Here, from the Description section of my book, Flogging the Quill, Crafting a Novel that Sells. is the second chapter, “Avoid conclusion words”
Author Barbara D’Amato finds consistent factors in the work of beginning writers that kill the promise. One she talked about in a post for The Outfit, a multi-author blog by Chicago crime writers, struck me because it’s something I’m constantly pointing out in my edits. I just didn’t have this fine label for them that she used: “conclusion” words.
Barbara says she finds “too many ‘conclusion’ words: beautiful, arrogant, ugly, magnificent, ghastly, stately, scary, and so forth.”
Here are a few more:
- handsome
- attractive
- momentous
- embarrassing
- fabulous
- powerful
- hilarious
- stupid
- fascinating
When used as description, these conclusion words are telling, and offer no real clue as to what the reader should be seeing. For example, what images come to mind when you read this description?
Allyson was beautiful.
Any picture of Allyson has to be reader-generated, and may have nothing to do with what the author intends. Beauty, being in the eye of the beholder, is subjective. You may think an anorexically thin Allyson to be beautiful while I think she should see a doctor. Steve may think that a woman with a good extra fifty pounds of love handles is beautiful while Roger thinks she should call Weight Watchers. And so on.
The difference between telling and showing usually boils down to the physical senses.
If the author wants us to think Allyson is beautiful, she needs to give us pictures that illustrate beauty, not labels.
Allyson moved with a ballerina’s grace, and her slim figure made any clothing look good. Long hair the color of dark chocolate framed a face that made Johnny think of a princess in a fairy tale, and he wanted to be the one to kiss lips that smiled and pouted and invited, all at the same time.
That’s not to say that you should avoid the word beautiful. It can be quite useful in characterizing. For example, here’s a descriptive passage in which two teenage boys are going to work on a ranch for the summer and go to a small log cabin that’s to be their summer quarters.
Excitement grew in Jesse as they approached the cabin. A place all their own. No grown-ups.
Inside, they stood in a main room just big enough for a double bunk bed, a four-drawer dresser, two chairs beside a small table, and a little space left over to walk around. A battered old radio sat on the table, and an easy-going breeze wafted through the screened door and out the single side window.
A doorway into the bathroom revealed an old-fashioned tub with feet; a metal bar suspended from the ceiling encircled it with a shower curtain. Jesse stepped to the door and looked in. The toilet had a seat but no lid, the sink a medicine cabinet above it, but the mirror was cracked.
Beautiful.
So “conclusion” words can be useful when you use them to describe just that: a conclusion. Jesse concludes that the cabin is beautiful even though, to his mom, I’m certain it would be far from it.
In looking through samples from writers for “beautiful,” I find examples that make Barbara’s “conclusion” label clear.
It’s a beautiful day, so we drive to Lyme Park.
Can’t see the day, can you?
He gestures at a strikingly beautiful black woman sitting opposite him.
No picture there. Oh, we know the impact of the woman’s appearance on our point-of-view character, but not what causes it. If we received a picture of the black woman, we’d learn what “beautiful” means to our POV character, and thus gain insight into his character. But in this case we learn nothing.
Here’s an example where the conclusion word is at least followed by the description:
They’ve got two little boys who are utterly beautiful—all huge blue eyes, blond hair and cheeky grins.
Here are some especially common conclusion words:
- elegant
- shabby
- bizarre
- eerie
- weird (a very common one)
- strange (another very common one)
- eclectic
- large or small (also relative terms meaningless without a comparison)
I suggest you do a search for the conclusion words from this section and any others you can think of and see if you’ve used them as description words—and then substitute the description.
For what it’s worth
Ray
© 2010 Ray Rhamey