How Important is Description in a Novel?

You’ll find writers who go from generic he, she, and they — zero names and descriptions — to those who take pages to describe a living room.

So, what’s a writer to do? Can there be too little or too much description?

John Bowers, author of the Nick Walker, United Federation Marshal crime thriller science fiction series, shares his opinions.

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The Art of Description Part One

In a previous article, I touched on description in writing; I referenced Robert Heinlein and Zane Grey, two excellent novelists whose gift for description varied dramatically. Zane Grey painted vast landscapes in your mind before his stories really got started. Heinlein’s stories were ground-breaking, especially for young readers, but his descriptions (at least to my taste) were weak and sparse.

Grey and Heinlein book-ended each other — Grey died in 1939 and Heinlein’s first story was published the same year. (To be fair to Heinlein, television was virtually unknown when he began writing, so his readers perhaps didn’t expect much in the way of visualization. Yet Zane Grey’s career ended at exactly the same time, and he described everything.)

Both men were giants in their genres, yet their styles varied. Which made me wonder … How Important is Description in a Novel?

What do Readers Want?

Readers vary as much as writers, probably more, in what they consider a good novel. Some want the action to get going right now, while others are willing to dip their toes into a story as it warms up. No writer can please everybody, but I think certain elements are expected in most non-experimental books. Description, to me, is paramount; others may view it as less important.

If you are light on descriptive narrative and your novels are doing well anyway, feel free to skip the rest of this article. It probably won’t help you. But if you, like me, feel that description adds depth and richness to a story, then let’s have some fun.

What Should You Describe?

The mere term “description” is pretty open-ended. What does it really mean? Well, it means whatever you want it to mean, whatever is important to you. When reading a book, you may want to know what the characters look like, how they dress, how they wear their hair (assuming they have hair). Do they talk funny? Walk funny? Different colored eyes? Tall? Short? Skinny? Are they pretty? Ugly? Pretty ugly?

Characters aside, what about the setting? This is important to me, because my stories are usually set on other planets. I don’t need to describe the intersection of two streets in New York City because one NYC intersection probably looks a lot like all the rest … and you’ve already seen them on NYPD Blue (I couldn’t describe them anyway, because I’ve never been there). But what about Lucaston on Alpha Centauri 2? Or Sagan City on Mars? Kline Corners on Sirius 1, or Hardwood on Tau Ceti 4? You’ve never seen those cities because they don’t exist … yet … and yet I have created them for you, and if you are to enjoy them, you need to know how they look.

Description in a novel is akin to a CAMERA PAN shot in a screenplay, usually a slow sweep of the camera to deliver a panoramic view of the locale. Your book doesn’t have a camera, so you have to take its place. That’s what “description” stands for.

But first …

Avoid the Info-Dump

The danger with description is the info-dump (too much information). This happens when a writer stops the story dead in its tracks to explain things. Amateur writers often go on for pages about what everything looks like, smells like, tastes like, sounds like; what the weather is like, who is president (or prime minister), what time the sun sets, who the Pope is, the difference between Fahrenheit and Celsius … you get the idea. In their exuberance to tell the story, they vomit words.

In the meantime, the story languishes and the reader puts the book away. (I enjoyed Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged, but at one point she devoted literally 100 pages to her political philosophy! One. Hundred. Pages. I read about the first twenty, then skimmed ahead to see how much longer it would run. When the story finally picked up again, I jumped to that point to see how it would end.)

Too much information can be worse than none at all.

The secret to successfully weaving description into the story without losing momentum is to do it gradually. Don’t describe everything at once, or give too much information at once. It needs to blend seamlessly into the story, like when you’re watching a movie and subliminally absorbing the background in a scene.

How Hard Is It?

Let’s describe some people. Everyone knows what “people” look like, yet every person is unique in some way. You can describe them generally by class (“blue collar,” “white collar,” “jocks,” “suits”) and that works fine from a distance. But if you zero in on a particular character, it takes a little more effort. Again, you don’t want to stop the story while you disassemble the character and outfit him, so you need to economize your description.

Take Brian Godney, a United Federation Attorney who prosecutes our hero Nick Walker (a United Federation Marshal) for use of excessive force. Godney is five feet four, cocky, arrogant, Harvard-educated, and a very sharp dresser. I could have taken several paragraphs to introduce him, but this is how I did it (from Gunfight on the Alpha Centauri Express):

This brief description, which is far from complete (no eye color, clothing color, hair color, etc.), still tells us quite a bit about him. Sharp dresser, confident, fearless. And yet there is more to learn.

Describing a person is much more than just explaining what she looks like. Outward appearance is useful, but what’s really important is the personality. Physical description can contribute to understanding that personality.

Brian Godney, for example, suffers from a “short man complex”; i.e., his diminutive stature has caused him a lifetime of grief from the ridicule of his peers and has definitely affected his galaxy view. While ultra-confident of his own ability, he is easily rattled. When his colleague Victoria Cross switches sides in the middle of a court hearing, this is the result:

What About Women?

Maybe because I’m a man (my pronoun is “you”), I love describing women, and not just the beautiful ones (I long ago discovered that women come as varied as men, and a beautiful face can cloak a hideous personality). Victoria Cross is fun to describe because she is not only hot, but gutsy. Physically, she’s easy to describe:

Far more important, however, is how she handles herself in a crisis (from Victoria Cross: United Federation Attorney):

To save space, the spoiler is that she is bluffing; he falls for it and Victoria, a trained Star Marine, proceeds to kick the shit out of him.

Looking Presidential

When Nick Walker meets the President of the United Solar Federation (Assassin on Centauri B), she almost takes his breath away. Not because she is beautiful but …

Finally …

My current work in progress features a high school girl who is a lot less attractive than Victoria Cross. This is her introduction in the story:

She’s a very sweet girl with an inner beauty that isn’t immediately apparent. I look forward to developing her into a major character.

In Part 2 of this series, we will take a look at describing Setting, also known as scenery. In the meantime … get back to work!

© John Bowers

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John Bowers began writing at age 12 and was considered a prodigy by his English teachers. He wrote prolifically until his thirties, but life got busy and he took a decade off, returning to the keyboard in 1993. He is the author of the Nick Walker, United Federation Marshal series and the Starport series, all available on Amazon.

Now semi-retired, Bowers still works part-time as a computer programming consultant and spends his free time writing novels. He lives in Central California.

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