Those little details can lift the characters right off the page and add that realism which I think is so important.

More than fashionably late to the party, as always…

As you know, I tend to create scenes vividly and then have to rein back: like Phillipa, for me the scenes have to feel real to me before authentic life can happen on the pages.

I try to be ruthless with myself now in subsequent drafts and edit with the agenda of leaving only the details that serve character and plot,as in your third example above (emphasis on the ‘try). I don’t waste anything though and, while these edited descriptions aren’t often useful elsewhere, even in the same novel, I do sometimes recycle them in short stories and poems. Having said all of that, I do like the odd (sometimes very odd) quirky detail – in my own and others’ writing – which I think can help verisimilitude.

I do need to work on my description. That’s one thing I’ve been told fairly consistently – that I don’t have enough description. Usually it’s the setting that I need to describe more, but also a bit with physical descriptions. Sometimes I just like to imagine that readers can fill in the blanks with whatever is familiar and comfortable for them, but I understand that readers do need a little bit of something to ground them in the story. And then of course, there are other times when I can see someone’s face, or the layout of their apartment, or they city they live in, with such clarity that I can’t help but describe it.

Off to read part 3!

Sarah, I’ll have to track down Bujold – my local library has come up blank so I’ll try further afield. Yep, you’re right Rom Susp does seem to demand sequels and Nora is the queen of them! I haven’t read any Shannon McKenna, but I’ve now got a copy of Return to Me to read. 17 pages sounds more like agony than ecstasy for a sex scene…. No danger of me ever running to that many pages…

No Lemon poppyseed recipes but I have had requests for Anzac biscuit recipes (my heroine cooks like a madwoman when under stress) so I’ll be posting that sometime soon.

And geez, Suzanne Brockmann has what, 17 or 18 books in ONE freakin series and personally, I am all there for book #25 if she’s willing to keep going. I mean, hey, more US Navy SEALS is NEVER a bad thing *hee hee*

My favorite Romantic Suspense author is Shannon McKenna who’s on (I think) Book 9 in her McLoud Brothers series. It was only supposed to be one or two books IIRC.

My writing is somewhere between Suzanne Brockmann’s milfic style and Shannon McKenna’s edge and grit (though I’ll always put more graphic and explicit sex than Suz and NEVER do 17 page sex scenes like Shannon )))

Are your first two books in this series published? By whom? What are the titles? Gee, the things you learn adn people you meet hanging out on a blog these days *grin*

Lemon poppyseed muffins are the BEST with tea, not coffee, and you must put cream into your tea (or at least milk) Do you have the recipe posted on this blog somewhere? Linkiness please if you do!

-sry

One writer you didn’t mention who has so utterly mastered the art of description, I tend to think of her settings as being characters (almost) in and of themselves is Award-winning Science Fiction & Fantasy writer Lois McMaster Bujold.

When I read a Bujold, even those in the fantasy genre (which I loathe and despise, recall – and even Lois’s fantasy is still loathesome to my tastes), there is usually a sense of a tapestry being woven before my eyes. It doesn’t matter how many times I read one of her stories. I’ll ALWAYS see or notice something new and different that I never even realized was there the last time through. She so fully-integrates the worlds she builds into the stories she builds and makes the pacing and setting grow and develop together that it would be impossible for her settings to be altered and still have the same people and same story. THAT, in my opinion, is the perfect way to write a description. Whether she’s describing characters or places or events, Lois always integrates all of my senses, as a reader, into teh experience. I don’t just envision the room or the people in it, I smell them, I taste the little swan shaped pate and feel the gravelly substance on my tongue and hear the raves of the snobs behind me whilst I’m looking for somewhere to spit the stuff out and I feel every bit of social pressure to swallow that sordid substance that the character did. That’s one of my favorite moments in a novel called CETAGANDA which is a rather hilarious novel for a murder mystery in the science fiction genre. I think CETAGANDA is second only to MIRROR DANCE for Lois’s ability to layer texture upon texture into the worlds–multiple–created in one story. It’s so complex and yet, so utterly simple to absorb.

You are soooo right about information overload being a big problem so many of us writers step into, like a mud puddle we can’t avoid. We just plop right down into the info dump and ramble away, thinking “Oh no, the reader will LIKE knowing all of this.” NOT. I don’t find Hemingway or Fitzgerald to be so breathtaking as I do Bujold, though Fitzgerald does impress me (no, really!) I think you might enjoy reading a Bujold just for yucks and grins. Or for psychological challenge that might bend your mind over Carrie, read MIRROR DANCE. You’ll be UTTERLY hooked on Miles Vorkosigan and his world. After many years in the fantasy genre, Lois has finally come back to write another Miles book adn it’s coming out this November. Now’s the time to get hooked

Thanks for writing this article on description. It definitely got me thinking anyway!

-sry