Fundamental functions of description and detail in prose

I tend to write by intuition, then try to edit with my analysis goggles on, which means that I’m often looking at the words I’ve put on the page and thinking about why they are the way they are, what else might need to go there, and what the functions those words are serving. Description and detail are one of the things that I naturally go pretty sparse on, then add in during the edit, so I tend to think about it more than other aspects of the craft. In fact, I tend to add in more description and detail than I would want for my own preference, and it’s mostly because of my opinions on the functional purposes of these tools and how the audience will react to them.

I’m a firm believer that visualization is one of the key things that separates readers. Some people can read a brief sentence and have a full scene bloom into their heads, while other people need to explicitly be told that a character has eyes for that character to have anything other than a blank, abstract face.

I’m in the full visualization camp, and it’s not even close. A paragraph of description is wasted on me unless it’s particularly counter to my intuition, very nicely worded, or otherwise pleasing. As soon as you say “cubicle” I have the whole scene up and running. For characters, who tend to get full paragraphs of description, I’ve usually invented a person and how they look before we can get to that paragraph, and then it becomes a tedious process of updating, “oh, they have blonde hair instead of brown” or “right, more fit than I was thinking”, which I don’t tend to find very worthwhile.

But for other people, a lack of description creates a lacuna, and I think as a writer you have a duty to those people. Interestingly, some of those people who have this lacuna don’t actually mind it; they can read a chapter where a person’s face isn’t described, fill them in as blank-faced and abstract, and be perfectly happy with it.

This is a fundamental function of description, and even for people like me who can visualize from incomplete details, the question of “what do things literally look like” is always going to be one of the core elements of what description does.

Aside from “what do things literally look like”, description is there to give you a feeling of what things are like. One of the ways I think about writing is that you’re making cognition and emotion happen in someone else’s head. This extends to all writing, but with description especially, you’re telling people what something is in order to get them to extrapolate from incomplete information. It goes hand-in-hand with visualization; if visualization is telling people what something looks like, evocation is getting them to know what it looks like without telling them (or by only telling them a little).

Say, for example, I tell you that a woman is wearing green lipstick. This communicates a lot! Green lipstick is uncommon, and only worn by a certain sort of woman, and absent any other information, we assume … party girl? Cyberpunk? Fashion-forward? Goth, punk, witchy? Likely with a single other bit of description (perhaps even the color, whether it’s muted olive-green or neon) we could narrow it down significantly, but it’s a key identifying detail that forces the mind down some different paths. Your mind starts making some guesses; it picks up on vibes.

A good piece of evocative description has 10% of the detail in the description with the remaining 90% in the reader’s mind. And these are not just inferred details, since ideally there are other elements of cognition, including emotional reactions.

I think in practice this is difficult to get across in short snippets, and is also one of those things that people vary a lot on in terms of whether it works for them. For certain people, attempts at evocation will often fail, and this ends up creating distance from the text.

Of special note here, non-visual description is one of the places where you can get a lot of evocation; saying that a room smells of fresh paint can activate those sense-memories, though I consider this a little dodgy since readers seem to vary a lot in how effective this is for them.

Description and detail are a way of focusing on a thing. The longer you describe something, the more attention you give it, and this is a useful tool for getting the reader to actually remember, or to emphasize what a character is paying attention to.

In first-person writing, description isn’t just literal, it’s showing what’s important to a character, so when there’s a very long paragraph of description, we imagine the character perking up and watching closely. We see through the character’s eyes what is important to them, what they focus on. Description carries metadata about the character doing the describing, or if it’s not a character, then about what the story is.

And you can use this for dissonance! A character who says that they don’t care about a thing but also describes and details that thing is something that a reader can and should pick up on. It’s a way of getting information across, showing unreliability to the narration.

It’s also a method of telling the reader what is and isn’t important. Brief description signals that something won’t matter, and more involved description means there’s a thing you should track.

Somewhat parallel to attention, description is one of the primary methods of communicating who our viewpoint character is, or the particular voice of the author. This is not just about what they focus on, but the frame they put on the world. It shows their thinking and interpretation, their foibles and neuroses. There are obviously extreme examples of this, like a character who catalogs the products that people wear, but even the more subtle examples are pretty important for the overall feel of a piece of prose.

As far as pacing goes, description and detail are one of the main ways to pump the brakes. A sentence of non-action description (that is, not describing an action being taken) slows down a scene and acts as an unobtrusive way to take a breath and relax, stretching action or dialogue over more word count. There’s a subclass of these that’s sometimes called “action beats”, at least for dialogue; see the following example:

“I never thought that you would end up with him,” said Robert.

Ella tucked a strand of hair behind an ear. “Fate’s a funny thing like that.”

Here, this bit of description is, yes, technically describing an action, but the purpose is mostly to imply a breath or a pause. You can also do this with more pure, plain description:

“I never thought that you would end up with him,” said Robert.

Light filtered in through the curtains. “Fate’s a funny thing like that.”

Because the reader has to take time to read, they feel the pause here, even if these things could technically be concurrent or incidental.

Unfortunately, because there are so many functions of description and detail in prose, they sometimes end up working at cross-purposes. You want to evoke something … but don’t want to slow down pacing. You want the reader to have a clear picture of the scene … but don’t think that the viewpoint character would actually pay attention to that sort of thing.

Writing is a matter of balance, and it’s difficult to say whether that balance is correct, or whether you’re at the border where you’re making actual trade-offs between any specific element of craft.

Beyond that, readers are different in their reactions and preferences, which means that at any given time you’re trading off not just fundamental purposes of writing, but different readers against each other. And here too, it’s difficult, if not impossible, to know whether you’re at the boundary of optimal writing.

I do feel that an exercise like this, trying to parcel out all the things that description is for and the functions they serve, does help to make it clear why writing is a difficult thing instead of an easy one.