How I Write Fiction: Description (Winter Solstice 2016)

Vanishing Point

As the year of writing essays draws to a close, we end up where we started at Imbolc, writing lines. The goal of description is to lift the fog in the reader’s mind and allow her to see the story. Through it, details emerge that make a story come alive.

By the time I sit down to spin an idea from the magic box into a story, I usually have at least a rough outline of the plot, if only in my head. I have a sense of the world it is set in. I know the main characters. I might even have some snippets of dialog. Description is the glue that binds it all together, the final piece of the puzzle slipped in place. In ways, it is the creation of the story itself.

Like wishes from a magic ring, the best things come in threes. I write stories in three distinct waves or drafts. The first involves getting the ideas down from start to finish unobstructed though sometimes incomplete. The second cleans up the first, filling in any holes, deepening it and making it resonate. The third cuts out the excess to make it flow and polishes it until it shines.

I start the first draft by working in a notebook. Writing longhand slows down any stray thoughts and allows a voice to surface. It focuses my mind on the story as I start to hear that narrative voice in my head. The morning I first sit down with pencil and paper, I try to write out at least a few pages without interruption. I keep writing until the words eventually run out. By then, my mind is buzzing with phrases and descriptions for several more scenes in the outline. I note as many of these as I can.

The downside of writing longhand is the duplication of effort as I then have to type in what I’ve written. When I sit down at the computer, I usually abandon the notebook. Once the voice is set, the story begins to flow by itself. But if I get stuck or discouraged or end up being away from a story for a prolonged period (as happens much too often), I’ll return to the notebook again to see what comes out. It’s a surprisingly effective tool for getting past writer’s block.

Because my hand is slower than my thoughts, writing longhand gives my mind a chance to ruminate just a bit between words as my fingers catch up with the images my muse has conjured. There is something meditative about the process, and more than a bit ironic. By slowing down, I speed up the overall time it takes to write a story down.

Writing longhand also puts effective curbs on my desire to edit while creating. Those two processes should always be kept distinct. Once you start cutting and polishing, you’ll want to do more, which means your mind will have switched from a imaginative mode to a critical one. Those are two separate mental spaces. Once your inner critic kicks in, your muse will flee back to her sanctuary.

Unlike most writing advice I’ve read about first drafts, I don’t just power through mine. Many books will tell you to just keep moving. If you stumble with a question or an unknown, leave it blank, note it and move on. You can revisit it in the next draft.

I don’t work that way. It’s not my process. When I get stuck on some aspect of filling in the plot, or getting a character from A to B, or often even envisioning a location, I almost always address it right then. Small details I note and let go, just not anything central to the overarching storyline.

That’s a dangerous path, but if I don’t solve the problem right away, it will niggle at me and ultimately slow my progress to a crawl. My mind knows something is wrong and can’t keep from worrying it like a polished stone. Perhaps that’s the engineer in me. Or my mind just works step by step, knowing where each foot will fall upon the path before lifting it. Your mileage may vary.

That’s not to say that there isn’t still work to be done after my first draft. There certainly is. It’s just that my first drafts are perhaps more evolved than some others.

In the second draft, I begin to sweat the small details. This is where I try to deepen my arguments by reinforcing both descriptions and the metaphors and symbols underlying them.

Specifically the descriptions of locations. In general, I have to be able to see the places I write about in my mind, large or small, from city streets to individual rooms in individual houses. I have to know exactly where that place is. Some locations are based on my memory of places I’ve been, others on pictures I seen or have in front of me, a few on impressions from other peoples accounts. Many locations end up being fusions of two or three different places.

As an example, the Stack Maze in Interdiction was based on a housing complex called Habitat 67 in Montreal that caught my imagination when I first saw a picture of it in my Art and Architecture textbook in college. I combined that with the container stacks I’d seen in ports and morphed it all with the idea of constructing homes from castoff containers used to ship supplies to a colony.

And just as with characters, place names are important to me. In more than one story, I’ve chosen a location as a setting from a road atlas just because the name itself had some underlying meaning, either as a symbol or a metaphor. As another example, in Aluria’s Tale, the main human character first encounters main genetically modified feline character just outside Roswell, Georgia. Why? Because where better to discover a secret, near alien species hidden by the government than a place called Roswell.

For some stories, I’ll make up place names based on underlying linguistics. So in the Celtic area of the fantasy world surrounding the city of Dirkham, you might run across Mil Tober (literally honey well in Scots Gaelic place name lore) or Dun Aird (high fort). Or, you might cross the River Afon on the ferry at Harper. All of which I hope evokes a particular look and feel even if the reader doesn’t understand the direct meaning, which I almost never call out in the story. Sometimes, as with Scots Gaelic or Welsh place name conventions, readers may subconsciously pick up those naming patterns over time (like caer being a castle or kil being a church).

As I said, I need to be able see each location and scene in my mind, even if I don’t describe it. I need to know if the end table with the open book on it next to the chair in Peacekeeper is round or square or triangular. I need to know whether the chair itself, which is unmentioned, is overstuffed or wing backed or a recliner or just a simple hard-back. While I rarely go into that level of detail, I need to be able to see it in case it ends up being important down the road and it needs to be described. Strange, I know. But again, that’s just the way my mind works. 

By the time I finish the second draft, there should be no questions left unanswered, no matter how minor. And any changes from the first draft, from place names to the content of a character’s pockets to the underlying metaphor of her grandmother’s gold promise ring sewn beneath the beltline of her fatigues as emergency currency should be woven back in from the very beginning. Those metaphors and symbols need to resonate. By the time it’s finished, the second draft should read clean from front to back.

Only once it does I begin the process of crafting and carving the third and final draft from it. Just as with sculpting, the idea here is to remove material and polish what you leave behind.

The goal is strictly editing. It is the process of deciding what needs to be in a story and what is better left out. To a large degree, in fiction less is more. Finding the right balance is what allows prose to shine. 

In general, there are a few items I focus on. One is smoothing the transitions. In many cases description and dialog are stitched together from separate pieces of writing on separate days as, again, that’s how my mid works. So making sure those seams are invisible, if they aren’t already, is my first goal. 

Another area I target for review is where I move the characters around. Many times while writing my mind wants to say a character went from A to B to C to D in a logical progression, where in reality all I need is a scene break between A and D because B and C add nothing to the narrative. Sometimes that scene break serves as a time break as well where going into details of what the character did for the intervening three hours is either unimportant or can be summarized with something like she cleaned her gun and then drove to the rendezvous. 

Next, I dwell on words I might not have been mindful of when the first draft spilled out. At this stage, a quality dictionary and thesaurus are essential. Some words I find should be more precise rather than the general ones I used. In other cases it’s just the opposite, a simpler word will do. Often I’ll look up the meaning of a more exotic word to make sure I’m using it right, even if it’s only through a secondary meaning. Or I’ll peruse the etymology of a word to see if there is a nuance in its history that I want to exploit.

I try to cut out every unnecessary word. Adjectives, adverbs, whole descriptive phrases at times. Sometimes sentences or entire sections. The goal is to make certain the words that remain have the most impact. Sometimes that requires addition rather than subtraction.  As well, I look for places where I reuse the same word or phrase unintentionally within a short space and find an alternative.

Finally, once I think it’s ready, I read the piece aloud, just as I do with an essay or a poem. Here I’m listening for any burrs, any phrases that I consistently stumble over. Or places where I continue to reverse word order from what’s on the page. In both cases, I think my mind is trying to tell me something so I try to heed it.

Only when I get a clean read do I print it out and hand it over to my beta reader for her assessment, critique and editorial comments. And after I address and incorporate her notes, I read the piece one last time on the physical page to make sure I haven’t missed anything. Sadly, I still often do. 

In my experience, a story tends to grow from the first draft to the second and then shrink from the second to the third. But the third draft is almost always longer than the first (unless I’m writing under a strict word limit).

To reiterate, first draft gets the story down. The second draft deepens it. The third draft oils it and makes it hum.

Of course, each of these drafts may well encompass more than a single iteration of their own. I don’t tend to work that way, but many writers talk about multiple, sometimes double digit drafts just to get their stories where they want them. As I mentioned, I tend to worry over each aspect as it comes up so I don’t have to redo work. In the end, the time of our journeys may be much the same. Many paths, one mountain.

As I said at the onset, the goal of description is to lift the fog in the reader’s mind and allow her to see the story. Images should form in her head. She should believe the places the characters move through could be real. She should feel as though the world continues to shift behind the falling curtain even when there is no character there to witness the evolution. The characters themselves should seem like real people to her, friends, enemies or simply interesting strangers in a coffee shop. They should have ticks and nuances that anchor them but not so heavily as to weigh them down.

The moment you lift that fog for her, when she tells you she can read the names of the boats in the marina as she passed each on the dock, that she can hear the conspiratorial whispers of your characters in one of the cabins over the gentle lap of waves and the distant, intermittent fog horn, that she can smell the sea mixed with death and diesel and the scent stale fish, that she can feel the veil of mist open the pores on her face even as it departs and taste the salt as its lingering tears run to the corners of her mouth, then and only then can you can officially call yourself a writer.

But even then, your journey has only just begun.

© 2016 Edward P. Morgan III