In the first chapter, my main character sees two different girls, each of whom has a servant/bodyguard. One of the servants becomes a larger character later, and he is male, but the other one was unspecified. Great, I thought - I can make her female. But it was a bit trickier than that, because if I had my protagonist notice that the servant was female, that might make it seem like having a female servant was somehow unusual - it would make that fact stick out in the narrative if I approached it directly like that. So I decided to use description, and show the hair or clothes of the servant in a female style. But I still had to make sure that was as relevant as possible. So I finally decided to bring in two other story criteria to help me: I needed to show that the servant caste is distinguished by tattoos on their foreheads, and also that my protagonist and his friends are afraid of these bodyguards. The final result was this sentence:
The servant's hair was pulled back in a bun so the curving caste tattoo on her forehead showed clear as a warning.
And it's the warning aspect that gets carried forward into the boys' next actions and responses, allowing both the servant's gender and her tattoo to be backgrounded.
The last piece, one I had more trouble with, was a description of setting. The setting of my novel is a very unusual one that doesn't fit with people's usual expectations, so I have to make sure to defeat people's usual expectations as soon as possible. Fortunately, there is an outside scene in Chapter 1 which I can use to establish some basic parameters (such as the fact that the entire city is underground). But in Chapter 1, it's nighttime, and the scene is set in the gardens of the Eminence's Residence, which is a pretty unusual place in that it has dirt and plants. So when I get to Chapter 2 and my second protagonist is running between buildings, I've got a quandary.
I don't want people to think that dirt and plants are normal and that everyone will encounter them if they go outside (because that's true only in the Eminence's gardens). On the other hand, running between buildings isn't a place where anything important happens, and the courtyard of the Service Academy isn't a location that will become critical later. My relevance support structures are few. So for now, I'm going to keep the description relatively short:
...headed out into the courtyard that separated the dormitories from the main Academy building - a single sheet of limestone worn smooth by centuries of running feet.
At this point I'm drafting, so who knows? I may come back to this location later and decide I need to change it because it needs more. But I will be careful, because at the moment I don't have enough relevance support to add much more than this, and if I need to add description later, I'll be trying hard to add relevance support too.
I'm going to keep thinking about it.
Showing posts with label description. Show all posts
Showing posts with label description. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
Sunday, March 27, 2011
Never "just description": making description subjective
Description is never just description.
It took me quite a long while to figure that out. I suppose when one first starts writing, one begins by exercising one's access to words and images, and thinking of the most beautiful, or the most visceral, or the most fill-in-the blank way to describe what one imagines. When you're using your own voice as an omniscient storytelling narrator, that can work just fine. However, once I started writing in close points of view, I started to realize that every time I went into a "description," I'd lose the sense of closeness. And that was a problem I had to fix.
The fact is that description is always subjective in some way. It is literally impossible to capture every detail about something in the real world. Every time we notice and name an object, that is a subjective choice. Every time we put an adjective on something, that is also a subjective choice. Subjectively, we decide what is noticeable and what is too normal to draw anyone's attention to.
If you keep this in mind, then it becomes possible to discover just how subjective your descriptions can be. Particularly if you work with close point of view, the identity of your character is going to change the way that things are described. Every word you choose is an opportunity to show something about your character.
To make this more concrete, let's play with it a little. I have a room in my work-in-progress, and I just had my main character walk into it. That means I had to describe it. But before I show you how I described it for him, I'll describe it in a few different ways (all third person, just for the sake of consistency).
As myself:
The Hall of the Eminence is a long, rectangular room with stone walls, columns and ceiling arches in the style of a European cathedral. The arches are decorated with mosaic tiles of variegated blue with occasional tiles in gold. Crystal chandeliers hang from the ceiling. The floor is covered in a white silk carpet patterned with the green swirling insignia of the Grobal caste. There are embroidered hangings on the walls, and there is a wooden dais at the end where sits the carved wooden throne of the Eminence.
This description is very informational and makes reference to the real world. It shows no positioning words to indicate any physical point of view. I might as well be hovering above it, or nowhere near it at all. I'm certainly not interacting with it in any way. It reads like a blueprint - good for my personal notes or outline, but useless for the story.
As a member of the merchant caste walking in alone, having never seen the place before:
The room made him want to shrink and retreat. Its arches stretched probably two stories high, and with every step of these ordinary shoes, he risked defiling a symbol of nobility. The chandeliers above and the embroidered hangings on the walls all around would have fetched a pretty price at the Exchange, but nothing compared to the wood of the stage at the far end. Not to mention the throne itself - a single piece of wood so large it would bring more than the worth of his entire family.
This description has a lot more to it. There's an emotional reaction to the sight of the room, and the person assesses its size ("probably two stories"). There's positional information ("the far end"). He draws a contrast between ordinary and noble. His actions have social consequences (defiling). He also shows his own idiosyncratic knowledge base and his personal priorities as he assesses the worth of various objects in the room.
As a fugitive:
She whipped around a corner and burst through the first door she found. Damn - just her luck she'd find the one room in this place where there was nowhere to hide. The place was bright and open, and even the wall-hangings were too flat, too high off the floor to give any cover. Maybe that stage with the big throne? She sprinted toward it, but it was worse - wooden boards that thudded under her feet, sure to announce her presence to any pursuers. With so many doors all around, they could come from anywhere!
Unlike the last person, this person has an urgent purpose in the room. She doesn't care about the richness of the room, but swears about finding a place so large and open. I can let her assess possible hiding spots, and thereby get in a little about the room, but really she doesn't care much about what's in it. She judges what she encounters, and pays no attention to the value of anything except as it serves her goal.
As my protagonist:
Tagret straightened up fast. The Hall of the Eminence was packed with potential enemies. To be on guard, he needed his eyes open. And to be the man Mother wanted everyone to see, he had to stand gracefully, making the high mosaic arches of the ceiling his portrait-frames, and the crystal chandeliers his spotlights. Father's hand stayed on his arm as the rest of their party came in. From the wall-hangings all the way to the dais with the wooden throne, the crowd glittered in ostentatious clothing, muted somewhat by the grieving yellow of mourning scarves. More and more eyes watched him as people entered through the doors around the Hall, clustering by Family. From this vantage point he couldn't see anyone he could clearly identify as either Sixth Family, or Ninth. Eleventh seemed like it might be in the far corner.
Tagret cares far more about people and the interaction he's entering than he does about the place, which is very familiar to him. Therefore, all the information about the room itself is backgrounded to his other concerns. In this scene, the conflict all comes from the interaction, so there's no reason for him to give any direct attention to the physical location at all. However, it's important for readers to know what the place looks like, so I let Tagret use the room's features incidentally to serve his own focus. He's also taller than most people in the room, so he has a pretty good view across the crowd, which affects how he describes it.
I hope these examples give you a sense of how widely descriptions of the same thing can differ from one another. In your own writing, as you approach a description of a place, an object, or a situation, here are some things to think about:
It took me quite a long while to figure that out. I suppose when one first starts writing, one begins by exercising one's access to words and images, and thinking of the most beautiful, or the most visceral, or the most fill-in-the blank way to describe what one imagines. When you're using your own voice as an omniscient storytelling narrator, that can work just fine. However, once I started writing in close points of view, I started to realize that every time I went into a "description," I'd lose the sense of closeness. And that was a problem I had to fix.
The fact is that description is always subjective in some way. It is literally impossible to capture every detail about something in the real world. Every time we notice and name an object, that is a subjective choice. Every time we put an adjective on something, that is also a subjective choice. Subjectively, we decide what is noticeable and what is too normal to draw anyone's attention to.
If you keep this in mind, then it becomes possible to discover just how subjective your descriptions can be. Particularly if you work with close point of view, the identity of your character is going to change the way that things are described. Every word you choose is an opportunity to show something about your character.
To make this more concrete, let's play with it a little. I have a room in my work-in-progress, and I just had my main character walk into it. That means I had to describe it. But before I show you how I described it for him, I'll describe it in a few different ways (all third person, just for the sake of consistency).
As myself:
The Hall of the Eminence is a long, rectangular room with stone walls, columns and ceiling arches in the style of a European cathedral. The arches are decorated with mosaic tiles of variegated blue with occasional tiles in gold. Crystal chandeliers hang from the ceiling. The floor is covered in a white silk carpet patterned with the green swirling insignia of the Grobal caste. There are embroidered hangings on the walls, and there is a wooden dais at the end where sits the carved wooden throne of the Eminence.
This description is very informational and makes reference to the real world. It shows no positioning words to indicate any physical point of view. I might as well be hovering above it, or nowhere near it at all. I'm certainly not interacting with it in any way. It reads like a blueprint - good for my personal notes or outline, but useless for the story.
As a member of the merchant caste walking in alone, having never seen the place before:
The room made him want to shrink and retreat. Its arches stretched probably two stories high, and with every step of these ordinary shoes, he risked defiling a symbol of nobility. The chandeliers above and the embroidered hangings on the walls all around would have fetched a pretty price at the Exchange, but nothing compared to the wood of the stage at the far end. Not to mention the throne itself - a single piece of wood so large it would bring more than the worth of his entire family.
This description has a lot more to it. There's an emotional reaction to the sight of the room, and the person assesses its size ("probably two stories"). There's positional information ("the far end"). He draws a contrast between ordinary and noble. His actions have social consequences (defiling). He also shows his own idiosyncratic knowledge base and his personal priorities as he assesses the worth of various objects in the room.
As a fugitive:
She whipped around a corner and burst through the first door she found. Damn - just her luck she'd find the one room in this place where there was nowhere to hide. The place was bright and open, and even the wall-hangings were too flat, too high off the floor to give any cover. Maybe that stage with the big throne? She sprinted toward it, but it was worse - wooden boards that thudded under her feet, sure to announce her presence to any pursuers. With so many doors all around, they could come from anywhere!
Unlike the last person, this person has an urgent purpose in the room. She doesn't care about the richness of the room, but swears about finding a place so large and open. I can let her assess possible hiding spots, and thereby get in a little about the room, but really she doesn't care much about what's in it. She judges what she encounters, and pays no attention to the value of anything except as it serves her goal.
As my protagonist:
Tagret straightened up fast. The Hall of the Eminence was packed with potential enemies. To be on guard, he needed his eyes open. And to be the man Mother wanted everyone to see, he had to stand gracefully, making the high mosaic arches of the ceiling his portrait-frames, and the crystal chandeliers his spotlights. Father's hand stayed on his arm as the rest of their party came in. From the wall-hangings all the way to the dais with the wooden throne, the crowd glittered in ostentatious clothing, muted somewhat by the grieving yellow of mourning scarves. More and more eyes watched him as people entered through the doors around the Hall, clustering by Family. From this vantage point he couldn't see anyone he could clearly identify as either Sixth Family, or Ninth. Eleventh seemed like it might be in the far corner.
Tagret cares far more about people and the interaction he's entering than he does about the place, which is very familiar to him. Therefore, all the information about the room itself is backgrounded to his other concerns. In this scene, the conflict all comes from the interaction, so there's no reason for him to give any direct attention to the physical location at all. However, it's important for readers to know what the place looks like, so I let Tagret use the room's features incidentally to serve his own focus. He's also taller than most people in the room, so he has a pretty good view across the crowd, which affects how he describes it.
I hope these examples give you a sense of how widely descriptions of the same thing can differ from one another. In your own writing, as you approach a description of a place, an object, or a situation, here are some things to think about:
- Does this place/object/situation have a special social significance to my character?
- Is it unexpected, abnormal, or otherwise unusual (will appear in description)? Or is it normal (less likely to appear; more likely to be backgrounded)?
- What is the current mood of my character?
- What is my character's goal and primary focus as he/she encounters this place/object/situation?
- Does the physical position and/or size of my character affect how he/she would describe it?
Monday, September 13, 2010
How do details make a fictional world "real"?
It is often said that details are what make a fictional world feel real. I heartily agree - but it's not just any type of detail, nor is it every type of detail. Details are especially easy to get lost in. How do you get both breadth and depth in your world? How do you pick the details that really give it flavor? How do you avoid drowning a reader in details and losing track of a story?
Let me take this a bit at a time, because details should typically be approached a bit at a time, in layers (it should soon become evident exactly why).
I'll start with worldbuilding. Often, when building a world, you want to know as much as you can - about the setting, ecology, architecture, social structure, manners - really everything you can possibly think of. So start with the basic principles upon which the story premise will rest. Then from there, try to work those basic principles down onto the smaller, more intimate scale. Work from institutions down to family structure, to manners, to individual definitions of identity and personal crisis.
That's just the start, however. The details required for worldbuilding are more general and more nebulous by definition; they are restricted more to the level of general principle. It's hard to push down as deep as you need to when you're working with worldbuilding detail alone.
To go further, you need to start writing the story.
The story will help you understand which details you need, because it gives you intimacy in the form of characters, their homes and relationships. The identity of a point of view character will have a huge influence on what he or she notices - as a thief will notice the placement of exits and the worth of valuables, while a snobby fashion-conscious lady will notice the details of clothing and of objects in a room.
Details also contribute to the emotional impact of a scene. If the character feels frightened, you can certainly say so - but you can also include details like sharp edges or the shape of shadows, details that deliberately contribute to the emotional mood of the scene even if they aren't part of the character's conscious knowledge.
Furthermore, details can work for you in establishing a theme for your story. Aligning details so they are described in terms that fit the worldview that underlies your project is the way I often like to think about it. I like to line up objects my Varin characters notice, and give them similes that directly relate to the fact that they live underground (because I can't draw attention to it otherwise, since they consider it so normal). Another technique is to place a certain detail, say the scent of oranges - in spots where a certain emotional mood is being achieved, and thereby link those spots together even if they aren't obviously linked in other ways.
There's a special value in details that go unnoticed. Very often the details of manners and speech will be partly subconscious, so that readers won't track exactly what it is that was said, but they'll get a "feeling" about it. I recently wrote a pair of lines as follows:
Character 1: "The music - I don't know how you do it," he stammered. "Is it the blessing of Heile on the Kartunnen[caste]? What's your secret?"
Character 2: "I - well in fact, sir, I don't know why I can do it."
I don't know if you can tell, but perhaps you can, that Character 1 is of higher social status but feeling quite awkward about asking questions. Character 2 is of lower social status, but the fact that he doesn't precisely echo the phrasing "how you do it" is a hint that something else is going on (to be divulged later).
I personally feel that it's worth being very attentive to social cues in dialogue! This will not surprise those of you who know me.
Finally, there's great value in the occasional unexpected detail. When we think "room" it's easy to think "door" and "furniture," but more fun if you throw in "cast bronze door" or "brass furniture." If you establish "market," many people's minds will leap instantly to the aisles of their nearest Safeway, or to a medieval market with booths, carts and the occasional horse - but not necessarily to the overpowering smell of cheese, or to camels and baskets of dates. Have fun; confound the easy expectations and your world will start to pop.
As you go through life, keep your eye out for places where details surprise you. Those can provide you with good opportunities to surprise people in your story. It's probably not surprising to have a person, when moving from one country to another, notice a change in the looks of the people, or the type of houses, or the food. But look for the unexpected.
I noticed something in France while I was there - it hit me all of a sudden, though the details of it had been collecting in my head for some time. It was about strawberries, when you buy them in a box (as I have done) in different countries. A box of strawberries in France isn't quite like a box of strawberries in Japan, or in the US. It's strange, but true, even when the plastic boxes are the same shape. A box of French strawberries will typically be full of relatively small fruit of varying sizes, all of which are very sweet. A box of Japanese strawberries will contain all strawberries of precisely the same size, and usually the same level of sweetness as well. Strawberries in an American box will vary in size, with at least two or three being very large and shiny red, but not necessarily sweet. This is one of the oddest patterns I have ever noticed, I admit, and I'm not sure if I'll ever be able to use it in a story as such. However, I could easily imagine myself putting a similar thought into the head of a traveler, such as, "I miss the fruit of my homeland; it was smaller, but always sweet."
Details like this don't need to be piled on a reader. The most critical factor to consider when writing, as opposed to worldbuilding (where profusion can be good), is the relevance of any particular detail to the story. If you pick your details carefully, keeping them well-suited to the character, to the mood and to the story's overall purpose, you don't need many for a large impact, and your world will feel much more "real."
Let me take this a bit at a time, because details should typically be approached a bit at a time, in layers (it should soon become evident exactly why).
I'll start with worldbuilding. Often, when building a world, you want to know as much as you can - about the setting, ecology, architecture, social structure, manners - really everything you can possibly think of. So start with the basic principles upon which the story premise will rest. Then from there, try to work those basic principles down onto the smaller, more intimate scale. Work from institutions down to family structure, to manners, to individual definitions of identity and personal crisis.
That's just the start, however. The details required for worldbuilding are more general and more nebulous by definition; they are restricted more to the level of general principle. It's hard to push down as deep as you need to when you're working with worldbuilding detail alone.
To go further, you need to start writing the story.
The story will help you understand which details you need, because it gives you intimacy in the form of characters, their homes and relationships. The identity of a point of view character will have a huge influence on what he or she notices - as a thief will notice the placement of exits and the worth of valuables, while a snobby fashion-conscious lady will notice the details of clothing and of objects in a room.
Details also contribute to the emotional impact of a scene. If the character feels frightened, you can certainly say so - but you can also include details like sharp edges or the shape of shadows, details that deliberately contribute to the emotional mood of the scene even if they aren't part of the character's conscious knowledge.
Furthermore, details can work for you in establishing a theme for your story. Aligning details so they are described in terms that fit the worldview that underlies your project is the way I often like to think about it. I like to line up objects my Varin characters notice, and give them similes that directly relate to the fact that they live underground (because I can't draw attention to it otherwise, since they consider it so normal). Another technique is to place a certain detail, say the scent of oranges - in spots where a certain emotional mood is being achieved, and thereby link those spots together even if they aren't obviously linked in other ways.
There's a special value in details that go unnoticed. Very often the details of manners and speech will be partly subconscious, so that readers won't track exactly what it is that was said, but they'll get a "feeling" about it. I recently wrote a pair of lines as follows:
Character 1: "The music - I don't know how you do it," he stammered. "Is it the blessing of Heile on the Kartunnen[caste]? What's your secret?"
Character 2: "I - well in fact, sir, I don't know why I can do it."
I don't know if you can tell, but perhaps you can, that Character 1 is of higher social status but feeling quite awkward about asking questions. Character 2 is of lower social status, but the fact that he doesn't precisely echo the phrasing "how you do it" is a hint that something else is going on (to be divulged later).
I personally feel that it's worth being very attentive to social cues in dialogue! This will not surprise those of you who know me.
Finally, there's great value in the occasional unexpected detail. When we think "room" it's easy to think "door" and "furniture," but more fun if you throw in "cast bronze door" or "brass furniture." If you establish "market," many people's minds will leap instantly to the aisles of their nearest Safeway, or to a medieval market with booths, carts and the occasional horse - but not necessarily to the overpowering smell of cheese, or to camels and baskets of dates. Have fun; confound the easy expectations and your world will start to pop.
As you go through life, keep your eye out for places where details surprise you. Those can provide you with good opportunities to surprise people in your story. It's probably not surprising to have a person, when moving from one country to another, notice a change in the looks of the people, or the type of houses, or the food. But look for the unexpected.
I noticed something in France while I was there - it hit me all of a sudden, though the details of it had been collecting in my head for some time. It was about strawberries, when you buy them in a box (as I have done) in different countries. A box of strawberries in France isn't quite like a box of strawberries in Japan, or in the US. It's strange, but true, even when the plastic boxes are the same shape. A box of French strawberries will typically be full of relatively small fruit of varying sizes, all of which are very sweet. A box of Japanese strawberries will contain all strawberries of precisely the same size, and usually the same level of sweetness as well. Strawberries in an American box will vary in size, with at least two or three being very large and shiny red, but not necessarily sweet. This is one of the oddest patterns I have ever noticed, I admit, and I'm not sure if I'll ever be able to use it in a story as such. However, I could easily imagine myself putting a similar thought into the head of a traveler, such as, "I miss the fruit of my homeland; it was smaller, but always sweet."
Details like this don't need to be piled on a reader. The most critical factor to consider when writing, as opposed to worldbuilding (where profusion can be good), is the relevance of any particular detail to the story. If you pick your details carefully, keeping them well-suited to the character, to the mood and to the story's overall purpose, you don't need many for a large impact, and your world will feel much more "real."
Monday, March 8, 2010
The writer's relationship to the reader
When you read a book, can you tell what the author is saying to you?
In academia, people tend to be very careful about making statements about authorial intent, especially when an author has been dead for over a hundred years. So they'll talk about the narrator and what the narrator says, or they'll talk about patterns in the text that might suggest different kinds of meanings.
For current writers, the question of a relationship to the reader is a complex one as well. It's better in some ways to figure that once a book or story is published, people will get what they want out of it, on the basis of their own experiences as readers, and this may not have much to do with what you intended - especially as it comes to reading your own reviews.
But whether or not we as writers have a particular message we want to get across (as discussed here in a related post), we DO want to have control over our stories - in particular, how the information in the story gets distributed so that the story is focused and its effect is maximized in the way we intend.
There are easy and hard ways to communicate with a reader. The easiest one is to appoint yourself the narrator and say things straight to the reader. That way, if you're Beatrix Potter, you can say:
"So that is the story of the two Bad Mice, but they were not so very naughty after all, because Tom Thumb paid for everything he broke."
or
"And besides - I have seen that door into the back of the hill called Cat Bells - and besides I am very well acquainted with dear Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle!"
You might say that this isn't the writer speaking to us. Sure, it's not - just as I said above, it's the narrator. But the narrator appears to be using a voice like that of the author, and we might hazard a guess that the author used these devices to back us off the story, while also reassuring the reader about certain things. One thing seems clear to me in the second passage - that Beatrix Potter doesn't want entirely to leave children with the idea that Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle was only a hedgehog, but to leave them with a certain sense of wonder.
Direct narrator speaking to the reader isn't just about suddenly breaking into your narrative with discussion of "the story" and what "I" know about it. It occurs all the time in third person omniscient point of view, whenever the narrator describes something that isn't directly observable, or judgeable, by the point of view character.
And in fact, I think you could argue that there's another tool available to the writer using an omniscient narrator - since omniscient viewpoints zoom in and out, drawing closer or farther away from a particular character's judgment, the writer can choose to make these zooms, or not to, in order to control the amount and kind of information given to the reader.
Controlling the amount and kind of information given to the reader is how we keep the story under control, focused and moving forward. Keeping momentum and giving information about the progress of the main story conflict is critical. But so is providing world information so a reader doesn't get lost. That's where the problem of infodumping comes up. What is it but the problem of the writer "getting information across" to the reader? To make the story work, we have to decide what information is really critical for the reader to know.
As J. Kathleen Cheney noted in her post on description, sometimes stains on priest's hems or field-stripping of weapons appears to come into it. But why would we as authors want to give such tiny details if they're at such risk of appearing irrelevant? To keep people oriented in the world, but not only that - it's to give the impression that we as writers are knowledgeable, and more importantly, reliable and authoritative reporters of the world in which the story takes place. The description of the weapon may seem pointless because it doesn't have sufficient relevance support in story conflict, character, etc. and its only underlying message may be "trust me, the writer, because you see that I know what I'm talking about." To my mind, that message alone is not enough - yet it is a very critical one for an author to deliver, whether in sf/f or mainstream work.
Other information we give needs to keep the reader feeling like they're grounded and on their feet in the story world (whatever world it happens to be) and ready to run in whatever direction the hook pulls them, so they don't feel like they're getting dragged behind a galloping horse. I struggle with this question constantly, given that I'm trying to create the impression of very alien worlds - but at the same time I have to keep readers able to follow the complexity of what I'm doing. Typically a reader won't object to information - and a critiquer might even ask for more information - if they feel that information helps them keep oriented in a fully fleshed world. But it's a tricky borderline to walk, as you don't want people to feel you're treating them like they're stupid. I personally recommend that writers trust the reader as much as possible.
I ran across another way that an author speaks to a reader over this weekend, when I was thinking about Harry Potter (which my husband has been reading with my kids). The way you choose to name your character is very important. In my science fiction, I try to keep my choice of names grounded in a language and world system, but also to give the names a flavor that will suggest their character. Bright and dark vowels are a part of this. If you look at the wizards' names in Harry Potter, you'll realize that often, that's J.K. Rowling intentionally trying to share information with you as a reader. Take Professor Remus Lupin, for example. It would be a staggering coincidence if that were truly his last name, and further, at his birth, his parents decided to give him such a lovely wolfly name. Far more likely is that Ms. Rowling is giving him the name for flavor, and to say to her readers something like, "Nudge nudge, here's a hint and if you can figure it out I'll be proud of you."
At this point it seems logical to ask, "What if you're using strictly internal point of view?" Doesn't that make it virtually impossible to communicate directly with readers?
Well, of course not. I've discussed unreliable narrators before, and how a writer can go about separating the sensory impressions and judgments of an unreliable narrator from the total impression a reader gets. Writers can not only use tricks like inclusion of details from the setting that a character doesn't judge. We can also include details that the character does notice, but which offer something else to the reader that the character doesn't pick up on. Every time you repeat a word, or a phrase, or an association of one object with a particular type of emotion, you begin to create a pattern (often an unconscious pattern) in a reader's mind. Literary writers do this all the time, but so do writers of other genres, even without realizing it.
The other thing you can do as a writer using internal point of view is choose when to switch from one point of view to another. This will allow you to control not only what information the reader gets from which character at which time, but also to create a sense of confidentiality with the reader. The spot where a point of view switch occurs doesn't need to be at a moment of low intensity - a safe switch point. It can be at a moment of critical high intensity, a charged switch point, where it will serve the writer's intention. I love to start a situation, such as a scene when one character puts another under pressure, build up a strong sense of character 1's motives and hopefully a sense in the reader of how they want the scene to come out - and then switch points of view to the other character in the same interaction. It not only surprises the reader, it also makes them question the set of expectations they've built up for character 1 by comparing them with those for character 2. And it gives them the sense that they know more than either character does alone, creating a sense of confidentiality with the author.
Before I go, a few thoughts on pov switches. It's important when dealing with point of view switches of this type to keep your descriptions of the cross-pov phenomenon, or object, totally different. If you describe the same thing the same way from two points of view, the whole significance of the switch will be lost. This is why it's often best for a story to stick with one point of view. The difference between the two descriptions is part of the author's message for the reader. In "At Cross Purposes" (the otter story), for example, I have a facial feature for my aliens that gets described from the human point of view and from the alien point of view. My human describes the aliens like this:
"...they have no eyebrows; above each of their wide-set eyes a strip of pebbly black skin extends up to the ear."
My alien describes this same facial feature on another pair of her kind as follows:
"Both have prominent, masculine brow-character – attractive – but Kir bears a pattern like thorns, while Haa has deep folds like cooled lava."
The descriptions are different, but for me, the important part is that each description shows that the feature means something different to the individuals observing it. Because one of my favorite issues to tackle is the different ways that people understand the things that they experience, I'm excited when I get an opportunity to describe the same thing twice. Readers will notice the repetition, and that repetition will in turn bring attention to the difference between the two descriptions. And then my reader and I will be sharing something that none of my characters are experiencing at all.
It's something to think about.
In academia, people tend to be very careful about making statements about authorial intent, especially when an author has been dead for over a hundred years. So they'll talk about the narrator and what the narrator says, or they'll talk about patterns in the text that might suggest different kinds of meanings.
For current writers, the question of a relationship to the reader is a complex one as well. It's better in some ways to figure that once a book or story is published, people will get what they want out of it, on the basis of their own experiences as readers, and this may not have much to do with what you intended - especially as it comes to reading your own reviews.
But whether or not we as writers have a particular message we want to get across (as discussed here in a related post), we DO want to have control over our stories - in particular, how the information in the story gets distributed so that the story is focused and its effect is maximized in the way we intend.
There are easy and hard ways to communicate with a reader. The easiest one is to appoint yourself the narrator and say things straight to the reader. That way, if you're Beatrix Potter, you can say:
"So that is the story of the two Bad Mice, but they were not so very naughty after all, because Tom Thumb paid for everything he broke."
or
"And besides - I have seen that door into the back of the hill called Cat Bells - and besides I am very well acquainted with dear Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle!"
You might say that this isn't the writer speaking to us. Sure, it's not - just as I said above, it's the narrator. But the narrator appears to be using a voice like that of the author, and we might hazard a guess that the author used these devices to back us off the story, while also reassuring the reader about certain things. One thing seems clear to me in the second passage - that Beatrix Potter doesn't want entirely to leave children with the idea that Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle was only a hedgehog, but to leave them with a certain sense of wonder.
Direct narrator speaking to the reader isn't just about suddenly breaking into your narrative with discussion of "the story" and what "I" know about it. It occurs all the time in third person omniscient point of view, whenever the narrator describes something that isn't directly observable, or judgeable, by the point of view character.
And in fact, I think you could argue that there's another tool available to the writer using an omniscient narrator - since omniscient viewpoints zoom in and out, drawing closer or farther away from a particular character's judgment, the writer can choose to make these zooms, or not to, in order to control the amount and kind of information given to the reader.
Controlling the amount and kind of information given to the reader is how we keep the story under control, focused and moving forward. Keeping momentum and giving information about the progress of the main story conflict is critical. But so is providing world information so a reader doesn't get lost. That's where the problem of infodumping comes up. What is it but the problem of the writer "getting information across" to the reader? To make the story work, we have to decide what information is really critical for the reader to know.
As J. Kathleen Cheney noted in her post on description, sometimes stains on priest's hems or field-stripping of weapons appears to come into it. But why would we as authors want to give such tiny details if they're at such risk of appearing irrelevant? To keep people oriented in the world, but not only that - it's to give the impression that we as writers are knowledgeable, and more importantly, reliable and authoritative reporters of the world in which the story takes place. The description of the weapon may seem pointless because it doesn't have sufficient relevance support in story conflict, character, etc. and its only underlying message may be "trust me, the writer, because you see that I know what I'm talking about." To my mind, that message alone is not enough - yet it is a very critical one for an author to deliver, whether in sf/f or mainstream work.
Other information we give needs to keep the reader feeling like they're grounded and on their feet in the story world (whatever world it happens to be) and ready to run in whatever direction the hook pulls them, so they don't feel like they're getting dragged behind a galloping horse. I struggle with this question constantly, given that I'm trying to create the impression of very alien worlds - but at the same time I have to keep readers able to follow the complexity of what I'm doing. Typically a reader won't object to information - and a critiquer might even ask for more information - if they feel that information helps them keep oriented in a fully fleshed world. But it's a tricky borderline to walk, as you don't want people to feel you're treating them like they're stupid. I personally recommend that writers trust the reader as much as possible.
I ran across another way that an author speaks to a reader over this weekend, when I was thinking about Harry Potter (which my husband has been reading with my kids). The way you choose to name your character is very important. In my science fiction, I try to keep my choice of names grounded in a language and world system, but also to give the names a flavor that will suggest their character. Bright and dark vowels are a part of this. If you look at the wizards' names in Harry Potter, you'll realize that often, that's J.K. Rowling intentionally trying to share information with you as a reader. Take Professor Remus Lupin, for example. It would be a staggering coincidence if that were truly his last name, and further, at his birth, his parents decided to give him such a lovely wolfly name. Far more likely is that Ms. Rowling is giving him the name for flavor, and to say to her readers something like, "Nudge nudge, here's a hint and if you can figure it out I'll be proud of you."
At this point it seems logical to ask, "What if you're using strictly internal point of view?" Doesn't that make it virtually impossible to communicate directly with readers?
Well, of course not. I've discussed unreliable narrators before, and how a writer can go about separating the sensory impressions and judgments of an unreliable narrator from the total impression a reader gets. Writers can not only use tricks like inclusion of details from the setting that a character doesn't judge. We can also include details that the character does notice, but which offer something else to the reader that the character doesn't pick up on. Every time you repeat a word, or a phrase, or an association of one object with a particular type of emotion, you begin to create a pattern (often an unconscious pattern) in a reader's mind. Literary writers do this all the time, but so do writers of other genres, even without realizing it.
The other thing you can do as a writer using internal point of view is choose when to switch from one point of view to another. This will allow you to control not only what information the reader gets from which character at which time, but also to create a sense of confidentiality with the reader. The spot where a point of view switch occurs doesn't need to be at a moment of low intensity - a safe switch point. It can be at a moment of critical high intensity, a charged switch point, where it will serve the writer's intention. I love to start a situation, such as a scene when one character puts another under pressure, build up a strong sense of character 1's motives and hopefully a sense in the reader of how they want the scene to come out - and then switch points of view to the other character in the same interaction. It not only surprises the reader, it also makes them question the set of expectations they've built up for character 1 by comparing them with those for character 2. And it gives them the sense that they know more than either character does alone, creating a sense of confidentiality with the author.
Before I go, a few thoughts on pov switches. It's important when dealing with point of view switches of this type to keep your descriptions of the cross-pov phenomenon, or object, totally different. If you describe the same thing the same way from two points of view, the whole significance of the switch will be lost. This is why it's often best for a story to stick with one point of view. The difference between the two descriptions is part of the author's message for the reader. In "At Cross Purposes" (the otter story), for example, I have a facial feature for my aliens that gets described from the human point of view and from the alien point of view. My human describes the aliens like this:
"...they have no eyebrows; above each of their wide-set eyes a strip of pebbly black skin extends up to the ear."
My alien describes this same facial feature on another pair of her kind as follows:
"Both have prominent, masculine brow-character – attractive – but Kir bears a pattern like thorns, while Haa has deep folds like cooled lava."
The descriptions are different, but for me, the important part is that each description shows that the feature means something different to the individuals observing it. Because one of my favorite issues to tackle is the different ways that people understand the things that they experience, I'm excited when I get an opportunity to describe the same thing twice. Readers will notice the repetition, and that repetition will in turn bring attention to the difference between the two descriptions. And then my reader and I will be sharing something that none of my characters are experiencing at all.
It's something to think about.
Thursday, March 4, 2010
Description, Relevance, and Genre
I had some very interesting comments on Monday on my post about description - in particular, people commenting about the descriptive requirements of different genres. J. Kathleen Cheney took that aspect of the topic and ran with it on her blog, here.
I was particularly intrigued by the following from her post:
... I did add this stipulation [to my rule of relevance]: There are instances where description is expected rather than required for the sake of the story, so a lot more gets put than is strictly necessary...
For example: If you're writing a GBHF (Great Big Honking Fantasy) you're probably going to describe everything, twice. At least. Down to what manner of stains mark the hems of the priests' robes in January. This seems to be expected in the GBHF. (Yes, I'm making a generalization, but that's what the internet is for, isn't it?) If you're writing Hard SF, you're going to have to describe all your gizmos and then explain how they work. (Also, if you can find any excuse to include the description of field-stripping a weapon, you must include that. It's a right of passage, I think.) If you're writing Romance, you must decribe the women's clothing. (Men's you can skip sometimes, as they always dress alike anyway.) You must also describe the upholstery and drapery in any room the female POV enters...
All right, I admit I'm sounding a bit sarcastic, but the truth is that there are some expectations tied to the target market of the story, which are probably based more on what the reader wants to know.
In fact, when I wrote my first post, I was thinking about my own writing rather than considering genre distinctions - but Ms. Cheney makes an excellent point! Genres like mystery, thriller, romance, science fiction and fantasy each come with reader expectations, which translate into editorial expectations, for certain types of description.
On the other hand, that need not be the last word on the subject (need there ever be a last word on anything?). I think Ms. Cheney and I would agree that, while it's true that genre readers expect certain kinds of description, it's still a good idea to try to maximize the relevance of any description. Yes, describe if it seems appropriate, but don't cut corners and figure that all readers will be interested in extensive description without a lot of relevance support.
Try to push for more relevance support regardless of what you're describing, in whatever genre. Yes, there are expectations - but you'll hear people talking about how in really great writing, every sentence is doing more than one thing at a time. Not only is it worldbuilding, not only is it character building, it's also pushing the main conflict forward - oh and by the way, it's also serving the theme, etc.
Each of those things is a form of relevance support, and it just goes to show that in the end, it's worth pushing hard to create as much relevance as possible for descriptions.
I was particularly intrigued by the following from her post:
... I did add this stipulation [to my rule of relevance]: There are instances where description is expected rather than required for the sake of the story, so a lot more gets put than is strictly necessary...
For example: If you're writing a GBHF (Great Big Honking Fantasy) you're probably going to describe everything, twice. At least. Down to what manner of stains mark the hems of the priests' robes in January. This seems to be expected in the GBHF. (Yes, I'm making a generalization, but that's what the internet is for, isn't it?) If you're writing Hard SF, you're going to have to describe all your gizmos and then explain how they work. (Also, if you can find any excuse to include the description of field-stripping a weapon, you must include that. It's a right of passage, I think.) If you're writing Romance, you must decribe the women's clothing. (Men's you can skip sometimes, as they always dress alike anyway.) You must also describe the upholstery and drapery in any room the female POV enters...
All right, I admit I'm sounding a bit sarcastic, but the truth is that there are some expectations tied to the target market of the story, which are probably based more on what the reader wants to know.
In fact, when I wrote my first post, I was thinking about my own writing rather than considering genre distinctions - but Ms. Cheney makes an excellent point! Genres like mystery, thriller, romance, science fiction and fantasy each come with reader expectations, which translate into editorial expectations, for certain types of description.
On the other hand, that need not be the last word on the subject (need there ever be a last word on anything?). I think Ms. Cheney and I would agree that, while it's true that genre readers expect certain kinds of description, it's still a good idea to try to maximize the relevance of any description. Yes, describe if it seems appropriate, but don't cut corners and figure that all readers will be interested in extensive description without a lot of relevance support.
Try to push for more relevance support regardless of what you're describing, in whatever genre. Yes, there are expectations - but you'll hear people talking about how in really great writing, every sentence is doing more than one thing at a time. Not only is it worldbuilding, not only is it character building, it's also pushing the main conflict forward - oh and by the way, it's also serving the theme, etc.
Each of those things is a form of relevance support, and it just goes to show that in the end, it's worth pushing hard to create as much relevance as possible for descriptions.
Monday, March 1, 2010
How much description?
Recently in my writing I've run into the question of how much description I need. I've seen this question before on the message boards, but I thought I'd discuss it a little since it's currently relevant to a couple of the stories I'm writing.
My general rule for description (of people or places) is that you need to stick with the rule of relevance: if it's relevant, describe. If it isn't, don't. It sounds simple, but evaluating the degree of relevance in any location is where the tricky part starts. There are three big kinds of criteria I generally use to assess this: point of view criteria, plot criteria, and story criteria.
Point of view criteria are my first concern. I consider the mental state of my protagonist and decide whether it allows them any contemplative time to look at themselves, others, or their surroundings. First impressions are huge deal for me in this context. What, I ask myself, does this person notice when they see X for the first time? If they are in a place where they can be held spellbound and simply observe, they'll probably see a lot. If they're in a fight or in a big hurry, they probably won't notice nearly as much, and I'll be looking for some key characteristics of a person or location that will help it be recognizable in the reader's mind if it reappears. I also look out for opportunities for a character to get things wrong on first impression, and pick up the superficial aspects of something in a way that will allow for a change in that person's opinion later when they get a closer look. I also keep in mind my general parameters for the character's mental state to see how to approach the description - as in my last post, when I talked about using negatively judgmental words in initial descriptions for the character Nekantor.
Plot criteria I've already mentioned a little above when I talk about fighting or being in a hurry. Depending on what's going on, you may not have time to do much describing - and if you have your character slow down in the middle of a battle to the death to notice the clothes that his opponent is wearing, it will seem ridiculous.
I find both point of view criteria and plot criteria easy to keep track of in the moment of writing. Harder for me is keeping track of the third type of criteria: story criteria.
Story criteria are things like, "we're early on in the story and if we don't have some description here, people will feel disoriented." Story criteria are tricky because they can actually work directly against one's instincts in the point of view and plot areas. In some cases, story criteria will give you a good reason to change your plot, to put your character intentionally in a position where some observation is possible.
We're all familiar with stories that place their protagonists in a high vantage point or in front of a mirror in order to allow for description of the setting or the character themselves. Be careful with this. If it takes you away from your main conflict, it may not be a good idea. Push yourself to create opportunities for description that have more subtlety, and make sure not to ignore the effect that vantage or mirror scenes have on your character - vantage scenes tend to make that person seem more contemplative in general, while mirror scenes can make them seem vain. The story need for description isn't enough to justify creating those scenes in and of itself; you need to look to bolster their relevance in other ways.
In my otter story, I added an extra paragraph of description when my protagonist first meets the aliens. Why? Because first readers thought I made the aliens too much like Earth otters. It was a good point. My stories are complex, and I'm always trying to keep lots of balls in the air, so I missed that one on first draft. Fortunately, my main character has a penchant for wry observation, so I got to play with first/second impression in two paragraphs that immediately followed one another. I had her think, "Otters!" and then go, "But wait a minute..." and describe a bit. There was room in the plot for it, and it was appropriate to her character. And now I've fixed the problem of the aliens being alien in physiology, which is of course terribly important!
Another example comes from the novel I'm working on, and involves a question of orientation in the world (another story criterion). I got to a certain point and realized that I hadn't established that servants to the nobility can be either male or female - and males can work for females, and vice versa. With the way I approach the story, I don't have the option of just telling the reader this. So I went back over the material I had and looked at the first instances of seeing servants. In the first chapter, my main character sees two different girls, each of whom has a servant/bodyguard. One of the servants becomes a larger character later, and he is male, but the other one was unspecified. Great, I thought - I can make her female. But it was a bit trickier than that, because if I had my protagonist notice that the servant was female, that might make it seem like having a female servant was somehow unusual - it would make that fact stick out in the narrative if I approached it directly like that. So I decided to use description, and show the hair or clothes of the servant in a female style. But I still had to make sure that was as relevant as possible. So I finally decided to bring in two other story criteria to help me: I needed to show that the servant caste is distinguished by tattoos on their foreheads, and also that my protagonist and his friends are afraid of these bodyguards. The final result was this sentence:
The servant's hair was pulled back in a bun so the curving caste tattoo on her forehead showed clear as a warning.
And it's the warning aspect that gets carried forward into the boys' next actions and responses, allowing both the servant's gender and her tattoo to be backgrounded.
The last piece, one I had more trouble with, was a description of setting. The setting of my novel is a very unusual one that doesn't fit with people's usual expectations, so I have to make sure to defeat people's usual expectations as soon as possible. Fortunately, there is an outside scene in Chapter 1 which I can use to establish some basic parameters (such as the fact that the entire city is underground). But in Chapter 1, it's nighttime, and the scene is set in the gardens of the Eminence's Residence, which is a pretty unusual place in that it has dirt and plants. So when I get to Chapter 2 and my second protagonist is running between buildings, I've got a quandary.
I don't want people to think that dirt and plants are normal and that everyone will encounter them if they go outside (because that's true only in the Eminence's gardens). On the other hand, running between buildings isn't a place where anything important happens, and the courtyard of the Service Academy isn't a location that will become critical later. My relevance support structures are few. So for now, I'm going to keep the description relatively short:
...headed out into the courtyard that separated the dormitories from the main Academy building - a single sheet of limestone worn smooth by centuries of running feet.
At this point I'm drafting, so who knows? I may come back to this location later and decide I need to change it because it needs more. But I will be careful, because at the moment I don't have enough relevance support to add much more than this, and if I need to add description later, I'll be trying hard to add relevance support too.
I'm going to keep thinking about it.
My general rule for description (of people or places) is that you need to stick with the rule of relevance: if it's relevant, describe. If it isn't, don't. It sounds simple, but evaluating the degree of relevance in any location is where the tricky part starts. There are three big kinds of criteria I generally use to assess this: point of view criteria, plot criteria, and story criteria.
Point of view criteria are my first concern. I consider the mental state of my protagonist and decide whether it allows them any contemplative time to look at themselves, others, or their surroundings. First impressions are huge deal for me in this context. What, I ask myself, does this person notice when they see X for the first time? If they are in a place where they can be held spellbound and simply observe, they'll probably see a lot. If they're in a fight or in a big hurry, they probably won't notice nearly as much, and I'll be looking for some key characteristics of a person or location that will help it be recognizable in the reader's mind if it reappears. I also look out for opportunities for a character to get things wrong on first impression, and pick up the superficial aspects of something in a way that will allow for a change in that person's opinion later when they get a closer look. I also keep in mind my general parameters for the character's mental state to see how to approach the description - as in my last post, when I talked about using negatively judgmental words in initial descriptions for the character Nekantor.
Plot criteria I've already mentioned a little above when I talk about fighting or being in a hurry. Depending on what's going on, you may not have time to do much describing - and if you have your character slow down in the middle of a battle to the death to notice the clothes that his opponent is wearing, it will seem ridiculous.
I find both point of view criteria and plot criteria easy to keep track of in the moment of writing. Harder for me is keeping track of the third type of criteria: story criteria.
Story criteria are things like, "we're early on in the story and if we don't have some description here, people will feel disoriented." Story criteria are tricky because they can actually work directly against one's instincts in the point of view and plot areas. In some cases, story criteria will give you a good reason to change your plot, to put your character intentionally in a position where some observation is possible.
We're all familiar with stories that place their protagonists in a high vantage point or in front of a mirror in order to allow for description of the setting or the character themselves. Be careful with this. If it takes you away from your main conflict, it may not be a good idea. Push yourself to create opportunities for description that have more subtlety, and make sure not to ignore the effect that vantage or mirror scenes have on your character - vantage scenes tend to make that person seem more contemplative in general, while mirror scenes can make them seem vain. The story need for description isn't enough to justify creating those scenes in and of itself; you need to look to bolster their relevance in other ways.
In my otter story, I added an extra paragraph of description when my protagonist first meets the aliens. Why? Because first readers thought I made the aliens too much like Earth otters. It was a good point. My stories are complex, and I'm always trying to keep lots of balls in the air, so I missed that one on first draft. Fortunately, my main character has a penchant for wry observation, so I got to play with first/second impression in two paragraphs that immediately followed one another. I had her think, "Otters!" and then go, "But wait a minute..." and describe a bit. There was room in the plot for it, and it was appropriate to her character. And now I've fixed the problem of the aliens being alien in physiology, which is of course terribly important!
Another example comes from the novel I'm working on, and involves a question of orientation in the world (another story criterion). I got to a certain point and realized that I hadn't established that servants to the nobility can be either male or female - and males can work for females, and vice versa. With the way I approach the story, I don't have the option of just telling the reader this. So I went back over the material I had and looked at the first instances of seeing servants. In the first chapter, my main character sees two different girls, each of whom has a servant/bodyguard. One of the servants becomes a larger character later, and he is male, but the other one was unspecified. Great, I thought - I can make her female. But it was a bit trickier than that, because if I had my protagonist notice that the servant was female, that might make it seem like having a female servant was somehow unusual - it would make that fact stick out in the narrative if I approached it directly like that. So I decided to use description, and show the hair or clothes of the servant in a female style. But I still had to make sure that was as relevant as possible. So I finally decided to bring in two other story criteria to help me: I needed to show that the servant caste is distinguished by tattoos on their foreheads, and also that my protagonist and his friends are afraid of these bodyguards. The final result was this sentence:
The servant's hair was pulled back in a bun so the curving caste tattoo on her forehead showed clear as a warning.
And it's the warning aspect that gets carried forward into the boys' next actions and responses, allowing both the servant's gender and her tattoo to be backgrounded.
The last piece, one I had more trouble with, was a description of setting. The setting of my novel is a very unusual one that doesn't fit with people's usual expectations, so I have to make sure to defeat people's usual expectations as soon as possible. Fortunately, there is an outside scene in Chapter 1 which I can use to establish some basic parameters (such as the fact that the entire city is underground). But in Chapter 1, it's nighttime, and the scene is set in the gardens of the Eminence's Residence, which is a pretty unusual place in that it has dirt and plants. So when I get to Chapter 2 and my second protagonist is running between buildings, I've got a quandary.
I don't want people to think that dirt and plants are normal and that everyone will encounter them if they go outside (because that's true only in the Eminence's gardens). On the other hand, running between buildings isn't a place where anything important happens, and the courtyard of the Service Academy isn't a location that will become critical later. My relevance support structures are few. So for now, I'm going to keep the description relatively short:
...headed out into the courtyard that separated the dormitories from the main Academy building - a single sheet of limestone worn smooth by centuries of running feet.
At this point I'm drafting, so who knows? I may come back to this location later and decide I need to change it because it needs more. But I will be careful, because at the moment I don't have enough relevance support to add much more than this, and if I need to add description later, I'll be trying hard to add relevance support too.
I'm going to keep thinking about it.
Friday, September 18, 2009
Character description: who? when? how?
I got the idea for this post from a thread on the Absolute Write forum, in which a member was asking about how to come up with fresh ways to describe characters' appearance.
It's interesting, but the question of fresh ways to describe appearance does contain a fundamental assumption that character appearance must be described. This isn't always the case. There are plenty of times when readers are happy to fill in an appearance from their own heads, and don't want to be bothered with the details - this is especially true when the action of an exciting story is flying along. So I thought I'd break the question into three parts: who? when? how?
1. Who?
You don't want to describe everyone. When we walk around in the world, we take in everyone's appearance on a basic level, but we don't have to remember it - and our brain takes it in easily as part of its massive parallel processing. When you're writing a story, you have to take that massive stream of parallel input and render it in a single stream of words. The result is this:
The more of the parallel stream of experience you try to capture, the longer the single stream of story language gets, and the more the perception of the passage of story time slows down.
So my general rule for describing appearance is as follows: describe only those people who deserve to be noticed and considered for a non-negligible period of time. I put the rule in this general form because I know some folks out there are writing with character-external narrators. Your narrator is going to have an enormous influence on how you should treat the problem of description (whether it be of characters or setting). Different narrators will concentrate on different things. With an omniscient narrator, the biggest question is who and what in the story the reader needs to notice. With an in-the-action character narrator, the biggest question is who and what in the story that character notices. With an out-of-the-action character narrator, such as a retrospective narrator, you can include stuff that the character noticed in the action, and stuff they noticed or recalled, or looked up, after the action finished. I talked about noticing in my earlier post about unreliable narrators (which some may find illuminating for this discussion, so it's here.)
I should add that I mean these suggestions to apply to all characters - including the point of view character. Ask yourself, for the sake of argument: How much time do I spend focusing on and maintaining my appearance? How much does the question of my appearance intrude on my daily judgments (of, for example, how other people treat me)? If your point of view character doesn't care about his/her appearance at all, and doesn't feel it's relevant to the way others treat him/her, then really there's no reason to slow the reader down and get into details - not to mention that there's no natural context for it.
2. When?
Different authors will likely treat this differently. When I'm powering through and drafting a story, I usually don't even think about the who/when/how questions on a conscious level - I just write. However, when I go back and edit, especially when I've been told by a critiquer that I need to include a description of someone, I try to look for what I call natural context for description.
Natural context for description is that moment of noticing and consideration. When does it happen, and for how long? When you pass someone on the street, what do you notice about them? Chances are it's not going to be their height and weight, unless you've been trained to give police evidence. In a split-second glance, you might notice just one feature - unusual hair, or clothing. If you're close enough to them to be potentially in their sphere of influence, you might notice their size relative to yours. If they are nondescript in a crowd, you might not notice them at all; if they are nondescript but alone, probably all you'll notice is their presence or absence, and maybe a bit of the surrounding context of where or when they appeared. If they are totally and utterly alien but moving too fast to be stared at? You might only notice they were alien. And maybe the color of their blur as it moved by.
Naturally, then, the longer the period of time you have to look - and the better reasons you have for doing it - the more you're going to notice. A character may notice one feature of a person on first glance (in which case, mention it at that point in the story), a few more features in a second encounter, but not actually be able to put together a detailed impression of a person until they've met face-to-face for a period of time.
I've heard people remark that romance includes a lot of description. Well, it does. But there are two very natural reasons for this. First, when we're romantically interested in someone, we're going to spend a lot of time and resources considering them on all possible levels, the easiest of which is appearance. Second, when we're romantically interested in someone, our senses are heightened, which enhances our ability to notice small things in our surroundings. Bang, there you have it - more natural context for description, even independently of authorial style and choices.
Contrast this with moments of high action in a story. Action is where you're going to want to keep description to a minimum. When things happen fast, we don't have time to notice a lot. And when we want readers to perceive that things are happening fast, we don't want to add the extra words that will cause them to feel story time slowing down.
3. How?
Wow, we've finally gotten to how. Let me start by saying that some of the aspects of "how" have already been touched on in the question of "when," at least where it concerns how much description you want to put at different points. So I'm going to try not to concentrate on that, and take the discussion in a bit of a different direction: the noticing and judgment direction.
What one person notices about another at any given time will depend on a lot of personal and cultural factors. Even a split second judgment of "what stands out" isn't necessarily going to direct everyone's attention to the same things. Someone with police training will be able to form split-second descriptions of height, weight, and distinguishing features. Someone with spy training will have very different impressions - possibly notice whether the person is armed, or moves as if they have martial training etc. Does their species stand out most? If they're alien, or if the observer is an alien seeing a human, then maybe so. Or if the character is an older woman judging a younger one in a social context, she may bring a large set of expectations for proper behavior and appearance, and run down a basic checklist of these in her initial judgment of the younger person.
To go back to the question of freshness and originality - if you write your description as befits the individual judgment of a unique point-of-view character, including that character's species, cultural background, individual experience, and social role in the context of the encounter, you're far less likely to describe people the same way twice. And the more time the describing character has to pass judgments, the more divergent these things can become.
Just for fun, here are a couple of character descriptions from my alien points of view.
Allayo the Gariniki describes humans:
"My captors have the faces and ruffs of simians, but are too large and have no tails at all."
Rulii the Aurrel describes human hands:
"Parker shows me his hands: short, stiff, single thumbs placed far to the side; long, long, soft brown fingers ending in covers like pale coins instead of claws. Hand-showing: a human submission move."
Part of why I include these examples is to show difference; part is to show that one character's description of another does more than describe the other: it also reveals things about the one doing the describing. We describe things and people in terms of what we know well. So from Allayo's description we can learn that she knows about small monkeylike creatures with tails. We can also conclude that she isn't one of them. Though we don't have enough information to construct her full appearance, we can be put on the alert to look for more cues to her actual appearance as we go forward (she's a reptile). From Rulii's description we can conclude that Aurrel hands have more than one thumb, that his thumbs are long and flexible, and his fingers are short and have claws. We also get a hint that he cares about submission behaviors.
Comparison between two characters is a great tool to provide natural context for description, especially for description of a point of view character who isn't naturally vain or otherwise focused on his/her appearance.
One last thought: while many times it's great to leave a character's precise appearance to the imagination of the reader, it's worth establishing that character's physical characteristics if they will be relevant later in the story. You don't really want someone getting halfway through your novel before they realize that they thought the main character was a brunette and the author thought she was a redhead. That level of strategic placement of description is unique to the author's point of view, and can often lead you to have to stick descriptions in where the character didn't naturally fall into them on the first draft. But if you keep your eyes out, you can usually find an opportunity here or there to provide a few extra words in a natural context. And then it will all work out.
It's interesting, but the question of fresh ways to describe appearance does contain a fundamental assumption that character appearance must be described. This isn't always the case. There are plenty of times when readers are happy to fill in an appearance from their own heads, and don't want to be bothered with the details - this is especially true when the action of an exciting story is flying along. So I thought I'd break the question into three parts: who? when? how?
1. Who?
You don't want to describe everyone. When we walk around in the world, we take in everyone's appearance on a basic level, but we don't have to remember it - and our brain takes it in easily as part of its massive parallel processing. When you're writing a story, you have to take that massive stream of parallel input and render it in a single stream of words. The result is this:
The more of the parallel stream of experience you try to capture, the longer the single stream of story language gets, and the more the perception of the passage of story time slows down.
So my general rule for describing appearance is as follows: describe only those people who deserve to be noticed and considered for a non-negligible period of time. I put the rule in this general form because I know some folks out there are writing with character-external narrators. Your narrator is going to have an enormous influence on how you should treat the problem of description (whether it be of characters or setting). Different narrators will concentrate on different things. With an omniscient narrator, the biggest question is who and what in the story the reader needs to notice. With an in-the-action character narrator, the biggest question is who and what in the story that character notices. With an out-of-the-action character narrator, such as a retrospective narrator, you can include stuff that the character noticed in the action, and stuff they noticed or recalled, or looked up, after the action finished. I talked about noticing in my earlier post about unreliable narrators (which some may find illuminating for this discussion, so it's here.)
I should add that I mean these suggestions to apply to all characters - including the point of view character. Ask yourself, for the sake of argument: How much time do I spend focusing on and maintaining my appearance? How much does the question of my appearance intrude on my daily judgments (of, for example, how other people treat me)? If your point of view character doesn't care about his/her appearance at all, and doesn't feel it's relevant to the way others treat him/her, then really there's no reason to slow the reader down and get into details - not to mention that there's no natural context for it.
2. When?
Different authors will likely treat this differently. When I'm powering through and drafting a story, I usually don't even think about the who/when/how questions on a conscious level - I just write. However, when I go back and edit, especially when I've been told by a critiquer that I need to include a description of someone, I try to look for what I call natural context for description.
Natural context for description is that moment of noticing and consideration. When does it happen, and for how long? When you pass someone on the street, what do you notice about them? Chances are it's not going to be their height and weight, unless you've been trained to give police evidence. In a split-second glance, you might notice just one feature - unusual hair, or clothing. If you're close enough to them to be potentially in their sphere of influence, you might notice their size relative to yours. If they are nondescript in a crowd, you might not notice them at all; if they are nondescript but alone, probably all you'll notice is their presence or absence, and maybe a bit of the surrounding context of where or when they appeared. If they are totally and utterly alien but moving too fast to be stared at? You might only notice they were alien. And maybe the color of their blur as it moved by.
Naturally, then, the longer the period of time you have to look - and the better reasons you have for doing it - the more you're going to notice. A character may notice one feature of a person on first glance (in which case, mention it at that point in the story), a few more features in a second encounter, but not actually be able to put together a detailed impression of a person until they've met face-to-face for a period of time.
I've heard people remark that romance includes a lot of description. Well, it does. But there are two very natural reasons for this. First, when we're romantically interested in someone, we're going to spend a lot of time and resources considering them on all possible levels, the easiest of which is appearance. Second, when we're romantically interested in someone, our senses are heightened, which enhances our ability to notice small things in our surroundings. Bang, there you have it - more natural context for description, even independently of authorial style and choices.
Contrast this with moments of high action in a story. Action is where you're going to want to keep description to a minimum. When things happen fast, we don't have time to notice a lot. And when we want readers to perceive that things are happening fast, we don't want to add the extra words that will cause them to feel story time slowing down.
3. How?
Wow, we've finally gotten to how. Let me start by saying that some of the aspects of "how" have already been touched on in the question of "when," at least where it concerns how much description you want to put at different points. So I'm going to try not to concentrate on that, and take the discussion in a bit of a different direction: the noticing and judgment direction.
What one person notices about another at any given time will depend on a lot of personal and cultural factors. Even a split second judgment of "what stands out" isn't necessarily going to direct everyone's attention to the same things. Someone with police training will be able to form split-second descriptions of height, weight, and distinguishing features. Someone with spy training will have very different impressions - possibly notice whether the person is armed, or moves as if they have martial training etc. Does their species stand out most? If they're alien, or if the observer is an alien seeing a human, then maybe so. Or if the character is an older woman judging a younger one in a social context, she may bring a large set of expectations for proper behavior and appearance, and run down a basic checklist of these in her initial judgment of the younger person.
To go back to the question of freshness and originality - if you write your description as befits the individual judgment of a unique point-of-view character, including that character's species, cultural background, individual experience, and social role in the context of the encounter, you're far less likely to describe people the same way twice. And the more time the describing character has to pass judgments, the more divergent these things can become.
Just for fun, here are a couple of character descriptions from my alien points of view.
Allayo the Gariniki describes humans:
"My captors have the faces and ruffs of simians, but are too large and have no tails at all."
Rulii the Aurrel describes human hands:
"Parker shows me his hands: short, stiff, single thumbs placed far to the side; long, long, soft brown fingers ending in covers like pale coins instead of claws. Hand-showing: a human submission move."
Part of why I include these examples is to show difference; part is to show that one character's description of another does more than describe the other: it also reveals things about the one doing the describing. We describe things and people in terms of what we know well. So from Allayo's description we can learn that she knows about small monkeylike creatures with tails. We can also conclude that she isn't one of them. Though we don't have enough information to construct her full appearance, we can be put on the alert to look for more cues to her actual appearance as we go forward (she's a reptile). From Rulii's description we can conclude that Aurrel hands have more than one thumb, that his thumbs are long and flexible, and his fingers are short and have claws. We also get a hint that he cares about submission behaviors.
Comparison between two characters is a great tool to provide natural context for description, especially for description of a point of view character who isn't naturally vain or otherwise focused on his/her appearance.
One last thought: while many times it's great to leave a character's precise appearance to the imagination of the reader, it's worth establishing that character's physical characteristics if they will be relevant later in the story. You don't really want someone getting halfway through your novel before they realize that they thought the main character was a brunette and the author thought she was a redhead. That level of strategic placement of description is unique to the author's point of view, and can often lead you to have to stick descriptions in where the character didn't naturally fall into them on the first draft. But if you keep your eyes out, you can usually find an opportunity here or there to provide a few extra words in a natural context. And then it will all work out.
Monday, November 17, 2008
Pain
Last Thursday evening I took my husband to the emergency room at 2:30 in the morning because he was experiencing intense pain in his left arm. The interesting thing about pain is, although it's adaptively very important because it lets you know that something is wrong, it doesn't always let you know what is wrong, because internal pain is hard to pinpoint and describe. My husband strained a muscle; but for all I knew at the time, he could have been having a heart attack.
It's made me think about describing pain. I remember seeing a TV show once where the host was taking typical descriptions of pain - in particular, I remember "stabbing pain" being featured - and trying to debunk them. Or at least, that's what it seemed like he was trying to do. The show talked about the phrase "stabbing pain" and then went and talked to people who had actually been stabbed to ask if it hurt and what it felt like; then it pointed out that this didn't match the idea of "stabbing pain" at all.
I took issue with their conclusion. "Stabbing pain" doesn't have to mean "pain like that of a stabbing"; it describes the way that the pain is experienced, the way that it seems to move quickly and sharply through the body. Then of course we have "thudding," "throbbing," "pinching," "stinging," "aching," etc. etc. I honestly don't think they all have to follow the same type of derivation. Pinching probably is "pain like that of being pinched." Lots of different experiences of pain lead to lots of different types of description.
This of course makes me think of aliens and fantasy peoples. How would aliens experience pain, and where in their unusual bodies? How would fantasy peoples describe their pain? Even if they felt it the same way we do, their alternate histories and backgrounds could lead them to describe pain with completely different metaphors. A description of pain could show a reader a lot about how a group of people conceptualize the internal organs of the body, and where health comes from.
Short entry today because I've been stressing out, for obvious reasons. My man's feeling better, so that's good, but he's still got his arm in a sling. And I'm starting to feel pain in my head... I wonder how I could describe it...
It's made me think about describing pain. I remember seeing a TV show once where the host was taking typical descriptions of pain - in particular, I remember "stabbing pain" being featured - and trying to debunk them. Or at least, that's what it seemed like he was trying to do. The show talked about the phrase "stabbing pain" and then went and talked to people who had actually been stabbed to ask if it hurt and what it felt like; then it pointed out that this didn't match the idea of "stabbing pain" at all.
I took issue with their conclusion. "Stabbing pain" doesn't have to mean "pain like that of a stabbing"; it describes the way that the pain is experienced, the way that it seems to move quickly and sharply through the body. Then of course we have "thudding," "throbbing," "pinching," "stinging," "aching," etc. etc. I honestly don't think they all have to follow the same type of derivation. Pinching probably is "pain like that of being pinched." Lots of different experiences of pain lead to lots of different types of description.
This of course makes me think of aliens and fantasy peoples. How would aliens experience pain, and where in their unusual bodies? How would fantasy peoples describe their pain? Even if they felt it the same way we do, their alternate histories and backgrounds could lead them to describe pain with completely different metaphors. A description of pain could show a reader a lot about how a group of people conceptualize the internal organs of the body, and where health comes from.
Short entry today because I've been stressing out, for obvious reasons. My man's feeling better, so that's good, but he's still got his arm in a sling. And I'm starting to feel pain in my head... I wonder how I could describe it...
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