Description: A Necessary Evil

As I was editing my “Rainbow Drafts” this week, I realized something that I have never thought about before.

I suck at description.

This fact had never occurred to me. I’d read plenty of Charles Dickens and Robert Lewis Stevenson. Shoot, I’d even mimicked their excessive use of description in my own work. Granted that didn’t really turn out in my favor.

What can I say? It was my younger, more formative years. I had been in the process of revising my latest little piece I’d been engrossed in. I realized I had neglected description in my work — and I had been reading a lot of Dickens lately — so one thing led to another and…

Yeah, looking back on that work, those Dicken-isms don’t blend all that well. Imagine if you will, a typical middle schooler’s writing style then a page long sentence about how a character’s swirling blue eyes looked sad.

I try to forget that time in my life.

Needless to say, I still battle with using description. Lately, I’ve strayed away from over describing and have now simply neglected adding description altogether.

I thought that was what all good writers did, after all. Guy de Maupassant’s “The Necklace” hardly describes anything at all. We get no idea as to what the main character looks like, nor the setting she interacts with throughout the piece. That’s good writing. That’s sophisticated. If Maupassant can get by without description, then perhaps I can too.

Let’s just say I’m no Maupassant.

The thing is, some stories work better without description, but horror and description go hand in hand. 

It Was A Dark And Stormy Night.

For a reader to fully understand the danger of a setting, they have to first understand what that setting looks and feels like. Imagine taking a tour of a haunted house, seeing all the haunts and scares but without glasses on. Not all that scary when you have no idea what you’re looking at, right?

Imagine Dracula, but without his castle. The Wolf Man without his graveyard laced with rolling fog.

Not the same effect as when you see them within the context of a setting.

Setting As A Theme

Most good description works on multiple levels. Description helps place the setting, but it also clues the reader into the tone and the major themes of the story. 

A great example in cinema would be the 1963 film, “The Haunting”. The establishing shots reveal the setting and describe the house in such a way that makes the viewer feel uneasy. The angles are off-putting — there’s something wrong, but it just looks like an ordinary building. This use of description plays into the major theme of the movie: are the ghosts real or just in the main character’s imagination.

Wait. What Is Going On?

Perhaps the most important part of description is to ground the characters in a physical scene. This is especially true for horror. So the axe murderer is chasing a blonde. She slips. She falls and hits her head. The axe murderer creeps up before her and…

You probably can guess the rest.

Great, but what did she slip on? A loose tree root? A muddy trail? Wrong! That scene was in a fast food joint and she slipped on a stray chicken nugget. Bet you didn’t see that coming.

Well the joke’s on me because it’s my fault you didn’t see that unlucky chicken nugget. I didn’t describe the setting the characters were interacting with. The girl and her murderer were just floating in space without any description to place them in a scene. She could have slipped on anything.

A stupid example, yes, but in all seriousness — tense physical scenes need accurate and quick description otherwise a reader will lose sight of what is going on and how these characters are moving through the scene.

What Is Good Description?

Confession time. I don’t know.

I know what bad description is. Bad description is Stephenie Meyer describing Edward Cullen’s washboard abs for two entire pages in Twilight.

I suppose good description is efficient. Stephen King said it best in On Writing, “…your job is to say what you see, and then to get on with your story.”

It’s so important to help the reader see your scene and characters so that they are not left in obscurity, but it’s equally important — especially in horror — to not reveal too much. Leave some up to interpretation.

What is necessary description? When do you know your descriptions have gone too far? I’ll be eager to hear your thoughts.