Writers in the Storm

Descriptions are some of my favorite things to do. But they're not easy to write well.

Descriptions have changed over the years.  Stienbeck's The Grapes of Wrath was published in 1939. Here's the beginning: 

Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge Steinbeck fan, but that was before TV, Netflix, apps, and Xbox. Back when readers had time to linger over prose - through long, quiet, boring winter nights. I don't care how great a word-smith you are, you're not likely to describe a sunrise better than the great authors in history. 

The good news is, you don't need to.

Because readers don't come to your novel looking for a new, fresh sunrise description. Promise. 

They come for engagement.

They come for a great character they can relate to (or totally not) in a situation that puts their beliefs, values, or lives in danger. In a word, conflict!

So what does description have to do with this? Tons. Descriptions nowadays have to do double, and sometimes, triple duty. Because through it, you can show: worldbuilding, tone, foreshadowing, and most important, emotion.

Let's look at each of those separately.

• Worldbuilding

Most of this type of description is (as it needs to be) at the beginning of a novel. Even there, though, your descriptions need to do double-duty.

When I wake up, the other side of the bed is cold. My fingers stretch out, seeking Prim’s warmth but finding only the rough canvas cover of the mattress. She must have had bad dreams and climbed in with our mother. Of course, she did. This is the day of the reaping.

Suzanne Collins', Hunger Games:

See what she did there, in two sentences? You know the world you've been thrust into is spare, poor, bleak . . . and scary. That's also a good example of foreshadowing.

World building is important in every novel, not just fantasy and Sci-Fi.

The realtor Mama recommended was a friend from her days on teh Appalachian craft fair circuit. Verna had a hairless Chihuahua named Mistake and a distended tattoo of the Tasmanian Devil running across her belly. I knew this second-hand, thank God. The point is, in my hour of need, this is who Mama turned to for sound advice.

Kimberly Brock's River Witch

What do you get of this character's world just from the first paragraph? You also see a lot of Kimberly's beautiful voice there, too.

• Tone

I want to tell you some important things before we start our journey.

I lived through it all. That's one problem about relating events in first person. The reader knows the narrator didn't get killed.

Robert McGammon's Boy's Life

You don't need to read the back blurb to know this is a scary book, right?

"Come on, baby," he murmured. "Give it up for me. You know you want to."

Jade Bennett did her best to ignore the way the low, sexy voice made her shiver. Besides, it wasn't aimed at her. Dr. Dell Connelly--dog whisperer, cat whisperer, horse whisperer, and known woman whisperer--was talking to a stray kitten.

Jill Shalvis' Animal Attraction

Lighthearted and fun, a rollicking romance. Right?

• Foreshadowing

Girls stretched and writhed under the hot water, squalling, flicking water, squirting white bars of soap from hand to hand. Carrie stood among them stolidly, a frog among swans. She was a chunky girl with pimples on her neck and back and buttocks, her wet hair completely without color. It rested against her face with dispirited sogginess and she simply stood, head slightly bent, letting the water splat against her flesh and roll off. She looked the part the the sacrificial goat, the constant butt, believer in left-handed monkey wrenches, perpetual foul-up, and she was. She wished forlonrnly and constantly that Ewen High had individual-and thus private-showers.

Stephen King's Carrie

Even if you'd never seen the infamous shower scene at the beginning of the movie, you'd know this isn't going to end well, just from the word usage, right?

• Emotion

To me, this is the most important. A description should convey an emotion to the reader. Like Hugo did here, in Les Miserables

Do you see that the one light detail he highlighted darkens the entire feel? Brilliant.

So how do you do that? That's where the details come in. 

Think about it; the view of the sun rising over the bay will look different to a woman whose child is missing than to a woman who’s just fallen in love. The way you’d describe that sunrise for each, shows your focus, and sets a tone.

The details you'd choose to show that will be different than mine - and that's why it doesn't matter if it's been written before, because it hasn't been written by YOU.

Take, for example, a description of a junior high school dance.

The faint whiff of sweat from the locker rooms, mingling with your date’s cheap perfume. Don’t just tell us the character is nervous. We can guess that. Tell us what we don’t know. You can show that Junior high school awkwardness in description as well: a glimpse of a white bra at the gap in a sleeveless dress, a wobbly ankle in heels, a tug at a too-tight waistline. I love in the movie Footloose – remember the how awkward the dance was at first?  The guy picking his nose? Great detail.

Here's how the master, Pat Conroy did it:

When I entered the dimly lit gymnasium, the awful reminder hit me like a well-aimed meteorite that I had never been to a high school dance before and had no idea how to conduct myself. Nor was I sure how to set my face – a confident smile, an easy nonchalance, a cocky watchfulness. I found myself simply defenseless as I felt my face congeal into a dewy lostness.

See what he did? He didn’t focus on sweat, discomfort, etc. That would be the norm. What lifts this above that is him focusing on one small part of it; how he holds his face. I’ve never seen it described that way, and yet I’ll bet everyone can relate to this feeling. Dewy lostness – Conroy slays me.

Whatever you do, be sure your description of a pretty sunrise is telling the reader about more than just the sunrise.

Do you have any other tips for us on writing descriptions? You you have a great one to share?

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About Laura

Laura Drake is a city girl who never grew out of her tomboy ways, or a serious cowboy crush. She writes both Women's Fiction and Romance.

She sold her Sweet on a Cowboy series, romances set in the world of professional bull riding, to Grand Central.  The Sweet Spot won the 2014 Romance Writers of America^®   RITA^® award in the Best First Book category.

Her 'biker-chick' novel, Her Road Home, sold to Harlequin's Superomance line (August, 2013) and has expanded to three more stories set in the same small town.

In January, 2016, Laura released her first Women's Fiction, Days Made of Glass.

In 2014, Laura realized a lifelong dream of becoming a Texan and is currently working on her accent. She gave up the corporate CFO gig to write full time. She's a wife, grandmother, and motorcycle chick in the remaining waking hours.

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Kari Lynn Dell

If you’d asked me twenty years ago, the idea that a ranch girl from Montana who majored in sports medicine could up and write a book would’ve seemed ludicrous. Then this story got stuck in my head. The characters—typical of many of the cowboys I’ve dated—settled in on my mental couch, hogging the remote and forever drinking the last can of cold Pepsi in the fridge. They brought along their horses, dogs, and in one case a goat, and the only way to evict them was to write them out.

Now that I’ve been involved in this crazy business for a while, I’m convinced that a lifetime of rodeo competition is actually the best possible preparation. And here’s why:

1. Even if you put in the time and effort, there’s no guarantee you’ll end up with a winner.

Training a rodeo horse is a two or three-year process, minimum. Some, like certain of my book ideas, are stinkers from the get go. Some start off great, but unravel halfway through. Sometimes you’re sure this is the ONE, only to have them fall just short in competition, the equine equivalent of a rejection letter that says, “Sorry, this book was good, but not great.”

So you train harder, try different techniques, go to a clinic in hopes of an Aha! moment that will transform average to exceptional. Or you rewrite, go to workshops, get your manuscript critiqued. And then you resubmit, or enter more rodeos, and see if you’ve found the magic key. Occasionally, as with the fourth rewrite of Reckless in Texas, the answer is yes.

2. The hardest part is knowing when to give up.

I wasted years on a barrel racing horse named Roo, who would show a flash of brilliance just often enough to keep me hanging on, sure we were almost there. We never arrived. On the other hand there was Scotty, who bucked me off three times in one week and was so cantankerous the first year we competed that merely surviving every rodeo was an accomplishment. I battled on, and when she finally got it all together, she became a champion—and so did I.

But how do you know which horses (and books) are a Scotty, and which are a Roo? And when to admit defeat and move on? For me…when I’m stumped and so are my little group of readers. We all know what we don’t like about the book but we’ve run out of ideas about how to fix it.

This is when it’s time to put that horse out to pasture. Amazingly enough, sometimes with horses (and manuscripts) just leaving them alone and letting them age for a while is all you need. When you stop pushing so hard and move on to another idea, your subconscious can run free, and if you’re very lucky, it may one day serve up the solution to your book problem.

Or not. Some books never come around. The characters or the plot have a bone deep, fatal flaw and it’s better to just leave them in the bottom drawer. But don’t consider it a loss. You learned things from that book, even if it was what not to do. And you may, like me, find yourself scavenging bits and pieces from it for later books—an image, a description, a secondary character, sometimes an entire scene. Don’t think of it as a loss. Just repurposing, like Roo, who turned out to be an awesome team roping horse instead.

3. First practices (and drafts) stink.

The other day we roped steers for the first time in over a month. We were rusty. The steers were fresh and wild. My horse had apparently forgotten everything he’s ever known. We trudged back to the barn exhausted, battered and disheartened. In other words, it was a typical first practice. The next night we returned to the arena and voila! We roped as if we’d never had a break. But we had to muddle through that ugly first practice to work out the kinks.

First drafts are also clunky and uncoordinated, and at several points along the way I’ll be convinced I’ve forgotten how to write. Still, I grit my teeth and stagger through to the end, knowing there are better days to come. I have to remind myself that for me, a first draft is mostly—other than a few scenes that leap onto the page fully formed—a pencil sketch. All of the pretty color, subtle nuances and best humor will be layered in during the second draft. Or third. Occasionally, much to my editor’s delight, even during final line edits.

So it also goes with roping. First practices are about not falling off the horse or roping yourself instead of the calf. But with each subsequent trip to the arena we begin to hone in on the finer points, like adjusting the set of my shoulders and the turn of my wrist to make my loops snappier with no wasted motion. Just like my dialogue.

4. The only thing I can control is my effort.

I practiced hard all of last May. My horse and I were ready. On the first weekend of June we drove a hundred miles to the annual Whoop-Up Days rodeo. I warmed up, stretched, went through my mental pre-game routine. Breathe. Visualize. Be in the moment. And then I backed in the roping box, nodded my head—and the calf ducked hard left, out of reach, before I could throw my rope. No chance. Just luck of the draw.

So it goes in publishing. I can’t control the whims of the reading public (sorry, no zombie cowboys this year), or whether that editor who was waiting breathlessly for my next book left New York to raise alpacas in Alaska. What I can do is write the best stories I know how and keep telling myself that every word, like every rodeo, increases the odds that the luck of the draw will turn in my favor. My job is to have a perfect loop ready to throw when it does.

5. No matter how good you get, on any given day there will be someone you can’t beat.

Let’s be honest. There are people who are exceptionally gifted—physically, mentally, creatively. And if that person also dedicates themselves to working hard and maximizing their talent, they will be better than you. Such has always been the case in my roping career. I’ve lived and competed in Montana, the Dakotas and the Pacific Northwest and in every region there was at least one woman I could not consistently beat. On my very best day, she could still out-rope me.

Harder to accept was the person who wasn’t as talented and never seemed to have a clue what she was doing, but who always seemed to get lucky at the right time. We all knew she wasn’t that good but somehow, when the biggest money was on the line, she would toss out a prayer of a loop and come out on top. It made the rest of us froth at the mouth.

You will see both of these scenarios in your publishing career. A writer whose prose is universally panned will hit the jackpot with a book that leaves you shaking your head and muttering, usually over an alcoholic beverage. Conversely, you’ll pick up a book and it will be so freaking brilliant it will make you want to toss your laptop out the window in despair, knowing that everything you’ve ever written and will ever write pales in comparison.

Measuring yourself against other writers is the road to crazy town, because—newsflash—life is not fair. The most deserving will not always be rewarded. What you can do, though, is pick those other writers apart, the way I study videos of the best ropers in action. Analyze their technique and see what they’re doing better than you, then up your game in that area if it suits your style. I will never be six feet tall with exceptional upper body strength. Patterning myself after a roper who is will likely make me worse, not better. By the same token, my gift as a writer is in the authenticity of my characters and settings and in my humor, not paragraphs of breathtaking, poetic description.

But I can still learn something from the way that Amazon roper positions her horse for the best throw, and I can weave touches of brilliant color into my descriptions to make it more vivid. In other words, I can do the same thing you should with this post and all others on craft. Take what suits your style and makes you better and leave the rest.

And as long as the desire drives you, keep on swinging. As they say in my world—you can’t win a rodeo you didn’t enter.

What do you think, WITS readers? What has another passion of yours taught you about writing?

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About Kari Lynn Dell:

Kari Lynn Dell is a native of north central Montana, a third generation ranch-raised cowgirl, horse trainer and rodeo competitor, most recently the 2013 Canadian Senior Pro Rodeo Association Breakaway Roping Champion. She attended her first rodeo at two weeks old and has existed in a state of horse-induced poverty ever since. She currently resides on the family ranch on the Blackfeet Reservation, loitering in her parents’ bunkhouse along with her husband, son and Max the Cowdog, with a tipi on the front step, a view of Glacier National Park from her writing desk and Canada within spitting distance.Kari Lynn Dell is a native of north central Montana, a third generation ranch-raised cowgirl, horse trainer and rodeo competitor, most recently the 2013 Canadian Senior Pro Rodeo Association Breakaway Roping Champion. She attended her first rodeo at two weeks old and has existed in a state of horse-induced poverty ever since. She currently resides on the family ranch on the Blackfeet Reservation, loitering in her parents’ bunkhouse along with her husband, son and Max the Cowdog, with a tipi on the front step, a view of Glacier National Park from her writing desk and Canada within spitting distance.
Her latest book, Tangled in Texas, was an Amazon Top Five of the Month pick and hit the Neilsen BookScan top forty list. You can find more information on Kari and all of her releases at KariLynnDell.com.

Kathryn Craft
Turning Whine Into Gold 

It’s true: after years of growing to trust the blogging team here at WITS, someone is finally going to spill the bean-counter’s beans. Read on, because there’s more to getting rich than this sure-fire technique:

Write major selling points in their own paragraphs—in red!

Among the top ten reasons people seek publication for their work is the possibility of making some real money at this gig. After all, you have worked so hard. (And so have so many others, but it is not expedient to think about them just now.) Your friends think you can do it. (They also thought you could be a cowboy or a firefighter, two other high-income occupations, but it’s not expedient to think about that just now, either.) The riches will go to someone, so why not you?

Waiting for your bestseller royalty check to auto-deposit. This is the American Dream.

Or is it? If we’re being realistic, a “financial score” in today’s publishing world pales in comparison to pre-2008 values. Hey, I wish it were different. But the market has spoken, and when the budget is tight, most people value a double-shot soy mocha latte over a book purchase.

When such economic realities get you down, turn to these standards of wealth that the bean counters forget to measure. I want you to rest assured:

You’ve already been getting richer from your writing.

Let us count the ways:

1. You’ll meet people who excite you.

This isn’t the first consideration for many introverted writers, but it is one of my favorites. My writing friends think about life deeply, they feel deeply. They are my kin—and yet each of us notices different aspects of the human condition and filters it through different predispositions. Color me jazzed.

2. You will go to new (tax deductible) places

I feel certain Dr. Suess was speaking of writers when he titled his children’s book Oh, the Places You’ll Go! There are any number of exotic places I may not have visited if it weren’t for my writing. Lest you think Maui and Hudson, Ohio are not equally exotic, I beg to differ. A curious mind will find fascinating, quaint, rich detail wherever it goes.

3. You will enrich your thought life

Reading, films, concerts, lectures, theater, museums—these are all ways to escape the keyboard, to learn and refresh. Yet once my mind is deep into a new project, the culture with which I interact makes a personal and necessary contribution. As the scrawled notes on my collection of church bulletins and programs would attest, these experiences become a way to enrich and stimulate the creative mind.

4. You will enhance family relationships

Tme spent alone can improve relationships by forcing you to set boundaries. Writing time is you time—and especially for married women with children, this is an important precedent to set. Your writing puts needed reserves into your patience account, and much-needed interest into your personality account that you can withdraw to engage loved ones who may have previously assumed that you fold laundry and clean all day. I’ll never forget those years, drafting my practice novel, when my teen would come home from the bus stop, perch on one of the deep windowsills in my office, and ask, “So Mom, what is happening with Autumn today?”

5. You will stimulate your mood

In her book Wired for Story, Lisa Cron says scientists have shown our brains light up as if the events in our novels are happening to us. Frugality alert: this is cheaper than a cocaine habit, and ends better. Plus, in our fraught political climate, any investment that adds to our emotional assets is a bonus.

6. You will gain wise inner advisors

Most storytellers write to discover what we do not yet know, and we do that through our characters. Mine live within me beyond the end of the novel. More than once I’ve thought, “What would Marty Kandelbaum do in this situation?” On one hand these are friends of convenience—they were born of thoughts and needs and quandaries specific to a certain time in your life—but they also taught you lessons that you will never forget.

7. You will improve your citizenship

If a writing life is the American Dream, how does it benefit us as Americans? We writers are the Good Samaritans or problem solving. When we hear of others who are butting up against conundrums that stop them in their tracks, we writers say, “Cool!”—then steal their shoes and walk around in them until we’ve replotted the story and shared a lesson in doing so.

By these seven measures, your life is already so much richer because of writing. So here’s my advice:

To get even richer, go do more of that.

Please share in the comments: Besides money (because bragging will just make the rest of us feel bad), how has writing made you rich?

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About Kathryn

Kathryn Craft  is the award-winning author of two novels from Sourcebooks, The Art of Falling and The Far End of Happy, and a developmental editor at Writing-Partner.com, specializing in storytelling structure and writing craft. Her chapter “A Drop of Imitation: Learn from the Masters” was included in the writing guide Author in Progress, from Writers Digest Books. Janice Gable Bashman’s interview with her, “How Structure Supports Meaning,” originally published in the 2017 Novel & Short Story Writer’s Market, has been reprinted in The Complete Handbook of Novel Writing, both from Writer’s Digest Books.