Edit like an Editor: A Wattpad Featured Guide ✔

Part i. Need More Details & Descriptions?

Introduction to Description

Unless one character needs to describe something to another character because the second character wasn't there to see an event or person for himself—or wasn't capable of seeing or hearing for himself—description in fiction is pretty much solely for the benefit of the reader.

Characters have no need to describe objects, setting, events, or other characters to themselves.

Description establishes or changes mood—for the reader. Description creates a sense of place—for the reader.

Description fills in setting details and character details for the reader who would otherwise be unable to see or hear them. For all our efforts at making a story real, for putting readers inside the fictional world, the readers aren't actually there. We have to re-create that story world for them in their minds.

Description helps the writer do this. Description lights a reader's imagination, primes it to picture places and characters and events.

Description is not needed for the character who actually lives in the story world. The character who lives and works and plays there, who loves and hates and fears in the fictional world, knows what it looks like and smells like and tastes like. It's all right in front of him—under his feet and in his nostrils and over his head. He touches and experiences the world in the same ways we experience our own—through personal encounters and through the senses.

Characters, except for the reasons I mentioned in the first paragraph, don't need description. Readers do. So keep readers in mind when you write description. When you choose what to include. When you choose what to exclude.

Ask yourself a few questions: What does the reader need to see and feel of your world, of your characters' world? What does the reader need to know to make sense of the events of that world? What would the reader like to know? What is he wondering about?

Which details will make him feel like a native, as comfortable with that world as your characters are? Which details create boundaries that hold the world together, contained, and keep everything that's other outside the story?

How can you lead readers through that world, encouraging them to make note of the noteworthy, while assuring them that some objects and people, while there, taking up space, are part of the background only and will have little impact on major story events?

Description, your description, paints in the story world just as a reader is walking through it. For the reader, the story world doesn't exist before the moment he encounters it.

Description in the Beginning

Readers can't step into nothingness, so some description has to come early in a story. A reader shouldn't stand around in a fog, hearing characters speak or feeling events explode around him, not knowing where he and the characters are. Until you include some description, typically of setting, a reader is caught in a void, a blinding nothingness absence of markers of any kind.

Description of setting allows the reader to see where events are taking place. And description of characters allows the reader to see who is involved in what's taking place as well as draw conclusions about the characters. Description of events engages the reader, draws him into the story and stirs up his curiosity.

Reading a description of a character, getting some sense of a character right off can orient the reader. Can give him something to identify with. Can give him a sense of what's happening in this new world.

The character is in his normal world—he has no need to have that world described for him. The reader, however, needs initial description. And if he's to travel this unfamiliar world, he needs more description, especially of the unfamiliar, as he follows your characters around.