It feels like "I am not good at describing things" is the recurring hangup in the Cohost Writer's Salon, and I am not at all joking when I say that I used to worry about it in my own writing, a lot, and then I Just Stopped. (Glossing over a bit, maybe; joking, no.)

My side account on here is called Impressions of Detail, a not-really-prompt account that aims to post something evocative daily. The name speaks directly to my theory of description: that generally, you're aiming to convey an impression, not give a feature rundown. Being told that there are buildings on all four sides of your viewpoint character, all at least twenty stories tall, is qualitatively different to saying they're boxed in and looked down on by window-striped hulks.

If you're describing enough to follow the narrative, everything else is stylistic. Which is not unimportant, but it's also yours to play around with. There's a thing I do in a lot of my current writing, where I talk about some particular thing very specifically — the takeaway meals in The Ink-Coloured Mouse, for example, all consist of specific foods, or Elena the Progress warlock's clothes — and those details, I hope, help to anchor the piece overall in peoples' minds, even as the level of detail I give about other things in the same piece is wildly less — how many of the characters, across the entirety of The Ink-Coloured Mouse, have I given a hair colour at all? It's stylistic! It's characteristic of me, of the things that, given a story, I think are worth picking out to convey an impression of.

If you're getting your story across, your technique might not be what you'd like it to be, but it's not wrong.


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in reply to @caffeinatedOtter's post:

huh. and i'm literally sitting here rn typing up my first thing to post, and most of what i'm worried about is just like, why am i writing so much stuff around the dialogue. everyone else keeps it so clear and focused.

god y'know the weirdest thing

normally that's exactly what i do. i sent out this outline recently and paired it with dialogue samples that's basically a theatre/tv script. except that i plan to add prose around that as i redraft it.

i guess it's like, when i write, i act it all physically, voice it in my head, so i just feel what otherwise i need prose to say.

So in the ttrpg writing world I know a lot of people believe that descriptions of things need to be like... Super objective. Like. "A stone courtyard, approximately 24' on each side, gray, weeds in the cracks." Done. Nothing that might suggest how the CHARACTERS might feel about it. No "ominous", no "welcoming", that was all considered... What's the word. Like you're deciding it for them. Prescriptive? And that idea infected my writing and roleplaying for a while, made it very fucking dull.

I have since decided that is total bullshit.

in the ink-colored mouse i’ve noticed something similar with how you convey emotion: you don’t often describe the characters’ feelings directly, instead you describe what they’re doing in a way that evokes the emotion indirectly. Their posture, or what they do with their hands, or the way they walk. and the result is a story that rips my heart directly out of my chest and stomps on it (in the best way) because even though you never tell us explicitly what the characters feel, the way you show it is very visceral and immediate.