How to Write Great Description in Your Book, Part 1

​“Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December / And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.” And of course my favorite line: “And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain / Thrilled me—filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before.” . . . Let’s talk about writing great description in your book.
 
(If you’d like to view this post in video format, click here. It’s part of our “Advice from an Editor” series on YouTube.)

​Description, like action and dialogue, is all about a balancing act. You want enough of it so the reader feels anchored in your story and is able to follow along with what’s going on, but you also don’t want so much that they become bored or overloaded and your story becomes bloated.
 
Each book will require a different amount of description, and it will depend on the type of book and the type of description. But to figure out how much and what type of description is best for your book, we need to look at what description does and what are its purposes. And I’d like to break this down into five different categories.
 
First: Description provides setting. It provides an anchor point for your reader to say, “Aha! I understand where I am and who these people are and what’s going on.” Second: Description sets pacing. Third: Description adds beauty to the text. Fourth: It sets mood. And fifth: It provides commentary on what’s going on and on who’s doing it.
 
Let’s start out with providing setting. Really good books, really good descriptions, will allow the reader to basically feel like they’re there, or sufficiently there—they don’t have to think about it a lot. This comes back to the rule of using all five senses (or all 9 if you wish) to provide that feeling of setting. You should know what it looks like, what it smells like, what it sounds like, what it tastes like and feels like. And you don’t have to have all five senses in every single description, but at some point you should have all five throughout the book.
 
So I should be able to feel, if I’m in 1800s London, that it’s, let’s say it’s summer—so it is damp and my clothing is sticking to me and the stinking smell of the Thames is rising into the air and the soot is heavy upon my tongue and the carriages are rattling by . . . I should be able to know all these things. And if the story is good enough, I shouldn’t have to wonder, to ask, “Where am I?” I know that I’m indoors. I know this and that.
 
This means that, to some extent, description is required in every scene. We’ll get into this a little more in a moment, but there’s sort of a rule of thumb that action scenes should have less description and in non-action scenes you have more because of pacing. But you always need to have some. I talked in my action video/posts on the importance of using your setting as part of your action. For example, you can use a chair as a weapon, you can pick up the chair and bash it on someone, but if the reader doesn’t know we’re inside in the sort of room that has chairs in it, that will come out of nowhere and it will be disorienting. It will also be difficult for the reader to become invested because they’re thinking, “Well, anything can happen because we don’t know what’s in that room. We don’t know what tools are at our disposal.” So you always need description of some sort.
 
When you’re not in the middle of an action scene, you can of course spend longer periods of time on description. One book that has a huge amount of description is Walter Moers’ The 13 1/2 Lives of Captain Blue Bear. There’s an enormous quantity of description in this book, but it doesn’t become boring because it fits in the universe and he does it at times when it’s not like “Oh wait, hold on, we were in the middle of something.” But then, this does come back also to my second point, which is:
 
Description sets pacing. More description will slow the pacing—to some extent; not so much if it’s good description, which can actually be used to increase tension—we’ll come back to that in a second. More description slows the pacing, and less description speeds it up.
 
One big mistake of this, though, especially in the aforementioned action scenes, is that authors will cut down on description so much because they want to speed the action that the reader isn’t given time to process what’s going on. You’re just racing from point to point, shifting the camera so quickly, that their brains don’t have enough time to actually register and therefore care about the events. And that’s part of why, even in the fastest scenes, you don’t want them to be too fast. You need to use description enough to slow them down so that the reader can keep up with you and be invested.
 
This is also a fabulous way to build tension—if done correctly and in the moment, and see my video/post on building tension for that. But if we’re in a really tense scene, if we’re inside a haunted house and walking down the hallway, you actually want a lot of description here because you want that slow, tense build. You want to maybe hear that creak or you want to (like in The Amityville Horror) hear that the flies are back. And if you just say “flies,” that’s good, but if you mention buzzing or the tiny flitterings of their wings, those little details—and how they’re just a mass of black—that increases the tension, makes it scarier, and makes the reader more involved because it makes it more real. Of course if you do too much or the wrong variety, it just bogs your story down, so again, balance is important.
 
Point three: Description adds beauty to the text. The poem I read from was Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven.” I love Poe; I think he has some of the most beautiful descriptions, and not just in his poetry. Some of what he does in “The Raven” is that he uses different literary techniques. He uses alliteration (“And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain” with all those nice “sss” sounds) and it just lends an extra something to the text. Every author out there, every writer, even when they’re trying to mimic other writers, has their own style, their own flair, their own flavor that makes them uniquely them, and it can never entirely be replicated.
 
When I was a kid, I was an enormous fan of the Animorphs series by K.A. Applegate. I read them obsessively over and over again—until the mid-20s, actually right after the David trilogy, numbers 20 to 22, and then suddenly . . . Nothing had seemed to change in the books, in the style, but I just enjoyed them less, and it wasn’t until years later that I figured out why, which is: that’s the point she started using ghost writers. And the ghost writers, while solid writers, weren’t her and didn’t have the particular flair that she had that drew me into the books. That “uniquely her” bit. This is something you should always bring out in writing, not suppress.
 
Now, don’t do this to the detriment of your book; don’t be like “Well, I’m just a writer who uses ‘very’ in every sentence. Get over it—it’s style.” No. But beauty in description is a good way to do this. Having that little bit of alliteration, that little bit of a more interesting description, which we’ll get more into in points four and five. It will make your text beautiful, and it doesn’t matter your genre—it will always improve your story and improve your reader’s enjoyment, even if they don’t notice the beauty of your description. . . . Unless you’re writing a book like The 13 1/2 Lives of Captain Blue Bear, in which case, yes, they will notice.
 
I’m going to stop here for today; next time, we’ll discuss points four and five, setting the mood and giving commentary, so stay tuned.
 
Do you have any other advice, comments, or questions about how to write great description in a book? Leave them in the comments!
 
For more writing tips, check out our Advice from an Editor YouTube series, or this set of blog posts.

As an Amazon associate, we earn from qualifying purchases.

Deborah J. Natelson

Deborah lives with a fluffy member of fauna named Flora and two pretty black kitties. She is the author of Bargaining Power, a smart, twisty fantasy thriller; and various other books. Her author website is www.deborahjnatelson.com.