How to Write Effective Description & Imagery | Writing Tips

it involves the narrator's body, it involves the senses, it is such a powerful, surprising and revealing

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that it tells me everything I need to know about the setting without even describing it. Now K-Ming Chang could equally have taken the more obvious approach and said, "You will take a job in a slot machine factory on the outskirts of Chengdu, a city that has buildings like this and weather like this" and described it in a way more concrete. Form and concreteness are good, but what he has done here is that he has taken the abstract qualities of the city and presented them in a concrete way.

He has taken the abstract feeling of the place and synthesized it into a physical experience and it is incredible. It is a great use of sensory

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and revealing, truthful and interesting

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. Now, one thing that people ask a lot about

description

is how do I fit into the story, like how do I make it flow? This is a question I've seen a lot: How do I make my description flow? And it's a difficult question to answer because I mean there are many ways to make the description flow, and it's a very intuitive thing that really relies on your best judgment.

Typically with description you won't get a solid block of description without anything else around it, and I think the best way to think about integrating your description into the story is to make it active and characterful. The best descriptions will reveal something about the character, using their actions, their perceptions, and their emotional biases. His emotional reactions will be one of the best ways to integrate the description into the story so that it does more than just tell us how things are. I think it's a missed opportunity to see description as something very utilitarian, something that is simply there to tell us how things are so we can continue with the story.

Description is an integral part of the story and can tell us much more about a character, about a situation, about a story, beyond how things look. The way your character sees and describes the world can reveal a lot about them. Now I want to address some advice that I see a lot and that I think is really bad advice. Now, is any writing advice bad? I don't know, this is writing advice that doesn't convince me. So I see it said a lot that characters won't notice things that wouldn't be important to them, so for example, if you walk into a room and it's full of sports memorabilia but you know nothing about sports and you don't care about sports, You won't notice it, you won't describe it.

Don't they see things that aren't directly relevant to their interests? If I walk into a room full of sports memorabilia, it's not that the walls are blank to me because I don't care about sports, I just won't have the language to describe them so specifically. I'm not going to know who the players are whose pennants are hanging on the wall. I'm not going to have any emotional attachment to it, I'm going to know that I'm in a room with someone I probably don't have. a lot in common with. We have very different interests. But it's not that I'm not going to see it and it's not that I'm not going to describe it.

That doesn't mean that if your character who knows nothing about sports walks into this room he shouldn't describe all the sports memories, he can still describe them, it'll just be with a very different tone than if the person walking in is like an avid sports enthusiast. sports. The tone will be very different, the language will be quite different. Using a character's actions is a great way to integrate description into the narrative. Using physical cues that your character gives you or that another character gives you can be a great transition for your description. If you have to describe a tree, describing it alone can work in some cases, but knowing how the description of that tree fits into the movement of the scene can be much more

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.

Knowing where the character is standing in relation to the tree, if he is doing something in relation to the tree, like if your character is about to start climbing the tree, that will give you action to jump. It will give you a very natural point from which to build the description. I just wanted to give you a little example of some description integrated with action, so you don't really feel like you're reading a description but you're getting a lot of descriptive language. This is from A Tale of Wolves by Emily Fridlund, one of my favorite novels.

I've talked at length about this novel and how much I love it, and the writing in it is really beautiful but accessible. I think it's just a masterclass in language and atmospheric tension. As you will see, action is happening and we get a description based on the rhythms of the scene. "Mr. Grierson treated the odyssey of history as if we both knew it was an arduous task. He secretly wanted to win. He was determined to see a wolf. At night I went out in mukluks, a balaclava, and my father's down jacket, It smelled like her, with tobacco, mold and bitter coffee.

It was like using her body while she slept, like earning the right to her presence, silence and volume. I sat in an old ice bucket near the farthest fish house. and I drank boiled water from the thermos, but it was rare to see a wolf here so late in the winter. The only thing I saw were distant logs writhing with crows. In the end I had to settle for a dead one. snow to the forest service nature center, where I studied the gentle dog in the lobby, with her glass eyes and coral nails, her black cheeks sunken back in what looked like a smile, Peg, the naturalist there, made a smile.

He pouted when he saw me try to touch the wolf's tail. "Uh uh," she scolded me. She gave me gummy bears and taxidermy techniques, she told me how to sculpt eyelids with clay and muscles with polyurethane foam. "Iron the skin, iron the skin," she warned me. "There's a lot of really impeccable writing here. So here we have things that the character is doing well, he's going out to see a wolf. He actually has a goal, so there's that drive, it's not just mindless wandering. We get that description of what he's wearing and we get that wisdom about his father's jacket.

We don't just say he's wearing a down jacket, but what it looks like, we don't just tell us what it smells like, but we understand that wisdom. : "it was like using his body while he slept, like earning the right to his presence, silence and volume," which is a revealing detail about the character and is a great example of using description as a way to reveal psychology. of the character, you know, we're learning about her based on the description of a jacket, rather than just being told that there are distant logs writhing with crows, which is an interesting image active is through the context of a scene. through the context in which she has a goal.

She is looking for a wolf. So, overall, I think this is a really strong paragraph, it's not pure description, but a description combined with an interesting narrative and with movement, with scene, with movement, with character. The description is not there just to tell us how things look, how they smell, but it is there to move the story. The description here is part of the narrative movement, so you won't feel like you're reading a description, because the description does more than just describe, which is what makes a good description. It doesn't just describe how things look, it's part of the movement of the narrative and part of the depth of the narrative.

Another really important quality of a good description is that it is well edited and economical. This almost relates more to the writing style in general. I think it's not a bold statement to say that if your description isn't well edited, it probably won't be as

effective

. Learning how to edit lines effectively is what will help your style shine. One thing a lot of people will say when you talk about line editing and you talk about all the things you can eliminate from your work, like, okay, you can eliminate all these weasel words, you can eliminate these filters, these are weak. verbs, etc., etc.

You talk about all the weak builds you can eliminate, one thing a lot of people will say in response is, well, you're just editing your style. But in reality you are doing the opposite. Your style is not based on weak words, your style is not based on the word alone, your style is not based on the word itself, your style will be based on the strong aspects of your work. So when you eliminate the weak aspects, your style can really shine. I remember a teacher talking about this in my first fiction workshop and we were a couple of months into the fiction workshop and she said, "it's really exciting because I'm starting to see all of your styles shine.

You know, at first." of the semester they all had the same style because they all made the same mistakes, they all had all this mess in their writing and what they were doing is just burying their style now that they've been undone. of the mess through which your style can really shine, and now you all have a distinctive and unique voice." So, learning how to edit lines will help your descriptions a lot. I'll leave   some of my line editing videos in the description And finally, a good description is nice to read. I think it's a mistake to see description as something utilitarian that is there to serve its purpose of telling us how things are and then moving on with your life. of the pleasure of a piece, it can itself be something beautiful and interesting to read.

Reframing the description as something that alone can be interesting, beautiful, effective and fun to read will really help take your descriptions to the next level. into descriptive writing itself, rather than simply seeing descriptive writing as something that should be there to serve a purpose, but is not the most interesting aspect of the story. It doesn't have to be inherently boring or slow; can be inherently interesting and attractive. Especially when you start using your description to further work the story and reveal more about the character, using it as a way to explore subtle emotional states can help you take your description to the next level because the description will be working. much more in your work.

I think with good description the reader can take away something beyond the visual sense, whether they consciously perceive it or not, you know it's feeding into other aspects of the story and even just on a linguistic level like language itself can be. part of the pleasure of reading a piece. That's all for this video! Thanks so much for watching, if you have any questions you can always send me a question on tumblr and I'll see you in another video. Bye