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A Question for The Community

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CASH216 View Drop Down
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    Posted: 26 Jan 2022 at 4:37pm
I have a question... and this is not a "hot take" or question to cause discord or confrontation.  It is merely, a question, or questions.

Have readers begun to lose their imagination?  Have writers begun to become TOO descriptive, leaving nothing for the imagination?

I wonder your thoughts regarding this topic.  

(Background, or reason for the question.  I am a lover of Bradbury, Orwell, Dickens, and Hemingway, etc. and they always seemed to be less about the details or description, and more about the storytelling.  So, I just wonder.  And please again do not take this as insulting nor attempting to start a fight, it's just rarely as of late have I had the privilege of speaking with or listening to such a diverse group of people, that I wonder what everyone thinks.  And am genuinely looking forward to any sort of conversation on the topic.  Thank You.)


Edited by CASH216 - 26 Jan 2022 at 5:34pm
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (1) Thanks(1)   Quote jennifer.quail Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 26 Jan 2022 at 6:46pm
Styles come and go. There's also a difference between "literary" writing and mass-market consumption that has gotten wider (Dune or Foundation or Rama would be very hard sells to the SF/F market now.) But it's not as if extensive description is new. If anything we haven't swung back to the days of Melville, Dickens, Hugo, and we won't even discuss Tolstoy and his 40,000 word "short" stories. 

But there is the other element: most entertainment media is now visual. People expect more description, so they want to be shown things in a way they're used to.
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (1) Thanks(1)   Quote Evelynwhy1 Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 26 Jan 2022 at 8:52pm
So, there used to be this common advice for popular fiction writers in the early 2000s: everything has to contribute to the greater plot. This is less true for the literary genre, and it's not terrible advice, but there are some poorer quality books from that time period from that. Having those soft, silent moments to just worldbuild or character build (think of the train ride in Spirited Away), can allow deeper emotion or tension to develop. That line of thinking is slowly breaking away, but my point is that trends exist, and we may move back to Hemingway's style. 
https://forums.nycmidnight.com/we-were-mermaids-r4-ff_topic45148.html
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (2) Thanks(2)   Quote Kali42 Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 26 Jan 2022 at 11:45pm
I think it depends a lot on genre. I get a lot of critique when I don't describe Every Thing in a romance. Curtains, cabinet type, full character descriptions down to the size of their nose, etc. But I almost never get the same notes from something like suspense. 

Do I want my reader to know a character is short and she has a ton of cabinets she can't reach in her kitchen? Yes. But I like leaving some details to readers. Mostly because I enjoy putting myself in stories and it's hard to do that with too much given detail and I tend to write for myself.
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (1) Thanks(1)   Quote iBenj Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 27 Jan 2022 at 6:55am
Originally posted by Kali42 Kali42 wrote:

I think it depends a lot on genre. I get a lot of critique when I don't describe Every Thing in a romance. Curtains, cabinet type, full character descriptions down to the size of their nose, etc. But I almost never get the same notes from something like suspense. 

Do I want my reader to know a character is short and she has a ton of cabinets she can't reach in her kitchen? Yes. But I like leaving some details to readers. Mostly because I enjoy putting myself in stories and it's hard to do that with too much given detail and I tend to write for myself.

Letting the readers work it out for themselves is a great approach (and it's something I know you do very well). It's a skill I need to work on - I'm prone to drawing pictures and colouring them in for the reader, which makes editing tougher, if nothing else.

When the reader gets to feel clever because they've put two and two together and figured out details you've only hinted at, they become so much more engaged in the story.
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (1) Thanks(1)   Quote AmandaM Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 27 Jan 2022 at 8:37am
This is a really interesting question. 

I don't think it's so much the reader has lost imagination. As stated above, styles for writing come and go, and can be genre dependent. But you can finesse giving lots of detailed visual description if it's not your thing. Filling in details that aren't there is something the human brain excels at, given the right encouragement. 

I'm not very visual--I can't really see things in my head easily. So as a reader, my eyes tend to glaze over at long visual descriptions of objects or locations. I don't "see" what's being described, so it tends to read as a laundry list. And if I try to write that kind of visual description, it sounds like a laundry list  So I rely heavily on giving just enough broad strokes visually to let the reader fill in the details for descriptions that aren't really important to the story. (If I were making a painting of a tiger in a jungle, for example, I'd focus on getting the tiger clear, but might let the jungle just be broad strokes of green and brown. The mind knows that's "jungle" and will fill in the details accordingly. But mostly I'd want you looking at the tiger.) I also pull in other senses to describe things. Smell, touch, sound.  

In the story I just submitted, there are almost no visual descriptions of the surroundings or characters. None of my beta readers noticed that. I am really curious to see if the judges do.



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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (2) Thanks(2)   Quote nod1v1ng Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 27 Jan 2022 at 9:08am

I'm a self ascribed description whore. It's not that I think readers don't have the imagination, but I often have a more literary style of writing. I love delicious prose, what can I say? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

That being said, it definitely depends on the genre and the story. I try for snappier, short prose if I'm writing something like a thriller than needs to be propelled faster and keep the heart racing. On the other hand, I published a story once where the setting itself was it's own character, so it was description heavy since that was the only way it could "speak."

While I do love description, I think there's a skill in distributing it - where is it important to you as a writer for the readers to really experience your vision? Every little thing doesn't need to be described to death, but sometimes focusing on something that is meaningful to the story adds depth. Also, don't forget when adding description, it is far richer when you add multiple senses - not just a laundry list of what can be seen, but smelled and felt and heard.

Also, sometimes description has to say a lot in only a few words. I write a ton of SpecFic flash, and some of my peers have mentioned that razor sharp world building in flash is my superpower. (blush) Three well chosen, strong words can sometimes be far more powerful than a paragraph of milquetoast description.  

Of course, it always comes down to taste. For example, the old editor at F&SF seemed to like a sparser prose, while the new editor has mentioned she likes a more poetic style. 


Edited by nod1v1ng - 27 Jan 2022 at 9:09am
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (1) Thanks(1)   Quote amlewi08 Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 27 Jan 2022 at 10:43am
Originally posted by AmandaM AmandaM wrote:

This is a really interesting question. 

I'm not very visual--I can't really see things in my head easily. So as a reader, my eyes tend to glaze over at long visual descriptions of objects or locations. I don't "see" what's being described, so it tends to read as a laundry list. And if I try to write that kind of visual description, it sounds like a laundry list  So I rely heavily on giving just enough broad strokes visually to let the reader fill in the details for descriptions that aren't really important to the story. (If I were making a painting of a tiger in a jungle, for example, I'd focus on getting the tiger clear, but might let the jungle just be broad strokes of green and brown. The mind knows that's "jungle" and will fill in the details accordingly. But mostly I'd want you looking at the tiger.) I also pull in other senses to describe things. Smell, touch, sound.  




This is me as well.  It's not that we're unimaginative, it's just that our brains process differently. I was having this conversation with a friend the other day. When she reads, it plays like a movie in her head; she's on the ground, in the action, basically a character.   I read like I'm some omniscient Morgan Freeman dictating from the clouds--I don't "see" the story as much as I'm "telling" the story. As such, highly descriptive elements are usually lost on me, or take a long time to process.

The book I think of immediately is "Titus Groan" by Mevyn Peake.  Amazing book, but it took me *forever* to read because he has long (beautiful) passages of description--from characters to landscapes to the basic gestures of conversation.  That said, it's a mid-20th century piece, and I think that was the norm in fantasy writing then. 


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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (1) Thanks(1)   Quote Random Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 27 Jan 2022 at 11:42am
I am visual, I have an excellent imagination and I always live in the story.  That's part of the reason they take so long to write; they play out in my imagination and I write what I see in my head.  Sometimes I have to re-imagine them to make it all seem 'real'.

With characters I never put in a description that isn't important to the story.  In some cases that includes gender, and if gender is irrelevant I go out of my way to choose androgynous names.  If what a character looks like matters, and sometimes it does, those elements get described to the extent necessary.

In one case it's important that a character is very attractive, but I leave it in terms like that (other than hair and eyes) because 'attractive' is subjective.

That goes for the environment as well.  If there's no reason to describe a place I won't waste the words on it.  In some cases, the most recent story I wrote, the place is an integral part of the story so it got quite a few words, and all you got for the characters were names.

In my world reading is all about imagination, so a few clues to get you started but I rely on the reader's imagination to fill in blanks like what characters look like or the place they're in.
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Post Options Post Options   Thanks (1) Thanks(1)   Quote taaaylor Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 27 Jan 2022 at 11:46am
Originally posted by amlewi08 amlewi08 wrote:

Originally posted by AmandaM AmandaM wrote:

This is a really interesting question. 

I'm not very visual--I can't really see things in my head easily. So as a reader, my eyes tend to glaze over at long visual descriptions of objects or locations. I don't "see" what's being described, so it tends to read as a laundry list. And if I try to write that kind of visual description, it sounds like a laundry list  So I rely heavily on giving just enough broad strokes visually to let the reader fill in the details for descriptions that aren't really important to the story. (If I were making a painting of a tiger in a jungle, for example, I'd focus on getting the tiger clear, but might let the jungle just be broad strokes of green and brown. The mind knows that's "jungle" and will fill in the details accordingly. But mostly I'd want you looking at the tiger.) I also pull in other senses to describe things. Smell, touch, sound.  




This is me as well.  It's not that we're unimaginative, it's just that our brains process differently. I was having this conversation with a friend the other day. When she reads, it plays like a movie in her head; she's on the ground, in the action, basically a character.   I read like I'm some omniscient Morgan Freeman dictating from the clouds--I don't "see" the story as much as I'm "telling" the story. As such, highly descriptive elements are usually lost on me, or take a long time to process.

The book I think of immediately is "Titus Groan" by Mevyn Peake.  Amazing book, but it took me *forever* to read because he has long (beautiful) passages of description--from characters to landscapes to the basic gestures of conversation.  That said, it's a mid-20th century piece, and I think that was the norm in fantasy writing then. 



Have you guys heard of aphantasia? I have next to no visual imagination (I remember visual things as verbal concepts) and what you're describing sounds a lot like how I process imagery and story

I have never had the "movie in your head" effect, but I will get an internal snapshot of an emotional moment, and my brain holds onto the echo of that feeling, that's usually what makes a story feel alive in my head
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