Stephen King's Guide To Writing Description
Lesson from "On Writing" by Stephen King
If you want to be a successful writer, you must be able to describe the images you see in your mind.
Description is what makes the reader a sensory participant in the story.
It starts with what you want the reader to experience and ends with translating the images in your mind with words on the page.
Underdescription leaves the reader feeling nearsighted.
Overdescription buries the reader in details and images.
The trick is to find a happy medium.
It’s important to know what to describe and what can be left alone while you get on with your main job: telling a story.
How To Describe Characters:
Good description usually consists of a few wellchosen details that will stand for everything else.
Stepehen King advises writers to avoid overly describing the physical characteristics of characters and what they’re wearing.
Spare the hero’s sharply intelligent blue eyes and outthrust determined chin; likewise the heroine’s arrogant cheekbones.
King would rather let the reader supply the faces, the builds, and the clothing as well.
Carrie Example:
Carrie White is a high school outcast with a bad complexion and a fashion-victim wardrobe.
It’s up to the reader to fill in the details.
We all remember high school; if King describes his specific memories too much then a little of of the bond of understanding between the writer and reader is lost.
Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.
How To Describe Locations:
The same principle for characters applies to locations: a meal is as good as a feast.
All descriptions should be in service to immersing readers in the story.
When it comes to description, a writer wants to open all his senses.
Stephen King provides an example describing one of his favorite restaruants in New York, Palm Too.
The first four things that come to his mind are:
a. The darkness of the bar and the contrasting brightness of the backbar mirror, which catches and reflects light from the street.
b. The sawdust on the floor.
c. The funky cartoon caricatures on the walls.
d. The smells of cooking food.
Here’s how it would translate onto the page:
After the hot clarity of Second Avenue, Palm Too was as dark as a cave. The backbar mirror picked up some of the street-glare and glimmered in the gloom like a mirage. For a moment it was all Billy could see, and then his eyes began to adjust. There were a few solitary drinkers at the bar. Beyond them, the maître d', his tie undone and his shirt cuffs rolled back to show his hairy wrists, was talking with the bartender. There was still sawdust sprinkled on the floor, Billy noted, as if this were a twenties speakeasy instead of a millennium eatery where you couldn’t smoke, let alone spit a gob of tobacco between your feet. And the cartoons dancing across the walls—gossip-column cariactures of downtown political hustlers, newsmen who had long since retired or drunk themselves to death, celebrities you couldn’t quite recognize—still gambolled all the way to the ceiling. The air was redolent of steak and fried onions. All of it the same as it ever was.
More about the restaurant would slow the pace of the story.
This could potentially annoy readers and break the spell good fiction can weave.
In many cases a reader puts a story aside because it “got boring.”
The boredome arose because the writer grew enchanted with his powers of description and lost sight of his priority, which is to keep the story moving.
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