Descriptions

            Descriptions are something that I've always struggled with. As you can imagine, this makes my job as a writer rather difficult.

            At some point in my life, I stopped viewing things based on how they looked and saw them for what they were (this is hard to explain... when you look at a tree, you can see bark, leaves, branches, ect. - all the things that make up a tree, or you can see it as a tree - an entity made up of many parts, seen or unseen. This is very abstract thinking, I know). I think this was also around the time I stopped drawing – I had discovered that there was just too much detail in the world around me and there was no way I could capture it on paper. This managed to sneak into my writing as well. I can write that her hair is red, but if I try to describe the exact shade of red the description ends up far too long and takes away from the story.

            It’s no big surprise that my writing style took a turn away from descriptions. I like to let the reader’s imagination do most of the work – after all, that’s where books will always be superior to movies and video games. My writing evolved to a point where I felt it was pretty much seamless, but I always worried about if there was enough description. As the author, I can’t really tell – though I must say that when I do discover a place I want to add a description in, I can never manage it without breaking the flow of the story.

            Another big problem with descriptions is racism. I pride myself in not being racist – I don’t pay any attention to stereotypes and I very firmly believe that all people are people, regardless of what they look like. The problem is that I'm so anti-racist that one day I discovered that I’d gone right through and out the other side of racism. When I described people, I couldn't comment on the colour of their skin because to do so would be racist. Then one day it suddenly hit me that this was another form of racism – to ignore the colour of someone’s skin because there’s no politically correct way of commenting on it is to ignore part of who that person is. It was terrifying to me that I’d worked so hard to not be racist only to become racist in a way I hadn't anticipated. I'm still working my way through editing skin colour back into my vocabulary and, let me tell you, it’s very hard to take the taboo off words you've avoided all your life.

            In fantasy worlds, racism is something of a given. This was something else that came as a shock to me when I noticed it. If you pick up a fantasy book and start reading it, you find humans, elves and dwarves, all of whom have their own racial traits and most of whom are inherently good. Then you read about goblins, trolls and giants. Immediately, you assume they are evil and, let’s face it, you’re right. This is something built into our reading experiences and we simply accept them without even seeing the blatant racism right before our eyes.

            I first tried to change that when I was twelve. My protagonist found himself in a very friendly village where anyone of any race could live in peace. One of the cooks for the community was an orc. I must admit that the poor guy had a hard time fitting in (he kept putting bugs in the food to add flavour , but he was making an effort at least. Ever since then, I have always believed that there was some good in every race and, while some are predominantly evil, it is because of their upbringing, not what they were born as.

            In spite of all my troubles with descriptions, I've persevered and made three very important discoveries. The first is that less is more; all I need to do is sketch out an idea and let the reader’s imagination do the rest – it makes my books far better to read than if I described every detail. Second, the more I describe, the better I get at it, so giving up is out of the question. And finally, I don’t need to write descriptions at all; I can make Colleen do it for me.

Click here to find the charity anthology containing a couple of my short stories.

If there's any subject you'd like to see me ramble on about, feel free to leave a comment asking me to do so.