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(Picture: Ezra Pound’s extensive revisions to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.)
A detective drives up to a house. Before he rings the bell, we are given a fancy description of his car, the shrubs in the front garden, the neighbouring properties and, worst of all, the weather. We know what our detective is wearing and the sound his heels make on the gravel. By the time he reaches the door, we are barely awake and can hardly remember what brought him here.
Recently, with two of my writing students, I ran into an issue familiar to tyro writers. This concerns how much description is too much in novelistic writing. In a sense, all prose writing is descriptive, but there are descriptions of different kinds – details that are relevant and push the story on, which tell us more about the world we are inhabiting.
Reading their work, I became aware that they were burying the story and the actions of their characters under mounds of detail. The students had clearly done a lot of time‑consuming research, of which they had become over‑fond. They had to learn to cut – but what to cut was the question.
Carlo and I discuss this; he urges me to be more prescriptive, telling them that a description of a room, car or face should be one or two lines at most.
On the contrary, I insist that my style, as a teacher, is to resist rules. I dislike the idea of imposing a single method; the writer should proceed according to their own taste and sensibility. But there is a point at which “style” becomes an alibi for self‑indulgence.
The question my students ask is: how can you tell what is “good” detail and what is dead weight?
Not all description does the same job. Good detail locates the reader. We want to know what kind of room we’re in, for instance, but it only becomes interesting when our character begins acting inside it.
“He examined the body” tells us almost nothing. “He kneels, one hand on the cracked linoleum, tilting the dead man’s wrist towards the strip of light under the door” lets us see the movement. Here, the description is inseparable from the action.
We require details that locate our character in time and space. Biographies are boring; we want to learn about our protagonists piecemeal and through telling details that emerge in the course of the action.
Raymond Chandler tells us that Marlowe is going out in the rain with nothing more than a “coat, a hat and a gun.” Later, he is in a powder‑blue suit with black brogues and a display handkerchief because he’s “calling on four million dollars.” The description of his suit serves the plot, a seedy private eye dressing up for a big job. We get the tone of voice too: wry, slightly contemptuous, unimpressed by wealth. What the narrator chooses to include, what they leave out, and how they structure the telling of any particular story is integral to the novel’s tenor; it has to be a reflection of the protagonist, their way of thinking and operating, irrespective of who is telling the story, either the hero or the third‑person narrator.
In crime writing, the detail aids an obvious function; the reader is led into a puzzle, and the wrong brand of cigarette in the ashtray, or a fresh ring mark on a table where a glass has been moved, will be useful later. In any story, detail must be useful.
