Miserable Pile Of Words

I think this is a thing that depends on how your imagination tends to work. Do you imagine things visually in general? For me, I tend to imagine landscapes visually but people only in terms of where they are physically in the landscape, their posture and gesture, and that's what my work ends up like; it's ok to go where your imagination actually takes you.

As ever, also, look at what other writers do. Raymond Chandler uses extremely lush, detailed visual description (because he's a mystery/crime author and those rich descriptions sometimes contain clues to the mystery), and so does Janny Wurts (because she's writing epic fantasy and the grandeur of the landscapes is important for tone), but more action-centric writers tend to do a lot less environmental description to keep the pace up and/or the focus narrow.

Miserable Pile Of Words @MiserablePileOfWords10/23/2023, 3:32 PM

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Like, I see both my characters and locations clearly in my head... but I don't know if my readers do?

I'm guessing Almost Definitely Not, and 99% sure they're not seeing the same things - which is usually fine, especially for the one-off throwaway Vibe Scenes, but might get... tricky when a certain look is suddenly important? And then it becomes really... hard to just throw in a "Oh, yeah, by the way, Korto has always been a West-African woman, but you knew that, right?" kind of thing.

I'm also worried I might, if I really start doing descriptions for everything, go overboard?
Like, it was fine for Persephone, who has The Bad Brain (love you, baby) that makes her notice everything to the most minute details, but for general scenes? Nobody needs to know exactly what's in chief Budowski's office, but once I start describing it, you'll know exactly where the many coffee stains are, and how many crumbs are stuck in the out box, etc...

Eat @eatthepen10/23/2023, 4:53 PM

I mean, there's a pleasure in reading detailed descriptions of environments, and you can always Write All The Details first and then go back through and cut some of them out.

There's also like a tone thing, if you're writing something kinda humour-leaning then as you work your way across Budowski's office, stacking coffee stains on coffee stains could become humour by repetition; if instead the tone is down and you're communicating something towards a character's depression then it becomes monotonous and heavy/overwhelming. Obviously this is easy to overdo and end up in full pastiche melodrama pathetic fallacy mode, but effective atmosphere is all about how the words you use and the details you choose synergise with the action and character

Miserable Pile Of Words @MiserablePileOfWords10/23/2023, 7:26 PM

Definitely.
We'll see what happens, I guess.

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