How Much Description Is Too Much?

In today’s Journal

* Quotes of the Day
* Vacation Was Short-Lived
* Yates Briscoe…
* How Much Description Is Too Much?
* Well, Kindle Vella
* Of Interest
* The Numbers

Quotes of the Day

“I finished my first novel that I seriously tried WITD on, and I’m sad to be done but also so thrilled! It was so much fun. My characters took me places I never expected. Literally, some things came up where I thought, ‘Did I just write that? I never would have planned that’.” Erin Donoho, recent convert

I wrote back to welcome Erin to the club. (grin)

“The business of business is relationships; the business of life is human connection.” Robin S. Sharma, as reported on The Passive Voice

For a friend: “Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn’t exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.” Ray Bradbury

Vacation Was Short-Lived

But outstanding.

For the first time in two years without email as an intermediary, Dan and I slathered philosopy all the way through the drive over, the rest of that day and night, and half the next day.

The one night we spent there was exceptional. We always find something exceptional in our little camp perched on a cliff about 300 feet above the Gila.

This time, on Wednesday night, Musk’s Starlink satellite stream came up in the west a little after sundown and passed straight over us. An absolutely incredible sight.

I also got to witness for the first time in my 70 years a serious meteorite, complete with a very long green tail that lingered for a second or two after the meteorite disappeared.

Plus the requisite passenger jets bound east and west and various satellites. Oddly, the usually consistent wind/breeze appeared only intermittently, so we passed a fitful night slapping away mosquitos and gnats.

Around 1 p.m. the next day after hopefully watching clouds form and disappear, we decided to pack up and head back. Temps reached over 100, and there’s very little shade up there on the rock, and I for one am definitely not a spring rooster. (grin)

It’ll take me a day or two to get my routine under me again.

“Yates Briscoe and the Beauty of Britain”

Another short story went out free yesterday, the first in a string of ten I wrote while at, or as a result of, an earlier camping trip on the Gila.

To read it free, click https://stanbroughwrites.substack.com/p/yates-briscoe-and-the-beauty-of-britain. If you haven’t subscribed to these free short stories, you can do so by clicking the subscribe button at the bottom of the story.

One guy who read it yesterday emailed with this:

“That one’s a keeper. Not too wordy, not too short. (Goldilocks porridge.) The fight scenes are first-rate witness descriptions, and the picture of his mother made me think of Lee Marvin in a flowered dress.”

Thanks, Gary V.

One subject among many Dan and I broached during our brief outing. We both write into the dark, recording the story as it unfolds, and as we run through it with our characters, striving to keep up. We agreed on the answer to the question:

If your POV character(s) notice something about the setting, it goes into the story. Period.

This goes back to the root admonition of writing fiction into the dark: Don’t think.

If your characters add some description about the setting, leave it in. Don’t think maybe it’s “too much” (it isn’t) and take it out.

Likewise, if something about the description passes through your mind as you’re writing, put it in. Again, period.

For example, if you have two people talking in a second-floor formal dining room with a balcony, you can’t just open the next sentence (and scene) with “They looked out across the grounds spread wide beneath them.”

Nope. At some point in your mind, the characters made the move from the dining room through the double doors (or whatever) onto the balcony. Put that transition scene into the story. Otherwise, their being on the baclony surveying the grounds is miraculous, and you never want to do anything miraculous in your story.

Miracles don’t happen in stories anyway. Anything like that is the result of the writer not conveying to the page something that passed through their mind while writing the story.

Every scene has a resolution. Often, that resolution is a miniature scene, a transition. Write it.

The other half of the answer to the original question is this:

If you, the writer, “feel” (consciously think) that something should be added to bolster the setting, don’t put it in. That is the very definition of too much description.