Keeping it Real
By Dave King | February 16, 2021 |
One of the more baffling problems I see with my clients is that they’re not keeping their writing real. Their stories might be full of tension and clever plot twists, their characters people I might like to know, but their writing is not rooted in life.
This problem most often shows up in descriptions. Their characters’ hair is “silky,” or wool socks “scratchy.” Hearts “pound,” muscles “ripple,” eyelids “flutter.” Sunsets “glow” or rain “pours.” They are simply writing the sorts of things that other writers have written, time and time again. It’s just as damaging when they go generic. Rooms are “large” or “opulent,” gardens are full of “flowers” surrounded by “trees,” lipstick is “red,” their characters eat “food.”
When you’re creating your fictional world, details matter. A clever story can be entertaining, but readers can’t lose themselves in your fictional world unless it feels real, concrete, definite. Clichés are tired and overly familiar. Generic descriptions are just filler, Pablum rather than steak.
Of course, most writers already know this. So why do they so often fall back on generic commonplaces and clichés?
They’re easy. They’re what comes to mind first. And they often look just good enough on the page that it’s possible to skip over them while you revise and never realize you have a problem. You have to deliberately focus to spot the places where you’ve taken the easy way out.
Other writers, I suspect, fall into commonplaces because they’re more interested in other parts of their stories. They want to get past the descriptions so they can dig into more dialogue, or they’re so caught up in the upcoming plot twist that their characters start talking banalities to get the dialogue out of the way more quickly. And all of that might be fine for a first draft. But when you’re revising, you need to rip out cliches like the weeds that they are.
Replacing them isn’t simply a matter of pulling out a Thesaurus and looking for alternatives to “silky.” You have to pay attention to the actual, real world. That’s where you go to find the distinctive, often surprising details that will make your fictional world real. For instance, the received wisdom is that teakettles whistle. But if you actually pay attention when one is coming up to a boil, you’ll find that it often bangs and pops (depending on how hard your water is) and then begins to hiss. If your readers have never noticed just how kettles boil, showing them that detail can make your fictional world feel more real than their everyday life.
To give you an example of the impact clear, reality-based details can have, Rex Stout once described Archie Goodwin visiting a witness’s apartment. Archie finds it cluttered with furniture, including a piano stool in the middle of the room with no piano. In another story, he’s searching a suspect’s room and notes that she left all of her dresser drawers open an inch or so. I read these descriptions years ago and can’t even remember which books they came from. But those little, unique details made those two locations so real that I felt like I was in them at the time and still remember them years later.
Metaphor is another way to anchor your writing in reality – even better, it’s the reality of your characters. If you’re stuck looking for an original take on something, get into your viewpoint character’s head. What would their surroundings remind them of? How would they filter what they see? This gives you a chance to not only capture the reality around them but the reality inside of them – their history, their experience – making your descriptions doubly real.
In Kenneth Roberts’ Arundel, set in 18th-century Maine, a character describes a dress as being the shade of yellow of a fern after the first frost. This is not only crisp and specific, it tells you how someone of that century who was steeped in nature might have seen the world.
A lot of writing is fun – getting surprised by your characters, getting carried away by the action or fast-paced dialogue.
Keeping it real takes discipline. You not only have to get into the habit of paying attention to the real world, you have to learn to see the blandness in your own writing. But you’ve got to develop the discipline, building your reality muscles. Keeping it real is the only way to create worlds your readers can inhabit.
Dave King has been editing for nearly 40 years now. He is co-author of Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, a former contributing editor to Writer’s Digest, and has contributed more than 100 articles over the last 12 years to Writer Unboxed. He lives on 25 acres in rural Massachusetts with his business partner and wife, Ruth Julian, who also edits his work. His other day job, at least on Sundays, is as the organist at a Lutheran church in Greenfield, Mass.
It’s about deep POV,isn’t it? The example of the dress is poignant. Thanks.
Deep POV is another way to understand it, yes. You can avoid both cliches and generalities by deeply imagining your story, filling in the little details of a scene before you start to write it, staying centered in your character’s point of view. People rarely look at a plate of, say, pork chops, potatoes, and carrots, and think “food.”
Great suggestions, Dave!
Dee
Thanks, Dave. Sometimes I struggle with the odd details that I want to include, the personality of place. Every word counts and must have its use. Story telling and story feeling. That you are there, that you can feel the action, the heat, the cold, the tension–whatever is needed at that time. “Now late afternoon, Ella in the kitchen preparing dinner, feeling more intensely the smoothness of dinner plates and soup bowls, the weight of Cecile’s ancient tureen—be careful, don’t drop it, don’t smash it against the counter.”
That’s the sort of thing I’m thinking of, though I suspect that all plates and bowls are smooth. The weight and preciousness of the tureen are very nice, character-driven touches.
In general, remember, the details you want are the ones your characters notice. You not only tie those details to their frame of mind, you can use those details to convey their frame of mind to your readers.
What a wonderful post, Dave. I just finished The Searcher by Tana French, and while the plot gave me problems, I was stopped in my tracks in a good way by her descriptions of the Irish landscape. Observations made in deep 3rd POV by locals gave me a sense of not just the land but the people in this one specific place. Then the observations by the ‘blow-in’ (the sassenach from Chicago) had a completely different feel. You got a sense of his outsider-ness by what he heard and saw and even smelled. All five senses engaged, and sometimes, the sixth. These descriptions were what kept me reading. They put me on the ground in another place.
That is exactly how it’s supposed to work, and thank you for an excellent example.
Thanks Dave, this is sound advice and perfect timing. I am revising my WIP right now, weeding out favourite words at the moment. (The word count of Scrivener is so helpful there!) I have some pet verbs I am using way too often. But descriptions are another weak spot. Thing is, as a reader I often skip over them quickly. I know this is no excuse for putting in weak descriptions in my own writing, but I need to be reminded from time to time. :-)
I’m happy to provide a reminder. And it’s always a good idea to pay attention to the parts of writing that don’t really interest you. The more well-balanced you can make your writing, the larger an audience you’ll reach.
Hello Dave. Thanks for helping us to be mindful of what crouches in the tall grass, waiting to pounce (sorry, that’s a cliche)
–cliche.
In his essay collection The War Against Cliche, Martin Amis expands the concept beyond our usual use to include cliches of the head and the heart. How many of us rely on the received shape of ideas and feelings, instead of doing what you ask of us: to question not only the words we’ve chosen, but the thoughts and feelings they express. Are they boilerplate ideas? Conventional emotions instead of unique to the circumstance? It’s hard to do, but crucial for those who take pride in their work as writers. Thanks again.
I’m actually not sure whether the tall grass is a cliche or a metaphor. Sometimes the line gets a little blurred.
And you — or Amis — are absolutely right about cliches of the heart, which is a very nice phrase. The unwillingness to look beyond conventional behavior, of characters acting as they ought to act, is one of the things that keeps characters from coming to life.
Great article. I love description, reading and writing it. One of my favorite things about effective description is that it does more than “show.” It also reveals more nuanced depths to character and place. Dead leaves scattered across a deserted street hints at the time of year. A trash can overflowing with booze bottles and crushed beer cans tells me something about the person responsible for filling it. Great description can make a story more compelling.
In a lot of the best descriptions, the location can become one of the characters. If you give them the same attention you give your people characters, they can have the same history and personality.
Spot on, Dave. As an editor, I’ve seen so much narrative weakened by words such as “some,” “large,” and other vaguenesses.
I have found cliches useful in the sense that they are placeholders showing intent to be rewritten later. But they aren’t that easy to see in one’s own work, and your caution that they may look so good on the page that they avoid being dealt with is smart.
So is the idea of filtering description through a character. I was once writing an “about the author” bit on me for a website, and it was dull, dull, dull. So I gave the task to my protagonist, a cat. His unique take on things human led to a lively and funny bit that still got across the biographical information.
Many thanks for your insights.
Oh, I like the cat technique. A fresh pair of eyes that can see in the dark.
The thing that intrigues me most about this topic is why so many cliches persist. Everyone knows they’re a problem, and I weed them out for a living. And yet I often find cliches in my own work — long after it’s published, of course.
There really is no excuse for the discipline of deeply imagining yourself in your story, of visualizing what your locations really look like. And since all the parts of a novel influence all the other parts, there’s a slight danger in using cliches as placeholders for something better. If your settings are more thoroughly imagined, they could affect your characters’ moods, which could change the way the dialogue plays out. Not necessarily, of course, but there is a little risk when you treat elements of your writing in isolation.
Thank for this, and great timing. Your examples were worth one thousand words as they made it all real to me. I appreciate you taking your time to help educate writers to become better at our craft.
“In general, remember, the details you want are the ones your characters notice.” Dave King.
Yes! This!
IMHO, those details aren’t excuses for the writer to wax poetic, they should be deliberate, specific observations of the POV that set the tone, develop the POV’s inner angst, and further the plot.
The reason why readers skip poetic description is because they sense it has nothing to do with story.
Great post Dave King.
Many years ago, when I was on the masthead of Writer’s Digest, I wrote a piece on purple prose that got into that tendency to was poetic. I should probably pull those ideas out again.
It also gave me an excuse to quote G. E. L. Bulwer-Lytton at length.
Great article Dave. I laughed over “food.” As a foodie, I can’t imagine anybody writing “food” (but I do imagine my cat thinking oh goodie, fud, when I open up a can) but then again I like to practice the use of specific nouns and strong verbs. And if you read my book BOUND, you’ll get hungry for a lamb vindaloo :)
What I struggle with is with descriptions that some of my critters want but those that my MC would not pay attention to. I realize they want more details because the setting is in India so I’m having to be more creative incorporating those details. Example: when my MC unrolls a hold-all to bed down for the night. Is it sufficient to say: My folded clothes in the pouch at the end of the hold-all made a soft enough pillow. I tried to pretend I was in a train, but there wasn’t any rocking to lull me to sleep.
I think you’re taking the right approach in standing up to your critics. The goal is to allow your readers to inhabit a fully-imagined world, and your viewpoint character is the path into that world. Someone who lived with hold-alls on a daily basis would never notice the details of what they are and how they work. As long as you give western readers enough detail so they understand them, leaving the other details out will actually make your world seem more real.
“From oriole to crow, note the decline
In music. Crow is realist. But, then,
Oriole, also, may be realist.”
–Wallace Stevens
Thanks for this, Dave. I often find, in trying to find the mot juste, that the struggle is to gratify both the desire for naturalness and the desire for something fresh, unique, vivid. It can take a lot of time to strike the right balance, but it’s geberally time well spent.
One of the little complications I didn’t dive into is that characters sometimes use cliches. Writers have to look for a fresh take on the world. Characters, particularly dull and plodding characters, don’t.
You’re right, it’s a hard balance to strike sometimes.
Dave:
I have just the opposite problem. I’m obsessed with specificity. I will spend 30 minutes going down the rabbit holes of design and paint maker websites looking for just the right shade of blue, say, to describe the sky or a character’s eyes, only to realize that the character — and the reader — would not recognize the term or the color (delft, anyone?).
Actually, I’ve run into this problem before — in Self-Editing, Renni and I use the example of the writer who spent three pages on how to kill and field-dress a beaver. (If I remember right, the tail is the yummy part.)
I think the way out of this is to focus on your characters. Unless your character is a painter with an obsession with color, you can probably get away with colors that appear on Crayola crayons. The 64-crayon box rather than the 8, but still.
Dave, you make a useful distinction between details that advance the narrative and detail-dumps with no function except to distract the reader from the story. We don’t need to follow the heroine along every time she changes clothes, complete with the color and style of every garment, unless we are shown the relevance.
That’s it. Only notice what the heroine is doing when the heroine notices what the heroine is doing. You can actually draw readers more deeply into the story by leaving out ordinary details your character wouldn’t notice.
The problem is when you insert details that simply fill space rather than bringing your story to life.
Thank you, Dave. And thanks to the thoughtful commenters. I am trying to do this, to put myself in my character’s body and mind and see and think and feel and react as he would to his world. I presently have him climbing up a drain pipe to a high balcony, something I have never done, but I am trying to feel his fear, his rush of adrenaline, the joy and pain of muscles working to their limit. Previously, I just said he climbed it.
Excellent. You’re heading in the right direction.
I’ve often found that the conversations that start in the comments can be as illuminating as the article itself.