March 25, 2009

• descriptive language in stories

  I’ve been thinking… I don’t really buy into that description nonsense in stories and literature. 

  I realized this the other day when I was reading a work of fiction and came to the awareness  that I wasn’t really reading the descriptions.  No, I don’t mean that I was skipping over the descriptions, not at all. My eyes processed every word and my brain acknowledged their meaning. However, I wasn’t really reading them. My mind wasn’t taking in the data of the words and using them to formulate a picture of what was going on in the story. Rather the words were sort of just bouncing off my consciousness. I didn’t *care* about the description. It was wholly irrelevant to me in terms of my ability to enjoy the story.

  Instead I realized my mind was filtering out action words and phrases. Such and such did this. So and so decided that. etc. etc.  That and the dialogue were what I used to formulate the story. In my mind that was the story. It was that which I read for. What were people saying to each other. What were people doing. What were people thinking.  I didn’t care what the damn garden looked like or what posters were on the wall. I ignored that garbage.

  It’s always been that way for me actually. The only time I’d even remember a particular description was when it became relevant to the plot later on. Which most of the time for most of the descriptions was never.

  But how do you form an image of the story you wonder? Honestly, I always just made it up on my own. What the characters looked like, what they were wearing, where they lived, all those were images in my own head. Usually pretty vague and blurry and changeable images, but they were only the slightest bit loosely associated with the descriptions in the actual books. Often I would consciously and knowingly forge images in my mind that contradicted the descriptions the authors so painstakingly inscribed. Like for example I might think of a particular hero or heroine as black or asian or hispanic even when the writer clearly intended the culture to be more of a medieval European setting and the characters to be white. Once I even swapped a character’s gender in my mind because I felt the story was somewhat lacking in female representation.  Odd I know.

  Mostly though I just don’t have any particular images. I see the characters as if I am looking out from their eyes and not seeing their faces. I see the terrain as if I was looking down from a great distance with no particular details. When a description becomes relevant late in a book all of a sudden that feature might pop into existence in my mind’s eye’s view of the world. And the whole thing might shift and twist in my head over time as I decide that I like the world looking this way better than that way or whatever.

  This doesn’t mean I can’t really appreciate a good description. I just don’t CARE that much. Much like I can appreciate a beautiful painting or an extraordinary landscape. For about three minutes. Then I’m already bored and ready to move on.  So when people point to great passages of brilliant description in literature I look and nod and say “that’s nice” while at the same time trying to keep myself from falling asleep. The images don’t MATTER to me.

  It’s the same, ironically when I read comics and manga too. And those actually have pictures. But I don’t dwell on the pictures. My eyes pass right over them to get to the dialogue except during the key action sequences where you HAVE to look at the pictures to understand what’s going on. In a lot of manga I don’t pay enough attention to the images to even be able to tell the characters apart until a character mentions a character by name. Then I know and I’m able to match up the character representation with my mental image.

  Really I think this is because I’m naturally not very visual a person. I never pay any attention to sights in the real world. I don’t pick up or notice details. I get lost insanely easily even in video games and even with maps. I just don’t see things very well.  I can’t, no matter how hard I try, pick up the subtle details that people use as clues to understand what’s going on. Visually I don’t get it much. I don’t experience it much.

  However audial things I grasp much better. This works with regards to reading too. A descriptive passage won’t even interest me in the slightest in terms of the power of the word choice or the clarity of the image presented, but the rhythem of the words, the patterns in the way the language flows THAT I find fascinating. A particularly lyrical turn of phrase can entrance me for hours and I will take great joy in reading such a passage over and over again.

  Perhaps this is why in writing I find the prescription of “show don’t tell” to be a nearly impossible precept to follow. As much as I know other people like having their concrete descriptions of what’s going on, I don’t HAVE any to share. And the specific descriptions are, by and large, utterly irrelevant to the stories I want to tell anyway.

  So I wonder, are there a lot of other readers out there like me?  Or should I focus all my efforts in trying to modify my writing style so as to be able to delivery the descriptive passages MOST readers need in order to experience a story properly even if I myself have no interest in it?

  • 4:24 pm
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