Be Your Own Editor

Rollin from Virginia writes:

My question is: As an editor do you find overly descriptive narratives distracting or do they enhance the overall story? Example:

“Scattered columns of moonlight bled through the winding treetops of Barraud Common’s royal park as the night air howled through its foliage. On the ground below, amid the shadows cast on the murky forest floor, an orchestra of nocturnal creatures howled, twittered and creaked their songs of twilight.”

The simple answer, Rollin, is that “overly” anything is distracting. Description, like other elements, can enhance not only the story, but also the characters, the mood, and the themes in your writing. But restraint is called for: the best description uses a few well-chosen words to give the reader a lot of information.

It’s necessary in good fiction to describe everything from a setting to the shirt a character is wearing to his state of mind… to whatever degree we want the reader to know about these things. In some cases, a sense of mystery warrants less description. And you shouldn’t describe the shirt a character is wearing just for the sake of description if it tells us nothing about that character. But we’ll assume it’s important to describe the setting in your example.

Let’s take a close look at those sentences and try to determine what works and what doesn’t. I see a few lovely descriptive phrases that help to evoke image and mood. But I also see extraneous and redundant words that distract (and thus detract) more than they contribute. When in doubt, go with nouns and verbs in description before adverbs and adjectives. What’s strongest in the first sentence? “Columns of moonlight.” This phrase tells me all I need to know; I don’t think you’d lose much if you lost the word “scattered.”

Also, be watchful for redundancy or repeated words in description. “The night air howled.” We don’t need “through its foliage”; we already know we’re in a park with winding treetops. And in the last sentence, perhaps “their songs of twilight,” while a pretty turn of phrase, is also an unnecessary turn of phrase. The creatures have already been described as “nocturnal” and an “orchestra.” And the word “howled” is used to describe both the air and the creatures: Are both descriptions of sound even necessary to evoke the mood? It’s getting pretty noisy in there.

Sometimes that’s the hardest thing in preventing your description from getting too wordy: you think of a beautiful metaphor or the perfect word to describe something, and you can’t bear to part with it. But just like a film editor who sometimes has to leave a great shot on the cutting-room floor, writers must sometimes sacrifice a few words they love for the greater good.

Check out this edited version. Has it lost anything? Or has it gained meaning and effectiveness because each word, not being surrounded by extraneous words, is able to shine?

Columns of moonlight bled through the treetops of Barraud Common’s royal park. Amid the shadows on the forest floor, an orchestra of nocturnal creatures howled, twittered and creaked.

My version, of course, is only one possible version. It’s meant to illustrate the importance of the economy of words. Description is vital, but overload it with verbiage and whatever you’re trying to convey through that description may become lost in the murky forest.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 27th, 2007 at 1:35 pm and is filed under Readers Q&A, Writing/Editing Tips: Nuts and Bolts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.