Here's the scene: your private eye needs to meet her contact at a local bar so she can get some vital information before it's too late. She bursts in the door and scans the crowd frantically until she sees him hunched in the corner... but as she heads towards him, she sees her nemesis standing near the pay phones, scanning the room as well. Can she get to her contact and get the information before her nemesis spots her? The stakes are high, the pace is fast, and yet.....
Look, you've imagined this scene for months. You have it so well-envisioned that you could list off what beers are on tap, if necessary. You know what everyone's wearing, where they're coming from, what their deepest desires are; heck, you could describe the type of varnish on the wooden bar if you had to. But every single descriptive choice is a negative choice: whatever it adds to the scene in terms of color, it detracts in pace and slackens the tension you've so carefully built up. This is a scene about speed, and you can't afford to waste a single word. What do you do?
This isn't a new or especially unique issue: efficient description is an issue that various writers have attempted to tackle as long as literature has existed. This isn't to say that florid, excessive writing can't be effective, but it has to be balanced against other concerns: our little hard-boiled thriller needs to be tight. Most seasoned writers and editors will probably tell you to cut the scene down to its bare bones, which is good advice in itself, but doesn't give you much guidance about what to add. And that's what today's diary is about...
Let's get one thing straight from the beginning: you're not going to be able to get every detail in your head onto the page. Writing is, in many ways, an act of faith in your reader. You provide some fleeting details and trust your reader to fill in the rest. Your reader's bar will have its own beers on tap and its own wooden varnish, but unless it ruins some absolutely necessary aspect of your scene, that's okay: let them have their own details, too.
Still, you do need to convey some things: if you don't provide anything, the characters run the risk of becoming empty ciphers and the setting a generic backdrop. So the ideal choice in this case is the telling detail, the minimum amount of description that yields the maximum amount of resonance. They may say very little literally, but they are pregnant with implied meanings or associations that help the reader form a fuller picture of the setting or character without having to go into great detail. Telling details can take many different forms, so let's look at a few examples:
"[Billy Pilgrim] was tall and weak, and shaped like a bottle of Coca-Cola." Vonnegut's description gains extra oomph not just through the originality of the comparison, but through the associations (like banality) we have with the object itself. It's ostensibly about physical shape, but it's effectively about so much more.
"[Scrooge] carried his own cold temperature always about with him." Dickens isn't exactly known for holding back on the descriptive language (one of the pleasures of Dickens is the way he unspools his grotesqueries across pages), but this one pithy line about Scrooge already encapsulates his most important features, no?
"Other people came to see pictures; go to the opera; take their daughters out; the Whitbreads came 'to see doctors.'" I know these people. You know these people. Also note that Woolf personifies them without appealing to the five senses: this is a description of activity, and it's just as effective (we probably have a mental image of them, even though there's nothing physically described.)
"One that loved not wisely, but too well." One of my favorite lines of Shakespeare, because it's so good it nearly renders the rest of the play moot: everything you need to know about Othello is right here, and the more time you roll around in the line, the richer a description it seems.
"...a man with beetling brows over eyes which seemed to be saying with a wink, 'Come into the next room, my friend, for I have something to say to you'." It's hard to pick just one quote from Gogol's Dead Souls, which is a cornucopia of evocative little details like this; note that Gogol doesn't even tell you what the character does, but what it looks like he'd do... And yet, we know exactly what he means.
If you have any other favorites, share them in the comments!
Naturally there's no one-size-fits-all solution for this kind of issue, and it's often appropriate to drown out a paragraph or two in descriptive detail if you're going for a different effect, but if you've got problems with pacing, and you know you need to cut your manuscript down to the barest of bones, then the efficient little details like this will help you get as much as possible across while minimizing damage to the plot.
So let's give this a whirl: let's take a short passage (no more than 100 words) and focus on keeping the pace brisk. You can follow our detective to the bar, or our would-be heroes chasing the Jewel of Tagogmagog, or whatever suits your fancy. But whichever you chose, try to describe 1) the setting and 2) at least one character with the minimum number of words possible, never losing the forward propulsion of the plot. Give us a lot while doing little! It's a good exercise, at any rate.
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