(1) It was a dark and stormy night and he was lost in the forest looking for her cottage.
(2) The world was plunged into stygian gloom, the wind and rain pelting as from nowhere into his face as he struggled onward through the undifferentiated forest, seeking her small cottage.
(3) He staggered through a world of unknowing, buffeted by trees that sprang from the darkness against him, cut by rain sharp as ice, his squinting eyes seeking moon, stars, lamplight from her window, finding none.
(4) He edged through the night, arm outstretched. Was this the same soft-peeling birch he had encountered a hundred paces back? Above him the trees groaned under the wind, shedding bitter tears across his back. His eyes jumped with sparks of weariness, fooling him that her lamp was there--there--no, there--until they burned for want of seeing. He shouldered aside a pine tree and plunged on.

Four descriptions of the same thing: a man lost in a forest in a night storm. Each of the four strives to achieve the same purpose, but why do two work and two do not? What is the purpose of description?

It is not simply to tell the reader about something. "She was five-two, medium build, redhead, green eyes." This is fine for the police, but not for the fiction writer. Every detail in a story has to have a reason, and that reason is to drive the narrative forward.

A descriptive passage gives details about someone or something in order to give the reader a better understanding about the characters and their world. "She was five-two, redhead, green eyes, and a badly scarred face" will give the reader vital information about that woman. Why the scar? How does she feel about it? How does it influence her actions?

In the same way, the detail describing the man lost in the forest has to tell us more than it was night, it was stormy, and he was lost. The first passage, above, does nothing more. There is no excitement, worry, fear, wonder. It is dead, dull prose. Surely you want to do better than that.

The second is merely elaboration on the first, using fancy language in an attempt to disguise flaccid thought. Some writers think that elaborate language lifts ordinary vision into literature. "She was a redhead" and "She had tresses the colour of wheat kissed with raspberry" say the same thing, but the first is honest and the second is balderdash. "Dark night" and "Stygian gloom" also mean the same. The writer is not imagining the actual night, but simply dressing up a cliché. And clichés never propel any narrative anywhere. They just take up space.

The writer has to enter the environment he or she is describing. Say your protagonist is loading a nine-pound cannon with grapeshot on a frigate. What does he see and smell? You have to see through his eyes, feel what he would feel, know what he would know. Writers are supposed to have this vivid imagination, the ability to create a world for the reader.

Creating a world means specific, concrete details.

"His uniform was uncomfortable" tells you little about a young soldier at Gettysburg.

"His stock had rubbed permanent rawness under his chin, his shoulders were welted by the weight of his haversack, his feet slid inside boots misshapen into leather lumps, his gun was so heavy it had dug a groove in his palm and he'd been half-minded to throw it into the trees."

takes you into his private misery.

This intimacy is the other half of a good descriptive passage. You must not only see, feel, hear, smell the physical environment, you must also share the character's feelings. The third passage of the lost man, above, gives you this. The man staggers, is abused by the elements, seeks for light. It tells of painful, unrewarded searching. This passage has specific detail and implies something about the man. It moves the narrative forward by giving him motive (a search) as well as a predicament.

The last passage takes us into the man, into his weary hopelessness, gives us some measure of his desperation to find that cottage, and it is done with concrete detail that gives the reader the feel of the birch tree, the sound of the trees and the weight of the rain, yet evokes, by the words "groaned" and "bitter," some measure of his own emotional state. Environment and character create a sense of being there with that man, helping the reader to understand his determination and encouraging an interest in who "she" is and if he will find her.

A good descriptive passage has three elements:
(1) specific, well-observed detail
(2) revelation of the character's inner life and
(3) motivation, the impulse that drives that character.

"She was a redhead with a scarred face" is detail, "She was a redhead with a scarred face who took his love as pity " combines it with the character's inner life, and "She was a redhead whose scarred face made her take his love as pity until the moment she opened her cottage door and caught him, frozen and half-blind, into her suddenly believing arms" is a story.

Copyright 1999 Caro Clarke

Here are the other writing advice columns I have written for NovelAdvice, the on-line advice column for novice writers: