A few days ago, I started reading a debut novel for a weekly study group. The book has an intriguing plot, an interesting story structure, and, after 30 pages, a few characters that I might just love and root for. But there are two elements of the book that I’m having trouble with. The first is that the book is written in present tense, which my brain, for some reason, has a hard time parsing. As I’m reading, my mind tends to read present-tense verbs wrong, and I have to go back over sentences to get them right. This isn’t a flaw in the book – plenty of great books are written in present tense. It’s just exhausting for me to read novels written that way.
But that’s not what I want to talk about in this post. The second reason I’m having trouble with this book is its use of adjectives. If I were the book’s editor, I would have flagged two ways in which the author deploys adjectives.
Less is More
Here’s the thing about description: usually, less is more. (Sorry, Tolkien…I love you.)
In the second paragraph of the novel, the author describes a truck. The truck is “forest-green” and “rusty.” Only one of these two adjectives is worth keeping.
Unless there’s a scene later in the book where the truck blends in with the trees because the main character is trying to hide in the woods, there’s absolutely no reason to waste words telling the reader what color the truck is. The truck is not central to the narrative, not a character in its own right. It’s just a truck. The color of the truck does not matter.
“Rusty” on the other hand tells us something about the person driving the truck. “Rusty” tells us the truck is old and perhaps a little broken down. Maybe the driver can’t afford a new truck, or maybe she’s thrifty enough to drive something until it completely falls apart, or maybe she likes older vehicles that have a pre-technology solidity to them. She doesn’t want to drive a rolling computer. She wants to drive a truck. No matter the motivation for the rusty vehicle, the description “rusty” opens up whole new avenues of imagination for the reader to speculate about the character.
The color of the truck just doesn’t. (Unless it’s a nonstandard color for a car like bubble gum pink or something. But forest-green? That’s just normal.)
So, why not include both? It’s not harming the narrative to include the color of the car, right? I would argue it is. Our brains process the information a narrative gives us and sort that information into buckets of importance. The more extraneous detail a story has, the more work our brains have to do. And our brains are lazy creatures. They want to work as little as possible. By overloading a narrative with extra adjectives, our brains will start to skip description in favor of action and dialogue.
But by stripping the description down to the most essential elements, like “rusty,” our brains will have less to sort and will stay engaged in the narrative more easily. That’s why sentences with one perfect bit of description are so wonderful. They capture the essence of a person or setting all at once and allow the reader to fill in the rest.
Quantifiable Descriptions
The other usage of adjectives in this book that made me question the editorial decisions is a bit more arcane than having too much description. You might be thinking I’m making a mountain out a molehill, but here it is.
On the second page of this book, the author describes the wall surrounding an estate as “eight feet tall.” This type of quantifiable description always bumps me out of the story I’m reading because humans don’t absorb their surroundings like this. I don’t look at a wall and say, “That wall is eight feet tall.” I look at it and say, “I wonder if I could climb that” or “Wow, the people living here really don’t want unwanted visitors.”
If the reader is meant to be seeing the world through the eyes of the point-of-view character, then the descriptions need to come from that character’s perspective. Saying the wall is eight feet tall makes me think the character has a tape measure with her.
Instead of using mathematical quantities like “eight feet tall,” the wall might be “too tall to scale,” or “half again as tall as” the character, or simply “imposing.” If the character were a droid or a Terminator, I could see “eight feet tall” as a meaningful description for that type of being. But we humans notice our surroundings through relationships based on our own abilities and vantage point, not through quantities. So, someone is sitting “across the room,” not “ten feet away.” Someone is “out of earshot,” not “fifty feet away.” The bag of rocks isn’t “two hundred pounds”; it’s “too heavy to lift.”
When you are writing description, make sure you remain in the perspective of the character through whom the reader is seeing the world. You’re writing a novel, not a technical manual, so leave the measurements out.
That’s it for today. Let me know in the comments if you’d like me to talk about any particular aspect of writing for a future edition of this bimonthly newsletter.
Adam Thomas, Author 