No, not yesterday’s post; did you read something of yours? How was it?
Don’t tell me you’re not done reading it yet; you were supposed to pick something short.
And don’t tell me you didn’t have time; that’s your lack-of-grooveness talking. Make time. Read it while your significant other is doing a frame-by-frame live Tweeting of Lost or something. Time enough to accomplish The Reading exists, it’s just in the wrong box right now. Go get it.
So whadja think?
Needs some work, dunnit?
Good.
You’re gonna revise that sucker.
I know, I know: you’re out of the Groove. I’m saying “You need to revise,” and you’re all like:
...
Keep it simple. Have some clear technical goals in mind.
Find the spots where the story doesn’t seem to go into a scene long enough or far enough. Take it the rest of the way.
Fine the spots where your voice is muddied and indistinct. Clarify it. Clean things up. This is probably something you wrote awhile back, and you’ve learned stuff since then, so make use of it.
Kill adverbs. Rewrite the sentence so that you’re saying the same thing with better words.
The one scene that doesn’t seem to do anything? Take it out. This is your acid test revision: no less than 10% of the original text should hit the cutting room floor.
That’s the official list of goals.
But what you’re really doing is getting down in the muck, up to the neck, in your own writing. In you. Wallowing in the glory of your own wonderful stink.
That is your method, and it’s also your true purpose in this little endeavor. Yes, doing the revision will be nice, but your real goal here is to remind yourself why you like playing with words, and what all your favorite toys feel like.
Wallow. Get the mud in deep. Oink oink.
As a show of solidarity, I’m going to do a little public wallowing for the next week or so. My particular mud bath will be a short story I wrote a few years back called Vayland Rd. It’s a peculiar little thing I wrote as part of a 24-hour blogathon, so it’s about 7 tenths inspiration and 5 eighths exhaustion, but it came from a good place, I like the characters, and the story’s important to me.
As I revise, I’ll post a chunk of the yarn up here every day, so you all get something to read in between your own wallow sessions. Sound good?
You had a good end of the year writing rush. You got your edits done and off to your writing group, your first readers, your second readers, your volunteer editing harem, maybe even your agent. You started a new project and lo and behold, THAT went well too.
Then the holidays snuck up behind you and kicked you in the spine.
Maybe there was travel. Gifts. Food. Possibly drink. More travel. A nasty head cold, some vomiting, and body aches topped off the festivities. Yet more travel.
Then you’re back home, and your day job would like very much if you could make up the time you just spent on the holiday break, without actually clocking any additional hours. Tax paperwork starts coming in. Your cold won’t go away. All those shows that conveniently went on break before the end of the year are back and broadcasting what feels like two new episodes a week and all your friends are talking about them and spoiling everything. The driver’s side windshield wiper starts tearing, your fifty thousand mile checkup is ten thousand miles overdue, and your kid wants to join ballet and karate.
You’re carefully sculpted writing groove caves in like a badly dug trench.
The situation grows more complicated.
Now, please understand, when I mention a Groove, I’m not talking about a muse. I don’t believe in The Muse. A Muse. Whatever. Eff that nonsense right in the ear. Clinging to the ‘inspiration of the muse’ is some delicate, lacey bullshit (there’s a mental image) and I have no patience for it.
But there is such a thing as a groove, it is possible to get knocked out of it, and it can be a fucking drag to get back in there. Without some serious effort, it could take…
Well, honestly, it might never happen on its own.
This will not stand.
The mind-dulling blankness of January has gone by, and it’s time to dig your way back in there. Let the mud fly, people, and don’t worry about who else it hits.
What’s that? No shovel? Must you use your bare hands?
Ye–
Wait.
No. No you don’t. There are tools.
Read
It’s a simple thing to say, but one very pleasant way to make the mud fly is to read. If nothing else, it helps you remember the various cool ways those word things get strung together. Some of what you read will inspire you, some will amaze you, and some of it will, to put it bluntly, make you really really mad that you aren’t making a living as an author right now, because goddamn if you aren’t a hell of a lot better than this guy.
But I don’t need to tell you to read. You’re doing that already.
Right. It’s not the activity that I’m specifically talking about, it’s the author; what I need you to do right now is start reading your very very favorite author of all time.
You.
Now, I know what you’re thinking.
Man you're hard on yourself.
Why waste precious reading time on boring old you? Pay attention: you’ve been out of your groove for awhile, and while it’s great to read other fantastic and not-so-fantastic authors, it’s more important right now to remember your own voice.
Cuz you’ve kind of forgotten.
Which makes it really hard to jump back in and pick up where you left off.
So find something of yours. Doesn’t have to be super-polished. Doesn’t even have to be good. Probably shouldn’t really be that long, either.
Read it. Listen to that writer. See how they string the word things together. Get inspired by it, get amazed by it, and get angry at how much better you can do.
Let all the good and bad of the story soak into your winter-dry brain sponge. Let it percolate.
Over on Twitter today, I linked to three of the seven parts of an analysis of the Phantom Menace that was posted over on YouTube, and which I initially found on /Film: 70-Minute Video Review of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace.
The reason I didn’t link to all seven videos? I didn’t want that to be the main thing I linked to today.
Some folks retweeted it and seemed to enjoy it… others were put off by the video’s… odd tone.
Which I totally understand.
How should I explain this tone?
Ahh…
Okay, you know the serial killer guy in Silence of the Lambs?
Not Hannibal Lector, but the other guy? The “It puts the lotion on its skin / or else it gets the hose again.” guy?
Yeah. Him. Imagine if that guy, in between skinning girls to make a woman-suit, sharply and insightfully analyzed all the (multiple) failings in Phantom Menace… and periodically went off his meds.
That’s the video. It even sounds just like him.
It’s not to everyone’s taste.
The problem is, the insight is really good. It’s really useful, from the point of view of story construction and character building and even the use and purpose of cool-ass fight scenes.
But can I legitimately recommend a video like this to someone when I know the humor might be distasteful?
Yeah, I probably can. I’m sorry if the humor is not funny to you, or it goes over the line, but dammit, the analysis is too sharp to ignore. I always knew I didn’t like Phantom Menace, but I’d never put a lot of brainsweat into why. Thanks to this guy – his fucked-up sense of humor notwithstanding – I understand why, and I take away tools I can use to make my own stories better.
I guess I just have to remind myself it’s a joke. It’s part of the ‘brand’, maybe, and that’s his choice, but it’s also his problem – I’m just focusing on the useful signal. Sometimes I have to ignore the joke.
I mean, we all know Chuck’s not actually gaining carnal knowledge of vegetable or animal produce, right? We know Warren Ellis isn’t boiling hookers and shooting their cerebral juices into his femoral artery, yes?
Maybe this guy jumps over the line here and there. Fine. Yes. Not every joke is funny. Fuck knows I scratch my head at some people’s idea of humor sometimes, and at the twitter retweets that link back to my site with a parenthetical “Warning: NSFW”.
Really? Where the fuck do you work? I’ve known pastors that swear more than me.
Anyway.
If you really can’t stomach the meat because of the seasoning, I’ll try to summarize the guy’s points, below.
But I still think you should check out the video.
Keep people around who will push back on your work and force you to make it better… or just make sense.
People need to care about your protagnist – someone you can identify with – especially if you’re writing genre stuff. Get really basic. People should be able to:
“Describe the character without saying what they look like, what kind of costume they wore, or what their profession/job is.”
ACTION: in part two of the video, the guy’s analysis of what the first scene of the original movie conveys is brilliant.
You might be able to skip part three, because it’s JUST about the movie’s plot holes. So’s part four and five.
“Welcome to Coruscant, Home of the Mid-air Collision.” Heh.
Part Six: five minutes in. What Fight Scenes Do.
“When you’re worked up with emotion […] you expose your humanity a little.”
Temptation, revelation, anger, redemption.
“Lightsaber duels have less to do with the fight, and more to do with the characters.”
“We need a deeper meaning to things.”
Part Seven: the Ending Multiplication Effect — the simpler endings have more force and interest because we can focus on the important elements and the story.
So… yeah. The summary doesn’t really do the points justice. Not really.
I completely agree if you found the noise ratio too high to get anything out of the signal. Okay. I respect that. This is, I suppose, simply my explanation of why I chose to to the recommend the thing anyway.
(Also: I’m a huge Star Wars fanboy. There’s that too.)
So I’m teaching a basic business writing class last night, and someone asked about whether or not they should double-space after periods and colons. I said that that had been the rule at one time, but as a practice it was pretty much dying out. Like most things having to do with the dos and don’ts of writing, this is something I know to be true, but I’m more than a little fuzzy on the why.
They (of course) asked why.
And I heard my mouth say:
Much of it comes from graphic designers who think that the big white space after a sentence is ugly, especially now that few people use mono-spaced fonts like courier. Those double spaces really stand out in true-type/proportional fonts.
But even if that weren’t the case, there is no point in wasting time with double-spacing after periods today, because most anything you write will end up on a website somewhere, and web browsers never show more than one space after the period, anyway. (Even if you do it, no one will see it, so it’s wasted effort.)
After my mouth was done talking, my brain was left wondering “Is that right? That actually sounds right.” (My brain is justifiably suspicious of my mouth.)
Turns out, it pretty much was. It’s fascinating to me, the way in which our environment (-cum-technology) visibly and continually redefines “normal” in writing/communication.
(And I’d like to thank Twitter for helping my unlearn a two-decades-old double-spacing habit.)
Tonight marks the conclusion of the fall season of the bowling league in which I, my wife, and several of my game-geek friends participate.
It’s fun. Shut up.
In a way, it’s a weird return to my childhood. While bowling continues to grow in popularity in the U.S., bowling league participation dwindles, but such was not the case when I was a little kid. Both my parents bowl (and bowled), and I can remember many Saturday nights when my folks couldn’t get a sitter and my sister and I spent the evening running around the alley, screwing up someone’s game of pool, or mastering a sliding tile game that I only got to mess with during league play.
So about a year ago, one of our gamer friends asked if we’d be interested, and my wife thought it’d be a good way to meet people in her new home town, and I thought “sure, I’m a pretty decent bowler, why not?” (Funny thing: being around bowling doesn’t actually make you a good bowler. Who knew?)
This is what I remember about the bowling alley when I was a kid.
So we dove in. We got shoes. (Those of you who know my wife know she needs very little provocation or encouragement to buy shoes.) I bought her a bowling ball for Christmas. We didn’t do that great that season, but we had a pretty good time.
The next season started up, and we decided to keep playing.
And the next…
And the next…
And now it’s eighteen months later. Tonight is the last week of play for the fall league. The team that Kate and I are on (Crazy Bowling Monkeys) is in first place. Kate’s the #1 Most Improved women’s bowler. I’m #1 Most Improved men’s. Between us and the other gamer-geek team (White and Nerdy, with Ninja Pin Action), there is not a “leader” category we don’t pretty much dominate. It’s kind of awesome.
Obviously, with the big showdown tonight, it’s on my mind, so I thought I’d write down some stuff I’ve learned about Bowling in the last year and a half.
1. You gotta show up.
It’s a hassle. Sometimes you have to bring your kids along and keep them distracted (and in turn be distracted by them). But the only way to enjoy the game is to play the game, and (if you’re me) try to get better.
2. Getting better takes time. And lots of repetition.
I was never a horrible bowler. Sure, I’ve had horrible games, but I don’t know that I was ever really super-bad (and the nice thing about bowling is that you can still help your team out even if you kinda suck).
But I’ve always wanted to do well. I may not have learned a ton about the technical bits of bowling as a kid, but I did learn what good bowling looked like. I saw a lot of it. Hell, I heard a lot of it. I wanted my ball to do this, and the pins to do that, and the noise they all make to go cracka-boom.
So I keep working at it, and what used to be a 120 average is now a 160 average, and for all that that’s pretty respectable, not a game goes by that I can’t name a dozen things I did wrong, even on the strikes.
3. Don’t aim at the pins.
It seems counter-intuitive, but aiming at the pins you want to knock down is a pretty good way to ensure you’ll hit fuck-all when you throw the ball. There are these great little arrows on the lane that are about a third to half-way down, and you aim at those. They’re close enough to hit with some accuracy, for one thing, so you use them as your front-sight (shooting reference). Basically, it’s not the end result you think about, it’s the beginning and the middle that you work to get right, and the cracka-boom will follow.
4. Be consistent.
Generally speaking, if you start from the same spot every time, and you hit the right arrow, the end result is assured considerably more likely. That’s why you do the repetition — you figure out what works and what doesn’t, then you do the ‘what works’ thing over and over again until it’s hard not to.
5. Don’t be consistent when it’s not working…
Lanes dry out and suddenly the ball hooks too much. Or the lane-monkeys greased the damn thing up and nothing hooks at all. Or your pants are too tight. Or you shouldn’t have had a beer. Or you should have had a beer. Or you’re distracted from work, or family, or your kid with the tile-sliding game. Whatever the reason, The Thing You Do to Make the Pins Go Boom ain’t working: not by a little, but by a lot.
See when that’s happening, and try something else. If that doesn’t work either, sometimes you just have to laugh a little at the whole stupid game and have a good time while you rack up a terrible, terrible score.
6. … but don’t freak out when it’s almost working.
The hardest thing to deal with in bowling is a split — when you leave a couple pins behind, and they’re physically separated from one another by a great and terrible distance. And here’s a hard fact: the difference between a strike and a split is fractions of an inch. Or the exact same throw, but at a different speed. A spare is usually a strike that just didn’t quite strike.
So what do you do if you’re throwing a bunch of splits?
Nothing. The errors are small. Sometimes they aren’t even visible, and you’re left looking at the lane saying “are you kidding me?” In those situations, you just suck it up, go get your ball, and try to clean the mess up as best as you can with the second roll. You’re not doing anything wrong, it’s just not quite working, so keep throwing the ball the same way you have been, and eventually – probably – the kinks will work out.
7. Have fun. Don’t look at the scoreboard.
Is it a sport or is it a game? Could you go pro if you get good enough? Are we going to place this season?
These are all silly questions.
It’s something you enjoy, so do it. If you get really really good at it, maybe you’ll get back a little prize money when the season’s over. Maybe you’ll get a patch for your shirt, or a fridge magnet.
But seriously, who cares? If you can’t remember that it’s supposed to be something you like doing — maybe even love doing — why waste the time?
Yeah, you gotta show up, and you have to play a lot (a LOT) to get better (and take some other player’s advice, and maybe a few lessons, and, again, lots of practice). All good play is also good work, I think, and vice-versa.
But the fact is this: You will never be good if you forget how to enjoy it. Never ever.
There. I’m all done talking about bowling now. Too bad none of this applies to any other activity. Ahh well.
Yesterday’s post generated a lot of interest. And emotion, yes, but mostly interest. If I can be allowed to revisit that post for a second, I’d like to sum the whole thing up like so:
Ignore questions of infrastructure and the costs of ebook file development; those things are tangential to the current issue. What Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and HarperCollins are doing by delaying release of ebooks has nothing to do with those issues. It is about money. Period. It’s either about pushing readers toward the purchase of hardbacks, like the good old days, or it’s about the shoving match going on between Amazon and the Big Six over the price of ebooks. Either way, it’s about money.
However, the tunnel-vision focus from the Big Six on that single issue means that they are missing something critical: by delaying the release of official ebooks, they are creating an environment in which ebook piracy (thus far, a negligible issue) can and will thrive. This will hurt them, and I believe they will transfer that pain – which they caused themselves – to their authors.
This makes me angry.
This.
There. That’s all of yesterday TLDR post, in three paragraphs. You’re welcome.
Now then.
Generally, I try to avoid pointing out a problem without proposing some possible solutions. Doing otherwise is what the kids these days refer to as a “dick move”.
So:
What could the Big Six do, with regard to the release of ebooks, that would be better than the idea they’re currently going with?
As I said yesterday:
Some folks asked me yesterday what I thought of James McQuivey’s idea to delay the ebook-as-a-separate-thing by four months, but also give it away as a free thing with every purchase of a hardback edition. I think it’s a great idea. I thought it was a great idea when I suggested it to my agent about six months ago on Twitter. However, I won’t take credit for it – the indie gaming industry has been doing that for years; as a smaller, more nimble publishing organism, it has already felt and adapted to the changes of the digital age, and could teach the ‘real’ publishing world a thing or two about what works and what doesn’t.
I told Joanna Penn in an interview last year that the tabletop role-playing gaming industry started out by trying to model the methods of traditional publishing, found out the hard way that that really didn’t work for them (in the long run, it’s not working for big publishers either, but they’re BIG, so they didn’t notice as soon), and had to find new solutions. They were the first to adopt electronic publishing, shame-free POD printing, electronic-only publishing, podcasting-modules, mixed media releases, and every other experimental method anyone could think of, good or bad. That’s fine: they’re small, and experimenting is something small groups of people can DO that big groups can’t.
But what that means is that they’ve come up with some things that consistently seem to work, which, to a greater or lesser degree, might translate into solutions for Big Publishing that would please even the greedy bastards longing for the golden profits of yesteryear. I don’t have much time, so let’s get right to it.
Package the ebook with the hardback as a value-add
This works. More to the point it IS WORKING. Not just in gaming, but on Amazon, with the Kindle. For gaming examples, go to indie press revolution and take a look at the options for games like Penny for My Thoughts, Spirit of the Century, or Mouse Guard. I’m not going to discuss this further; this is the granddaddy of ‘new’ ideas, and dead-fucking-simple to implement.
Subscriptions
Whazza? Subscriptions?
Eleven million WoW players tells me that this is a sales method that can work.
Take a look at Paizo.com. They have a brilliant kind of deal set up for all their games and plain-old books: set up a subscription to one of their channels (like Planet Stories, which is your classic pulp “planetary romance” stuff). It costs you X dollars a year or whatever. Every month, you get an email about the new releases within that “channel”, on ebook. NEW releases. If you decide to buy, you get 30% off the unwashed-masses price. (Edit: Or hey, you get it on day-of-hardback-release. Even better: Both.)
Or, how about the Big Dog of gaming, Wizards of the Coast? WotC has done some stupid stuff with regard to PDFs of their products in the past, but DnD Insider is smart. Pay for a monthly subscription to the service, and you a couple magazines every month with articles and useful stuff, written by the names you’re already fans of, some cool apps, and ‘free’ access to every one of their current books, as searchable PDFs. I’m not a member, but I gather that members also get access to ‘preview’ copies of upcoming books, months before they’re released, which generates stir and interest and maybe a few advance reviews posted on —
Oh, you know what that sounds like in publishing? Advance Reader Copies (ARCs).
Yeah: “Sign up for our monthly subscription, and get digital ARCs of our upcoming titles, and a discount on the REAL digital copy when it’s released.” What book nerd wouldn’t jump at the chance?
The Ransom Model
There are a couple game designers who do stuff like this, notably Greg Stolze and Daniel Solis. There are a couple different ways it gets implemented. With Stolze’s Reign supplements, if Greg collects enough money from contributors (the “threshold pledge”) he releases the ebook as a free download for anyone and everyone. An easy tweak for this in Big Publishing works like this: “If we get enough preorders for the ebook, we’ll release it the same day as the hardback comes out. If not, you have to wait.” I like this, because it lets consumers tell publishers what they want — a ransom model works pretty well as a market study — the consumer has power, and if they don’t exercise it, the publisher feels justified in delaying release.
I can’t help but note that this is a pretty workable thing for indie authors. (If you don’t want to take preorder money for something you might not end up doing, run it like a publish-athon and just take pledges — it’s still a good a way to gauge interest.)
You can also reward the ransom-preorder people in lots of fun ways. A thank-you list on the website or inside the book, mentioning people who helped make that version of the book happen when it did. A unique cover for the advance-order people. Hell, I dunno – what else would be cool?
That’s stuff off the top of my head, stolen from people who are making it work in gaming (and thanks to Chris Weeda for the suggestion).
The important take-away is this: ideas and implementations vary, but they all have one thing in common: they require embracing e-publishing, not holding it at arm’s length like a used condom you found in the spare sheets for your hotel room.
Embracing it. That’s the first thing publishers need to do. That’s the first step.
Right now? I’m not seeing it.
And that’s not a problem anyone but the publishers themselves can fix.
But that’s okay! The post itself came out all right, and people had some good feedback and thoughts on it, so let’s call it a win and move on.
De clarified her interest in comments:
The kind of thing I’m looking more at is – when do you describe a building? When do you not describe a building? Why? When you do describe a building, how elaborate should you get? What is it that you’re trying to accomplish when you’re describing the building? What is it that you lose when you describe the building, other than the ability of the reader to fill in the details for you?
Ooh. I like that. That’s interesting. Let’s talk about it.
We join spokes together in a wheel,
but it is the center hole that makes the wagon move.
We shape clay into a pot,
but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want.
We hammer wood for a house,
but it is the inner space that makes it livable.
We work with being,
but non-being is what we use.
— Tao te Ching, verse 11
I am a big fan of not describing anything that I don’t absolutely have to. In Adrift, here’s the stuff that I’ve described:
Deirdre’s pale skin.
The Drift (Gallimaufry), multiple times.
Bilabil the alien.
Bin the bear-cat.
The Manifold Bazaar
Mak (the man, not the talking squirrel), and Five Finger Freight.
All of these things called for descriptions for different reasons. D’s pale skin is relevant in a larger context as a creche-child, which is historical background and plot-significant, and it will contrast her with almost every other human around. The Drift is a weird setting and some ground rules needed to be established: both what it is and what it is not, and it also starts to hint at the weird ‘paradise lost’ history of humanity in the story. Bilabil’s an alien; I needed people seeing a six-legged sloth, not (say) a big bug, and to see the parental nature of its existence, which echoes Finn. Bin’s a magical creature, and I wanted people seeing the same kind of magical creature, or at least the same specific elements. The Bazaar is a weird location, unlike any ‘space market’ I’ve read about — an inward-facing globe, thick with vegetation, and a marked contrast from the rest of the Drift — it’s a core of life inside a dead thing, and it parallels some other stuff that’s important. I also had a clear picture of Five Finger Freight and wanted that to be conveyed, because it tells us something about Mak before we meet him.
Stuff that I didn’t describe:
Finn, the main character.
Jon
The Binturong, Finn’s ship.
Any of the many dead ship’s interiors Finn crawls through.
Why did I leave those things out? I firmly believe that in any situation where the description of a thing only does one thing (tells you what something looks like), it can probably be left to the reader for the most part. Certain things can be implied in order to inform the reader’s impression, but you don’t need to spell stuff out. In fact, you’re better off not to, because what the reader comes up with out of their head will be (subjectively) better (read: more effective) than anything you write down.
Finn is a loving father who screwed some things up in the past (like most dads). Most folks can relate to that and build a good image of Finn.
The Binturong is a squat little indie ship. Cool, right? But everyone has an image of that cool ship that’s cooler to them than my description would be. Why not use that?
Ditto all those dead ship’s interiors. When I say the characters are crawling along the hull of a massive battle cruiser, I’ll let the reader see that for themselves.
I realize now that despite describing her somewhat, I never say what color Bin’s fur is, and I’m curious what colors people see when they read it.
Which isn’t to say I don’t imply things about their appearance, which is where I was going with the little quote from the Tao. I give the readers the shape and dimensions of the the jar, but they fill it up with whatever they’re bringing to the party.
There’s a funny and useful story about this. In Hidden Things (the book I’ve got representation for), there’s a dragon. The Dragon is probably one of my favorite Things in the whole book. I love it. I wrote the Dragon in a very particular way because it is a very powerful Hidden Thing and is very hard to perceive directly. This left a LOT up to the reader’s imagination, but I had no idea how much until one day when I referred to the Dragon as “he” in a conversation with someone who’d read the book.
They didn’t know who I was talking about. The Dragon was female. Clearly. Duh.
I stared. Possibly, I blinked.
Then I called a couple other readers and asked them what gender the Dragon was.
About half said male. About half said female. One guy didn’t think it really mattered, because Dragon’s transcend gender. Hippie.
Anyway, I was able to go back into that version of the story and point at specific instances where I’d referred to the Dragon as “he”. This point did not convince anyone. I eventually embraced the weirdness and removed the gender-specific pronouns.
That incident is why I believe so strongly that you really should leave as much as you can of the ‘unimportant’ stuff to the reader.
So when is it important? When you need the description for something else as well. When the description is both a description and foreshadowing, or when it’s a clue, or when it matters to the larger plot. When (again, to reference Chuck’s post) it’s doing more than one thing.
Example:
In the Adrift episode I am going to record tonight posted Thursday, Finn makes a specific point of narrator-commenting on the politeness of one of the people he meets; how unusual it is — like crawling through a rotten old space hulk and emerging in a cathedral. I wasted time making a note of that and making that analogy because (spoiler!) much later in the story, the flipside of that unlikely analogy actually happens.
Back to De’s comment, broken out:
1. When do you describe a [thing]?
When you need it to exist in the reader’s mind in a specific way, or including specific elements, because of some bigger thing going on in the story. (If you’re feeling decadent, you can also include ‘when you have this awesome imagery that you really want to include’, but be aware that you really should make that awesome thing more broadly relevant in order to justify keeping it around during revisions.)
2. When do you not describe a [thing]?
When #1 is not true.
3. When you do describe a [thing], how elaborate should you get?
You know what I’m going to say. Initially, three key facts. No one will remember more than three anyway, so they’ll cherrypick from a longer list, and might not focus on the Important Thing. You can introduce additional facts later. (Note: I totally break this rule in Adrift — Bilabil has fur, six legs, asymmetrical rows of nipples, a marsupial pouch, and big teeth. We hang out out with it for a long time, though, so maybe it’s okay.)
4. What is it that you’re trying to accomplish when you’re describing the [thing]?
That varies, but it’s never ‘describe the thing’, or at least it’s never only ‘describe the thing’.
5. What is it that you lose when you describe the [thing], other than the ability of the reader to fill in the details for you?
I’m not sure that you lose anything else, but I would shift the wording a bit: you lose the ability of the reader to fill in the details for themselves. The most awesome [thing] in my head that I then describe will not be as awesome as a similar awesome [thing] you think up in your own head…
Unless I can add depth to the [thing] by tying it into the rest of the story in some important way — that extra dimension hidden within my description is the thing I can do as the writer that the reader cannot, which makes it possible for me to cheat come up with cooler things than the reader would have thought of.
