This is Marilyn Meredith's handout for her talk on description:
USING
THE RIGHT AMOUNT OF DESCRIPTION FOR PEOPLE, PLACES AND THINGS
Use color,
texture, smells, sounds. Use strong, active words for description. Nouns and
verbs--less or no adjectives and adverbs.
Readers want to
know what your characters look like—give some hints right away, so they aren’t
shocked later to find out who they’d imagined is not at all like that. You want
them to “see” your characters as you see them.
Don’t put great
hunks of the characters’ description in one place. Scatter them.
Include how
someone’s voice sounds.
Be sure to keep
track of these details, so they don’t change later in the book. Give reminders
every now and then—tossed back her mane of red hair—polished his bald head with
his hand—adjusted his glasses—limped back to her seat.
Use descriptions
as dialogue tags. She smoothed her long skirt before sitting. He loosened the
collar of his dress shirt.
Same with
vehicles, what kind do your characters drive?
For places, if
you’re using real places, be sure you get everything right. Readers will let
you know if you’re wrong.
If you’ve created
a fictional place, make sure you keep track of where things are—even if you
don’t remember, someone else will.
Weather can
create a mood for your story. Remember weather changes—or if it doesn’t, how it
affects people can add to your story. Hot too long, foggy too long, too much
rain, etc. If it’s cold, you want the reader to feel the cold—and vice versa.
How the weather affects your POV character.
Describe what you
think your POV character will notice about the place where he/she is.
Be sure to
describe the places inside and out, let us see where people are having
conversations, what it’s like where the action is going on. Description of
houses and furnishings can add to what the people who live in them are like.
Rich people, middle-class, poor. Neat freaks or slobs.
Same with
vehicles, what kind do your characters drive? Should fit their personality.
Some of the
authors I think do great description of settings are William Kent Krueger and
James Lee Burke.
James Lee Burke—
We went through a
brightly lit shopping district, the entered the old part of Lafayette, where
live oak tress hung with moss still form canopies over the streets. --- The
mist was gray, floating across the trees and shrubbery and hedges in the
university district.
The sky was
black, but floodlight illuminated the signs advertising the drive-by windows
where the owner sold frozen daiquiris to the happy motoring crowd at five bucks
a pop. The outside light also lit the iron framework of the ridge and the bayou’s
surface which was running high up on the pilings and looked like yellow rust.
When I got out of my pickup, the night air was throbbing with the sounds of
tree frogs, the wind blowing through a sugarcane field out in the darkness.
The Tin Roof
Blowdown
William Kent
Krueger—
True to her work,
in one minute she appeared, a dark-skinned woman with a bright, white smile.
Her hair was a crown of black and gray. Her eyes were dark and shiny in a face
full of welcome. She was clearly well fed, though not quite rotund, and dressed
in the blue-short-sleeved shirt of a postal employee. Below that, she wore
bright floral shorts.
We continued to
follow the river, winding out way up out of the valley between the mountains
until we came to a cutoff with a sign pointing southeast—SULFUR SPRINGS 8
MILES. The road we followed snaked
steeply upward then crested. Below, along the base of the range, lay a kind of
alluvial plain, an apron of high desert with a clear view to the south.
Sulfur Springs
