Several years ago I had the pleasure of stumbling upon Isabella Bird's A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains while traveling in Colorado. I was struck immediately by her painstaking description of the landscapes she passed through on her travels:
The log cabin, on the top of which a room with a steep, ornamental Swiss roof has been built, is in a valley close to a clear, rushing river, which emerges a little higher up from an inaccessible chasm of great sublimity. One side of the valley is formed by cliffs and terraces of porphyry as red as the reddest new brick, and at sunset blazing into vermilion. Through rifts in the nearer ranges there are glimpses of pine-clothed peaks, which, towards twilight, pass through every shade of purple and violet.Writing in 1873, Bird's audience -- initially only her sister -- would have had no other way to "see" these scenes: photography was not as accessible as it is today, and film didn't exist. Bird was aware of her reader's desire for a clear, logical portrait of the scene. Unless she painted a picture of the landscape for her readers, they would have no idea what the American West looked like.
For this reason, Bird's work is replete with detailed, methodical description, and there is much to learn from her work. In fiction, however, description must go a step further: it should also contribute to the plot, and even to character. Writing even earlier than Isabella Bird, Emily Brontë's first description of Wuthering Heights is much shorter than Bird's description because she's writing for a very different purpose. Without interrupting the flow of the plot, she needs to present Heathcliff's home as a metaphor for the man himself and foreshadow events to come:
Wuthering Heights is the name of Mr. Heathcliff's dwelling. 'Wuthering' being a significant provincial adjective, descriptive of the atmospheric tumult to which its station is exposed in stormy weather. Pure, bracing ventilation they must have up there at all times, indeed: one may guess the power of the north wind blowing over the edge, by the excessive slant of a few stunted firs at the end of the house; and by a range of gaunt thorns all stretching their limbs one way, as if craving alms of the sun. Happily, the architect had foresight to build it strong: the narrow windows are deeply set in the wall, and the corners defended with large jutting stones (ch. 1).In one paragraph, Brontë's description conveys a sense of inaccessibility, remoteness, and harshness, of a place where living things struggle to flourish. The firs are "stunted," and even thorns are gaunt and starved for light. The house is strong, but the architecture is defensive and forbidding, which also describes Heathcliff.
A similar example can be found in the scene in which Elizabeth Bennet first catches sight of Darcy's estate in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice:
They gradually ascended for half a mile, and then found themselves at the top of a considerable eminence, where the wood ceased, and the eye was instantly caught by Pemberley House, situated on the opposite side of a valley, into which the road with some abruptness wound. It was a large, handsome, stone building, standing well on rising ground, and backed by a ridge of high woody hills; -- and in front, a stream of some natural importance was swelled into greater, but without any artificial appearance. Its banks were neither formal, nor falsely adorned. Elizabeth was delighted. She had never seen a place for which nature had done more, or where natural beauty had been so little counteracted by an awkward taste (ch. 1, vol. 3).Here again, the house stands in for the man. The description of the stream could describe Darcy: born into a situation of importance, he had made the most of that position through study and application. And the preference for naturalness over artifice is something that both characters value; in fact, it could be said that this is one of the qualities that attracts Darcy to Elizabeth in the first place.
Furthermore, the description of how Elizabeth reaches Pemberley, traveling first through the woods until the house can be seen, then descending again, to emerge at the house finally, mirrors the structure of the plot. Only after great misunderstanding and confusion does she see Darcy's real value; and having seen it, she is separated from him again, only to finally be reunited at the end.
Conversely, a description of a man might lay the groundwork for future plot points. For instance, the climax of The Great Gatsby depends on a certain violence and callousness in the character of Tom Buchanan. Fitzgerald sets that up in chapter 1, the very first time we see Tom:
He had changed since his New Haven years. Now he was a sturdy straw-haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner. Two shining arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward. Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body -- he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing, and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat. It was a body capable of enormous leverage -- a cruel body.
This is the kind of description that might be written during revision, when the writer has a sense of the complete narrative arc and sees what role each character plays in the plot. Then the writer might decide what aspects of character to highlight in that initial description and which to downplay or delete.
While every description in your fiction may not contribute so perfectly to character or plot as these examples do -- at least not in the first draft -- consider your descriptions carefully. What qualities must be present in the characters for the plot to make sense, and how can you best reveal those characteristics to the reader? In describing settings, could key descriptions introduce metaphors for your characters? How might they mirror the structure of your story? Could they foreshadow future events, and thus increase narrative tension?
Return to the list of description tips.
