: Re: What are the limits to description in story writing? How do I know if I have crossed them? Time and time again, I have been told that my unfounded focus on description distracts from the

@Annie587

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All writing is description. It's just a matter of what you're describing. So it's impossible to describe things too much, or to be writing descriptive prose when you should be writing some other kind of prose. With "purple prose", the issue as I see it is either describing the wrong thing, or describing badly.

When you look at any object, or live through any kind of experience, there is a general impression of what that experience is like created in your brain. That general impression is much more than just the retinal data received from looking at the object. Your job as a describer - in fact, what the verb "to describe" means - is to reproduce that general impression inside the head of your reader. It is not to exhaustively list all of the sensory details of an experience, and then describe each one with as much intensity as possible.

For example, if I'm writing an intense action scene, I'm describing the experience of the action. If you were to live through that action scene in real life, there would be some kind of general impression of what it feels like to be there in that moment. If you stop to describe the stitching on the characters' jeans, you are failing to reproduce that general impression. If the object you wanted to describe was the jeans, then you would have succeeded. But that wasn't the object you wanted to describe. The object you wanted to describe was the action. This is like looking at a painting through a microscope, one square inch at a time, and then expecting to know anything about what the painting looks like.

Thus, figure out what it is you're trying to describe, or to put it more pithily, describe the scene, not (necessarily) the things in it. This is a case of describing the wrong thing.

Another problem with "excessive" description has to do with describing the right thing badly: not everything needs to be described with intensity, because not everything is intense.

For example, did a surge of irritation really ripple within her? Are you sure she didn't just feel a bit annoyed? The rage you feel when you find out your own brother has betrayed you and stolen your kingdom might ripple within you, I'm not so sure that irritation at the wind messing up your hair really does. Are you quite sure that it really took all of what she had to restrain from even so much as stealing a quick glance? It's not just that she felt a bit self conscious, that she fidgeted nervously, or that she kept glancing at herself with mild dismay? Is her hair really crow black, or just black?

How you describe something and how intensely you describe something are not independent variables. It is impossible to change the intensity or the level of detail of a description without also changing the color of that description, because the more words you pile on something, the more important and dramatic you make it seem to the reader.

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