Over Describing

Why sometimes more is too much. Why sometimes a little goes a long way. And other generic statements.

I read an opinion of a working agent and editor(I apologise for not being able to find it or quote it word-for-word), who shared that they despise it when authors describe every single thing in a scene in insane detail. They seemed to suggest that they preferred stories that maybe got straight to the point. This is different to minimalist storytelling though, which is another post for another day.

Inside the kitchen, a long table was surrounded by tall, red velvet chairs, which were thickly cushioned and too heavy to pick up and move easily. The table was made of oak and on top of it sat various utensils. Metal knives, forks and spoons of various sizes gleamed since receiving a good polish and under each set was a napkin for each guest. Behind the table on the kitchen side were many pots and pans that had been left uncleaned since the food was actually prepared. Some were covered in the remnants of a green-brown sludge, as if the chef had made a sauce exclusively from the garden path that led to the bright white front door. In the sink were…

It’s tough to nail down how much is too much. The paragraph above might actually be suitable for a book, with some editing to maybe quicken the pace or make the general description a bit more interesting. However, in another book it might seem tired and a little pointless.

The sentiments the agent/editor felt extended to focusing on one thing and ‘over-describing’ (for lack of a better term), instead of getting to the point. Before I’d managed to read these wise words, when I was writing the first draft of my very first idea for a novel (which has not been published because, despite sentimental feelings, it is still poor writing), the following thought process ran itself though my head:

• Good writing communicates with a reader.
• Therefore, I must communicate as much as possible with the reader.
• This means I must describe everything in a scene/chapter.
• Which means I’d better get my thesaurus out.

Now, when I say it ‘ran itself through my head’, I mean it. It was like someone had taken the short notes above, tied them to a spike and shoved them into my brain, perhaps via my ears so that I couldn’t hear anything else. I was adamant that every detail must be included, despite the increased amount of time I was taking describing the pot of tea on the table, the dusty floor, the high, wooden ceilings, the smell of the drains outside, the everything in a scene and this meant it took me several pages before I’d even gotten to letting the reader know that the house was owned by a lobster-man.

I’m not saying description is a bad thing, obviously. If we cut down on all description, eventually we’d simply end up with books containing pages and pages of dialogue, which on the whole is incredibly dull. And a writer could do the quasi-ironic thing where they mention a few mundane details before mentioning offhand that the house is owned by a lobster-man (‘and Peter didn’t notice any of this because the first thing he saw was a man with a giant pair of claws’), but this is something more for the time of Douglas Adams, when perhaps that sort of thing was original. Saying this I of course have used this technique more times than I care to mention.

The type of story you want to tell usually dictates how much of this sort of thing you can do.

I’m not talking about genre. There are plenty of fast-paced thrillers that take the time to describe scenes in incredible detail. I’m talking more about the pacing you want to have. The type of pacing that means your reader won’t fall asleep in their chair and wake up not being able to remember anything that happened in your story. I’m talking about the type of writing that makes a reader suddenly jump in their chair and think to themselves ‘has he really been describing the grass in this field for five pages?’ There is a skill to writing this sort of thing and the detail and focus of your description will change depending on so many different factors, but does that sort of writing make a good book? It’s debatable.

As mentioned above, it depends on the story you’re writing. I’ll use an example of mine, because it involves negative critique and I don’t like criticising others unless they smell and I hate them.

In this first draft, I wrote a sequence involving the protagonist being invited to dinner with the mysterious King, who the protagonist has not seen before (this will be important in a bit). However, the little boy who is our hero is actively trying to topple the King. Does the King know and has he decided to invite our hero to tea as some sort of trap? Or is he inviting the youngster because the Queen told him to, as she also wants to topple the King (this book, meant for children, has a few twists and turns…)

It turned out, as the boy entered the small hut this dinner was happening in, that the King also invited three of his subjects. So another question on the protagonist’s (and hopefully the reader’s) mind was: which one was the King? With the protagonist given a choice of staying clear or taking a chance and possible being able to slay the King once and for all, I thought I’d set everything up to make the reader sweat and turn each page with a trembling hand.

I thought I’d stretch this sequence out in order to build the tension. I imagined I was writing the early sequence from Inglorious Basterds where Hans Landa questions a farmer about hidden Jews, who happen to be hiding under the floorboards as they speak. It turns out I was actually writing a description of a kitchen for an estate agent, because I got a resounding ‘eh’ when I asked about this chapter in particular. Re-reading the damn thing, I noticed I spent most of the time describing what it looked like inside. Why does the reader care that the sink was full of pots and pans? Why does the reader care that the side was unclean? They care about the protagonist and want to know the answers to the question I stated in the above paragraphs (hopefully. This is a separate job entirely).

While tension does mean sometimes stretching moments out to their breaking point, it doesn’t mean filling the space. While it does mean focusing in on the moment one of the characters picks up a knife, it doesn’t mean describing what the knife looks like in the character’s hand. You have to be careful you’re not just talking. Otherwise you end up filibustering and taking one thousand words to say ‘don’t take too long to make your point’.