ON DESCRIPTION, OR HOW NOT TO SMOTHER YOUR STORY

NOW FREE: There is a key moment in a writer's life when you stop writing in the style you consider novels should sound like, and start writing to entertain yourself.

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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.

Another way detail should work is to reveal the dynamic between characters. In Graham Greene’s political and colonial novels, most relationships are freighted with class, race and empire. His prose is spare and accurate, but the small details accumulate.

The English correspondent in The Quiet American watches his Vietnamese lover pour his tea; the local police chief hovers deferentially and resentfully in the same room; the American, with his clean socks and unopened textbooks, is naïve in this new country. Without a single block of exposition on colonialism, the reader has a vivid sense of who holds power, who serves, who is watched, and how precarious it all is.

And finally, clever detail tracks thought. The pages where we follow the detective’s chain of reasoning, or the lover’s self‑deceiving internal monologue, are also descriptive writing – accounts of a mind at work.

Take any descriptive sentence in your draft and ask: is it placing the reader, embodying action, situating character, carrying evidence, revealing a relationship or tracking thought? If your description is fulfilling none of these, or indeed too much of one, you might conclude that your writing, although pretty, may be redundant.

At this point a student might object: what about writers whose work is almost nothing but description? In Cormac McCarthy’s masterpiece Blood Meridian, for example, you can read whole pages of landscape and weather.

Early in the novel, he writes:

“He turned and placed one hand on the wooden cantle and looked toward the sun where it sat new risen above the bald and flyspecked mountains to the east. The floor of the playa lay smooth and unbroken by any track and the mountains in their blue islands stood footless in the void like floating temples.”

Later he writes of the dawn as “pale streaks of light and then a deeper run of color like blood seeping up in sudden reaches,” until the sun appears, “squat and pulsing and malevolent behind them.”

The sentences are long, there is little or no punctuation, the imagery is extravagant. You could strip this down to “The sun rose over the mountains” and get on with more important things. But every clause here is tightening the novel’s atmosphere of violence and strangeness. The poetic cadence and attention to detail – the objects and people that make up this lost world of the frontier – is the novel’s point. McCarthy is a master; bad luck if you can’t do that yourself.

On the other hand, Simenon’s Maigret novels are admirable because of their economy, moving swiftly from clue to clue. How can both be “good” when they appear to be opposed on the question of description?

Maigret is in a small café, “waiting patiently, gazing absently at the soothing décor of the little café, its pewter counter and its familiar bottles and labels… the same bottle labels he used to see in the village inn as a child.” It’s a modest description, fixing him in a specific, unglamorous Paris. At the same time, it gives us a glimpse into his childhood. The detail is doing three jobs at once: place, character and thought.

McCarthy’s pages of description and Simenon’s single line seem opposed – baroque versus bare – but they share an underlying discipline. Neither is merely decorative. The detail is there because the story requires this particular sensation or mood.

There is a key moment in a writer’s life when you stop writing in the style you consider novels should sound like, and start writing to entertain yourself.

One reason I often recommend young prose writers read good screenplays is that a script is ruthless about description. There simply isn’t room. A screenplay has to give the director and actors just enough to imagine the scene; the rest belongs to the camera and the actors.

Take the script of Alien. On the page, the film’s world is conjured in a few clipped, almost haiku‑like lines:

“SPACE – Deep, cold, and silent. Stars glitter. Against them drifts a tiny scrap of technology.
CLOSER – It is the Nostromo, a battered commercial starship.”

Later, an interior:

“A central space, laid out like a scaled‑down shopping mall with no styling flourishes. Tough faces. Work‑scarred hands.”

The movie we remember is lush in detail – the dripping chains, the steam, the grime, the creature itself – but the script doesn’t attempt to catalogue it. A handful of precise nouns and one or two charged adjectives, and then it trusts the reader’s eye.

When you’re revising descriptive passages in prose, read them as if you were operating a camera. How long would the shot stay here? At what point would you cut away, follow the character out of the room, move down the corridor? If the prose remains gazing lovingly at the wallpaper two beats after the camera would have moved on, you may be indulging yourself at the expense of your audience.

Good screenwriting, like the Alien script, proceeds by choosing the one or two details that fix the image in the mind and then moving on. It is not that films are less rich; it is that the richness happens in collaboration with other departments: set, costume, lighting, performance. Prose writers have to do all of that alone, with sentences. The temptation is to compensate with quantity rather than precision. Put the telling thing on the page, and be confident in the few descriptions you give.

Ask yourself: does a particular sentence make the page more or less alive? You cannot outsource this judgment to a teacher or a set of rules. It is ultimately your aesthetic sense, your vision of the world, that will tell you when enough is enough.

As a teacher, I like to be critical – that is the point of creative writing instruction – but without destroying the writer’s confidence. I do not see it as my role to go through a student’s work line by line with a red pen; I would rather give them a way of seeing their own pages anew.

The point here is that the writer is writing to entertain an audience rather than to admire their own sentences. The whole point of writing is to trap the curiosity of the reader, not to drive the reader away.