250 Things You Should Know About Writing (9 page)

You can use description to create or enhance mood, sure. That is, I think, why some writers try to describe the weather -- "Oh! It's thundering, and so I'm creating a mood of
impending doom
." Really? You can't do any better? It’s thunder or nothing? Here's the thing: you can describe something in a way that is both meaningful to the story
and
conveys mood. Were you interested in stirring up a pervasive mood of
rot and decay
, you could describe the rust on the character's gun, or some skin disorder he's suffering. Those things can affect the plot (the gun eventually jams, the skin disorder worsens). Description there serves both mood
and
story.

Walk into a room. Preferably one with which you're not intimately familiar. Look around for 30 seconds. Time that shit. Don't wing it. Then walk out. Wait five minutes. Make some toast. Pour a drink. Pet the dog. Masturbate wantonly. After five minutes, write down those details you believe are
essential
to capturing the "roomness" of that room. Write down as many details as you'd like. By the end, cut it down to three. Then cut it down to one. Just to see. How’d you do? You failed. F+. I’m kidding. I could never fail you. Not as long as you keep sending me checks.

Stories often rely on critical details that come out through description. A facial tic. A bomb under the table. A mysterious artifact known as the "Astronaut's Anal Beads." But some writers bury critical details in a mushy glop of description. Don't bury the things the audience needs to know. Highlight them. Make them stand out. I don't want to get to page 156 and say, "Whoa whoa whoa, the antagonist only has one hand? Shouldn't I have known that?" and then it turns out that yes, you told me back on page 32, but you told me in the middle of a generally descriptive paragraph. Blah blah blah, red hair, nice shoes, one hand, big belt buckle, fat thumbs, blah blah blah.

My eyes catch onto dialogue like a hangnail on a fuzzy sweater. My eyes slide over big patches of description like a fat guy going down a log flume greased with bacon fat. Description is like sex with someone unpleasant: get in, get the job done, get out. We call that a "combat landing."

No, “word-hammer” is not a euphemism for your penis. My penis, yes. Your penis, no. What I’m saying is, shatter descriptive passages like toffee -- break it into pieces. Incorporate it into dialogue and action. Description doesn't need to exist as if time stands still so the protagonist can "take it all in." He can be running, talking, scheming, hiding -- the details he notices are the details
he has to notice
, and thus, are the details the reader must notice, too.

Purple prose is the act of gussying up your words so that they sound more poetic. (Of course, that misunderstands poetry as some flowery, haughty thing.) If you dress up your language in such frills and frippery, you stand in the way of your own story. You do nothing but sound haughty, ludicrous, or some combination of the two. And yes, I said "frippery." If that's too purple for you, then pretend I said, "If you dress your language up in a bedazzled prom gown and give it a gaudy spray-tan..." Put differently: use the words that live inside your head. And if the words that live inside your head are those of an sentimental Victorian troubadour, then please close your head in a door jamb until you kill all that overwrought prose in an act of brain damage.

If you need to take the time to describe something, then aim for specifics. You can't just tell me it was a
dog
. I don't know what to do with that. Big dog? Little dog? Mutt? Pit bull? Rat terrier? Big-balled bulldog? Just telling me
what the thing is
goes a long way toward helping me place that object, character, or situation into the context of the story you're telling. Was she a leggy blonde? Was he a dumpy child? Description doesn't need to be long or drawn out to matter. It just needs to be specific.

See what I did there? I used
metaphor
to describe metaphor. That's how a writer does things. That's some hard-ass penmonkey trickery, son. What?
What
? You gonna step? You gonna front all up in my face-grill? Ahem. Sorry. Where was I? Right. Metaphor takes a
mundane part of the story
and connects it to the
larger experience of the audience
. It says, "this little thing is like this bigger thing, this
other
thing." Metaphor is less about fact and more about feel.

They're not wrong to
use
. But like I said, metaphors aren't about fact. They provide inaccurate information, but offer instead keen artistic and figurative data. When I say, "On our sales team, Bob's the last sled dog in the line -- always got a butthole view of the world," nobody really expects that Bob is a dog, or that during a sales conference he's staring down the poop-chute of a snow-covered Malamute. Metaphors have power
because
they're wildly inaccurate, because they take two very unlike things and bring them together in the reader's mind.

A metaphor has to make some motherfucking sense. "Man, working night-shift is a real can of ear-wax, isn't it?" What? What does that mean? That doesn't mean anything. Maybe
you
mean something, maybe
you
have some keen understanding of night work and... cans... of ear-wax (can you buy ear-wax in cans?), but the reader doesn't grok your lingo. That's why a metaphor bridges a part of the story with the
reader
experience, not with
your
experience as an author. Everybody needs to get the metaphor. The Thing That Is Like Another Thing must share an essential truth. That's the connective tissue.

Metaphors allow description to transcend a mere accounting, but even still, sometimes I just want to know if the girl has long legs or if the gun is loaded. Not everything needs to be a metaphor.

Using clichés makes Description Jesus turn water not into wine, but into starving ferrets that crawl up inside your bowels and eat your body from the inside out. "He ran like the wind?" Yeah, well, I kicked your nuts like a soccer ball. You're a writer. It's your job to avoid clichés, not run into them with your head.

You don't need to rely on visuals. Many writers do. So you shouldn't. You have four other senses and so do your characters, so use them. Actually, there's a sixth sense, too: common sense. Common sense says you shouldn't overdo the "other senses" thing, and further, should only do so when it's appropriate. You might see or smell a donkey, but you don't taste it. Or you might touch it. Mmm. Yeah. Yeah, baby. Touch the donkey. Go on. Do it. What? Ohh. Uhh. Nothing. Please don’t call the police.

Creating a new monster out of nothing? Inventing some wretched clockwork gewgaw whose flywheel mechanism could destroy the world? Unfolding a whole new fantasy realm or planetary scape? This is when it becomes tempting to hunker down and
describe the unholy shit
out of stuff. Resist this temptation. I know. You're thinking, "But how will the audience know what I'm talking about? This creature, the Dreaded Horvasham Gorblim, has
never before existed
. The audience won't know that his horns are studded with thorns, or that his nipples look like crispy pepperoni. I have to build this monster for them. On the page.
Inside their head
." No, seriously, resist the urge. By not going much further than "thorny horns and crispy pepperoni nipples," you've already created an image in your head of the beast. So too have you pictured the wretched clockwork flywheel gewgaw. Like I said: the audience is willing to work. They will carry your water.

Novelists could learn a thing or two from the brevity of description found in screenplays. Therein you will find short collapsed descriptive nuggets that still manage to paint the picture and get the story moving. Further, screenwriters could learn a thing or two from novelists. Remember, screenwriters: your script needs to be
readable
before it needs to be
filmable
. It lives in the reader's head before it ever makes it to screen. Description must feel alive.

That's an old Greek idea, right? "Everything in moderation?" Of course, those guys were all huffing Zeus juice and banging pegasuses. Pegasi? Fuck, I don't know. Point is, description is a powerful tool in your narrative kit because, as it turns out, readers like you to help set the stage inside the theater of their minds. You can underdo it. You can overdo it. You need to walk the line, look at the shape of your page. Sentences or small paragraphs punctuated by stretches of dialogue and/or action is certainly a good shape for which to strive. Find the middle path and you shall appease the reader.

The first draft is basically just you flailing around and throwing up. All subsequent drafts are you taking that throw-up and molding it into shape. Except, ew, that's gross. Hm. Okay. Let's pretend you're the Greek God Hephaestus, then. You throw up a
lump of hot iron
, and that's your first draft. The rewrites are when you forge that regurgitated iron into a sword that will slay your enemies. Did Hephaestus puke up metal? He probably did. Greek myths are weird.

Pipe breaks. Water damage. Carpet, pad, floor, ceiling on the other side, furniture. You can't fix that with duct tape and good wishes. Can't just repair the pipe. You have to get in there. Tear shit out. Demolish. Obliterate.
Replace
. Your story is like that. Sometimes you find something that's broken through and through: a cancer. And a cancer needs to be cut out. New flesh grown over excised tissue.

You will do more damage to you work by being merciful. Go in cold. Emotionless. Scissors in one hand, silenced pistol in the other. The manuscript is not human. You are free to torture it wantonly until it yields what you require. You'd be amazed at how satisfying it is when you break a manuscript and force it to kneel.

I'm not saying this needs to be the case, and it sounds horrible
now
, but just wait: if your final draft looks nothing like your first draft, for some bizarre-o fucking reason you feel really accomplished. It's the same way I look at myself now and I'm all like, "Hey, awesome, I'm not a baby anymore." I mean, except for the diaper. What? It's convenient. Don't judge me, Internet.
Even though that's all you know
. *sob*

Take time away from the manuscript before you go at it all tooth-and-claw. You need time. You need to wash that man right out of your hair. Right now, you either love it too much or hate its every fiber. You're viewing it as the writer. You need to view it as a reader, as a distant third-party editor flying in from out of town and who damn well don't give a fuck. From subjective to objective. Take a month if you can afford it. Or write something else: even a short story will serve as a dollop of sorbet on your brain-tongue to cleanse the mind-palate. Anything to shift perspective from "writer" to "reader."

You'll know if it's not time to edit. Here's a sign: you go to tackle the edit and it feels like your head and heart are filled with bees. You don't know where to start. You're thinking of either just walking away forever or planting a narrative suitcase bomb in the middle of the story and blowing it all to H-E-Double-Hockey-Sticks. That means you're not ready. You're too bugfuck to go forward. Ease off the throttle, hoss. Come back another time, another way. Cool down.

Editing, revising, rewriting requires a certain mindset. That mindset is, "I am excited to destroy the enemy that resists good fiction, I am ready to fix all the shit that I broke, I am eager to shave off barnacles and burn off fat and add layers of laser-proof steel and get this motherfucker in fit fighting shape so that no other story may stand before it." You gotta be hungry to fuck up your own work in the name of good storytelling.