Recently I did a sample edit for a writer who had a crisp, clean style but missed big opportunities to characterize through description. He gave me the okay to reproduce some of the material I commented on.
His was a coming-of-age story from a male point of view (I have a fondness for those, having written one) dealing with the angst of dating and boy-girling a few decades ago. A key early scene had the boy, Jimmy, going to the girl’s home for their first date. Jimmy had never been there, and had not met the parents. Here’s what the writer gave the reader:
Her mother opened the door as he approached. "Come right in. Kathy isn't ready yet; it'll be just a minute.” He found himself in the living room with her mother, father, and little brother. He tried not to say much, passing the time, trying to get through the ordeal without coming apart.
Whoa! This is very speedy telling versus showing (I know there are times that telling is a good thing to do, but not in the opening of a story when you need to ground the reader in the characters and reality you’re creating.) Also, I know that in my autobiographical story it was extremely easy for me to unknowingly shortchange the reader because I saw scenes in their fullness so clearly that I often put down skeletal representations.
In the above scene, to begin with, for the reader’s sake the writer needs to insert a quick picture. I provided this example:
Her mother opened the door as he approached. She leaned out, a smile on her round face but a crease between her eyebrows, as if she had questions for him she didn’t know how to ask. She wiped a hand on a blue flowery apron and said, “Come right in…”
That’s just a quickie example, but note how description can both create a picture and simultaneously characterize the observer (Jimmy, in his reaction to the frown line) and the observed (the mom). This quick visual helps the reader and will not slow him down.
I felt the writer needed to set the living-room scene briefly, too—the look and feel of the living room could show a lot about the girl and her family, and the boy’s reactions to what he sees tells about him. As a way to look at describing a room through the character, here’s a description from my own coming-of-age novel when the protagonist first entered a home:
The dining area opened onto a living room. Somebody liked the same kind of early American furniture Jesse’s mother favored, right down to a braided oval rug in hues of brown. It felt like home…not that feeling like home was a good thing.
Very quickly, you have an idea of what the living room looks like and Jesse’s home as well.
Here’s another use of description from the sample where characterization could have happened instead. The writer describes Jimmy this way:
Jimmy was high-school skinny, that lean, still-growing time when muscles are tight everywhere and the sinews are loose and respond quickly. He wasn't tall, only five seven, but she was only five three and they appeared to be the perfect couple.
I like the writing in the first sentence, but these lines are clearly the author getting some exposition out of the way—I’m taken out of the boy’s head and made to feel distant from the scene. The phrase “they appeared to be the perfect couple” is clearly from another point of view entirely, since the boy can’t see what they look like together. I know it’s tough to describe a character when you’re in his point of view, and you don’t want to resort to the tired old idea of looking in a mirror, but there are ways to do it. For example:
Jimmy worried that Kathy would think he was too skinny, which his mother said was just because he was still growing, all sinewy with long lean muscles. But he wasn’t so worried about being only five foot seven–she was maybe five three, tops, and he thought they made a perfect couple.As you can see, this gives a picture of them but characterizes him as well, and it comes from inside the character, not from outside, from the author. The reader not only doesn’t leave the character’s head, she is drawn more deeply into it.
Next post: while a novel should not be pulled along by a team of oxen, neither should it be rocket-propelled as in the first scene quoted above. I look at a couple of instances where, if this writer had lingered just a little, he would have crafted a more involving story.
Pease let me hear from you. Even better, email me with an example, published or unpublished, of something that peeves you or you have a question about, and I’ll level a beady eye at it. If it’s from your own work, tell me if I can post it or if you want a “private reading.”
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