This post is part of The Caffeinated Writer craft series. It is excerpted from the six-week writing reboot.
As writers of fiction, we rely on description to convey a sense of place, a sense of character. Description draws the reader into your imagined world, immersing them in the fictional dream. Through the details, we fall into the writing, and that falling in helps us to feel and experience the world of the story or novel in a more intense, personal way. This is true for nonfiction too, of course, although the dream of nonfiction must be built from reality.
Description grounds your writing. The senses, even imagined, are powerful. We invite the reader to see/hear/smell/taste/feel the world of the story, and we issue this invitation multiple times per page.
One mistake writers often make is throwing a bunch of adjectives against the wall and seeing what sticks. With description, less really is more. You don't just want to provide a bunch of details; you want to provide significant details, from which the reader can imagine and fill in a more complete picture.
In this post, we will examine three passages from published novels and stories to see why and how the details work.
Here's a passage from `On the Nightwalk" by Mark Sheerin, from Flash in the Attic 2.
He was on the road when they picked him up and it was night. There he was, large as life, in an outsize DayGlo coat, a coat like they use working on motorways, except he worked for a fashion magazine. The coat was bought second-hand.