As a visual artist, I’m at a disadvantage. I have zero natural talent.
But that’s not stopping me from learning to draw. My ultimate goal is to be able to draw concept art of my characters. So I’ve been drawing heads (from every angle) for days. They are invariably bad, but they are improving.
So what does this have to do with writing?
The smaller the sketch, the less detail I can put in without it turning into a muddy mess.
This is true in writing. If you are introducing a walk-on character, you can’t spend four paragraphs describing him. If your character dives into a restroom to hide during a gunfight, you can’t break the pacing to give us paragraphs of description about toilet stalls.
But you don’t want to miss the opportunity of establishing these elements firmly in your reader’s mind.
A guy called Foster came in with the report. He handed it to her.
“This it?” she asked, leafing through it.
“Yeah. Not much there. A few burglaries, a noise complaint.”
She didn’t even notice when Foster left. It seemed impossible her suspect had left so few tracks in his record. Nobody went from robbing a double wide to killing fourteen people.
That’s fine, we don’t need any context to know what’s happening. But the reader is forced to fill in the details of the world with the Generic TV Cop Show setting. It works. Many super successful writers do it, but that doesn’t mean you should settle for generic.
A guy called Foster came in with the report. He scratched a fat earlobe and extended the file across her disaster area of a desk. He raised an eyebrow, scanning the debris of yesterday’s lunch. “Want me to call FEMA?”
She grunted a laugh. Her desk wasn’t that bad. “Want me to call your cardiologist?”
She flipped open the file. He muttered something about his cholesterol. “This is it?” she asked.
“Yeah,” Foster said. “A few burglaries, a noise complaint.”
It seemed impossible her suspect had left so few tracks in his record. Nobody went from robbing double-wides in Pine Place to killing fourteen people in a Stanel Heights mansion.
Yes, it’s a bit longer. We see that she has a messy desk. But we now see that Foster might be a bit unhealthy. We see they have a relationship based on teasing. The pace is just slightly slower.
If the description of Foster went on more than this, the reader would start to think Foster is a more important character than he is. Or they might wonder why our detective is losing focus on the task at hand to notice so many details about him.
Just as in a small sketch of a face, we can’t pack in every wrinkle, every freckle, or the smallest creases above the eye. Give us the shape and a detail or two that captures the essence.
The more sentences you use to describe something, the more important the reader assumes it to be, and the slower the pace becomes.
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