Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Now I'm gonna jump off of this one a little bit and talk about how to do description well.
And then we'll jump back onto it with some examples. Okay?
That might help you a little bit better. So let's talk about description.
Description, which also kinda blends with my third point, is one of those things that is easy to overdo in a story,
and you want to avoid overdoing it.
The thing you want to do with description is you want to learn somehow to be shorter, meaning briefer,
which is basically the same word, but brief means something different than short.
Brief, I think that word kinda means you retain the content, but do it in fewer words.
So you want to be shorter/briefer, you want to be more concrete, and you want to focus your descriptions on things that do more than one thing.
Okay?
Student: What do you mean by do more than one thing?
Brandon: I'll get to it, don't worry.
Student: Good
Brandon: You want . . . eh, let's put on here, as kinda a reminder, not really a point but more of a reminder,
We have five senses.
Uuuuse moooore thaaan jussst sight.
Okay? So these are going to basically be your guiding principles for description.
Brevity, concreteness, making your prose do heavy lifting for you by doing more than one thing, and remembering you have multiple senses.
Let's go down the list, why is being shorter better?
Student: Because you don't lose them.
Brandon: Because you don't lose them, okay, great answer, what else?
Student: You can get onto the next awesome thing.
Brandon: You can get onto the next awesome thing. Cool.
Woo, that was way off. [Students laugh]
Ahh, nah, it slipped, that's what I'm gonna go with.
Student: Keeps it from being boring.
Brandon: Okay, keeps it from being boring.
Student: It allows you to control your tone a little better . . . [unclear]
Brandon: Okay, yeah?
Student: It lets your audience use their imagination.
Brandon: Okay, more imagination. Hey, I hit his shoulder, that's great.
Student: Reduces your wordcount.
Brandon: Reduces your wordcount. Okay.
Student: Remember shorter descriptions makes it more applicable to that thing
Brandon: Okay, makes it more applicable because they're shorter. Yeah?
Student: Especially with market fiction and not literary fiction. Literary fiction's usually known for its big, like epic poetic sentences, but
you look at, it kinda tells a story through setting--
Brandon: Yeah, let's talk about a few things here. You know I've already thrown a bunch of these, so.
Okay there you go. Woosh! Hey! [Students laugh]
So let's talk about a few things here.
These are all good things. But to boil it down--to be more brief--shorter and sweeter is going to have more impact.
More impact is going to hold the reader to your story better.
Holding the reader to your story better makes them continue going, and makes them get more immersed in the story.
Nothing is worse . . . okay there are worse things, but hyperbolicly, nothing is worse than a big boring paragraph at the beginning of a book.
You want to avoid this. And there are a couple things we'll talk about here, I'm gonna write these up mostly as a reminder to me.
We're gonna talk about learning curve, we wanna talk about the pyramid of abstraction,
Let's do with that. Learning curve.
Learning curve is a challenge for us. What I mean by learning curve is when you pick up a book, you will have a learning curve. No matter what.
You'll have to learn new names, you'll have to learn about characters, there's things you're going to have to learn and remember in order to keep track of this book.
In a fantasy or science fiction book, our learning curve becomes more steep.
Meaning, there's much more that people have to learn and so we have to throw it at them faster. Okay?
Learning curve is a challenge, but it's also an advantage. Most of us who read science fiction and fantasy are probably reading it because of, in part, the learning curve.
It's more engaging to us, it's more imaginative cause there's more going on we have to learn. We like it, we like that aspect.
But at the same time, learning curve creates a barrier of entry to the book.
Because so many new names and things pile on top of a person that it can be very difficult to get going.
How you manage your learning curve is a skill that's going to show off what you as a writer can do.
And how you match it to your given genre is going to be very important.
For instance, YA and Middle Grade, you're going to want to shoot for less of a learning curve, a shallower learning curve.
Usually the lower your learning curve the better. However, that said, there are some famous books out there that just expect you to deal with it.
Anyone read Gardens of the Moon (Steven Erikson)?
How's the the learning curve on that book?
Student: It's pretty steep.
Brandon: It's BRUTAL!
Student: I didn't figure out the magic system until the book was over.
Brandon: Yeah. He throws you right into the middle of things--any time you start in medias res is going to raise your learning curve.
In medias res means we're in the middle of an action sequence or something like that. [Literally: Into the middle of things]
That can be good because your payoff for that is nice tension, but things are going everywhere.
He just throws you in the MIDDLE of everything, and then there's like flashbacks too, and then there's like no description of how things work
You're just expected to pick it up as you go along, and his learning curve is kinda like
BONK
[Students laugh]
It's like, run to this wall and SCRAMBLE up to it, okay then we'll be easy on you NOW IT'S RIPPING AGAIN
It is a really steep learning curve. It's probably the steepest learning curve I've seen in a contemporary science fiction/ fantasy novel.
Now, shallower learning curves, there are a lot of things you can do to shift this around.
One thing you can do is to try and move some of your . . . oh, over here. Some of your descriptions toward being shorter and more concrete.
And trying to shift as much of the worldbuilding to as-we-go-along as possible.
Don't put it all in your first paragraph, your first page or even your first chapter.
Things that you don't need yet, shift them off and let us step into it so your learning curve doesn't do something like this. Unless you want it to.
Other things that make learning curves less steep is the classic "start in our world and get sucked into the fantasy world".
Why does this make the learning curve less steep?
Student: Cause they have to learn it too.
Student: We already know our world.
Brandon: You already know our world, so you start off with them only having to learn the character, and then you add the world step-by-step.
But the fact that you already know our world helps with that a lot. It allows you to ease into things.
This is one of the reasons why it's so prominent in middle grade is that it really helps with the learning curve.
Student: The character who gets into it has to learn it as they . . .
Brandon: Yes, then you have the Watson character. The Watson character is separate but on top of the same thing.
A Watson character is a character who doesn't know about what's going on, and so the narrative has a good reason to explain it to them.
It's another great way to ease your learning curve. If the character's confused, you feel alright being confused. Does that make sense?
If the character's like "I don't know what's happening, but all I know is I need to get over there and stay away from this thing chasing me!"
When you read the character saying that to you, you're like, "Alright! I'm on board. I know we need to get over there and not get eaten. I can deal with that." [Students laugh]
Students: One of the problems I see is when you don't have someone go from our world to the fantasy world
is you don't have analogous things to use in your description, like "it was big as a . . . nargalypoo"
Like you just make up, they're not even going to know what you're talking about unless they . . .
Brandon: Yeah it can be a real challenge to come up with.
And this is why the "really really really different fantasy world", or science fiction world, can be extremely challenging to write.
Because you can't even say, "It's as big as an orange" because they don't have oranges.
And so, this is one of the reasons why fantasy books also tend to only step it so far in how different the world is.
This depends on what type of book you want to write. Yeah?
Student: Is that why you still have horses in all these worlds that have totally different geographies, and totally different . . .
Brandon: Yeah, it's one of the reasons why you have horses anyway. Yeah.
A lot of the book you're going to find in-world reasons that you do.
A lot of them you'll find that they're far-future lost colony, like Pern
Is far future lost colony, which is why there are humans on this planet that there really shouldn't be humans on.
Student: Specifically with Pern, for a lot of those books Anne McCaffrey had this big prologue
"This is how they got to that planet", all the things you need to know . . .
Brandon: That was much more common back in the day, David Eddings did a lot of that too.
Nowadays we don't do it as much. I think we've found better ways to do it, and we've learned learning curve much better.
You don't see the big expository prologue anymore because people realized a lot of people were just skipping them. Because they're boring.
That said, most of the Pern ones, was like three paragraphs, and so was a pretty good way to do it.
And you know, I have a fondness for all the old David Eddings prologues, but looking back I'm like,
"Man, those don't let you start the story at all," you get this book and you're like,
"Okay I have to grind through this worldbuilding lesson, and then I can start reading my story."
And people grew up reading those, then assumed they do that, but now the fiction has kinda really learned to do it better ways
And you don't see those happening nearly as often. The editors are on the watch for people who can do it without doing that.
So, how you do it without doing that comes into your description!
You're going to want to make it short. Briefer.
And you're gonna want to focus it. What you do is you want to dole out the information as it becomes strictly relevant.
Instead of, we begin our book, people are chatting then you're like BIG BLOCK OF TEXT to explain where they are!
You want to shrink this down to one line as part of the conversation if you can. You can't always, but you want to try [coughs]
and say "What is the really relevant information for right now? What can I move to later about this worldbuilding?"
And, is there a way I can structure and format my scene so that the rest of this can be chopped up into little chunks and be distributed throughout the first three chapters
Instead of putting it right there. If you do this [putting it in one big chunk], you're going to have a hard time getting the editors past the first page.
If it is anywhere in the first chapter, you're going to have a little bit of trouble, that's not to say you can't do a couple of lines here and there
But you want to try and move it to a couple of lines here and there.
And this is a really tough thing to do in epic fantasy. I will tell you right now, that there's basically no getting away from doing it somewhat.
But if you can learn to do these kinds of things to temper what's going on, you'll find that you hold the readers' attention more.
And that's why we'll talk about the pyramid of abstraction.