"Since engagement is exactly what a fiction writer wants to accomplish, you're well advised to rely heavily on immediate scenes to put your story across. You want to draw your readers into the world you've created, make them feel a part of it, make them forget where they are. And you can't do this effectively if you tell your readers about your world secondhand. You have to take them there." (Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, p9)

 

Ross's Take: One of the best lessons I ever got on the value of this point came from Al Zuckerman at Writers House, who in response to a manuscript I had pitched to him helped me help one of our authors make one of the most dramatic leaps I have ever seen a writer take in the course of a single draft.

 

The manuscript  in question was a smart "thinking man's" action/thriller about a retired soldier who's being blackmailed into finding the AWOL wife and child of a pretty sick mob type. With a great catch.22 element to the plot , strong prose,  good characters, and great series potential it was no surprise that Al liked the manuscript.  "It's good," he said, "But there's something missing."

The something Al was referring to really boiled down to the author's effort show readers the world he was trying to draw us into...He felt like he readers needed to be able to 'see around the narrator' more and have a better visual sense of the surroundings.

The feedback surprised me because the author wrote thrilling scenes and his writing was already very cinematic, especially in connection to the choreography of the many physical confrontations and action scenes. But once I thought about what Al was saying,  I realized he was dead on right; the author was great at showing what was happening but he was very sparse with the kind of memorable descriptive details as to where the action was unfolding and what the players involved looked like.

Now generic descriptive detail its own--the sky was blue, the hair was blond, the dog was scruffy--isn't t often worth much. But when it's thoughtfully and imaginatively rendered and matched to the perspective and sensibility of the point-of-view character it can really be a valuable in making the world of the story feel real and interesting.

The author was quick to appreciate the value of the feedback and ended up with a complete revision focused on the effort to show readers more about the setting for his story. The resulting draft was considerably more engaging because readers got to see all the fascinating places the story took them through the eyes of the character at the heart of the action. And the writing improved because of the focused attention on providing meaningful description.

Narrative description clearly plays a big part in the effort to show and not tell, and the lesson I took from this is that good description is generally smartly balanced between focus on setting, characters, and physical choreography.

Hit on all three with memorable detail and suitable proportion and readers are much more likely to enjoy the experience of the story unfolding in front of their eyes.  The payoff is often a much higher level of engagement and the better odds of your readers choosing to spend some time in the world you've created.