I love descriptions. I am particularly fond of weather. The rain seemed to pour from all different directions. The sun drenched the spot on the desk where her pencil lay, rolling back and forth, just as she left it a few minutes before. The wind whistled, blowing whispers through her wild hair. The problem is (or so I have recently discovered), that sometimes we (as writers; as readers), tend to get a bit wishy-washy in the descriptive department.
Google tells me that the word wish-washy means “watered down.” And when authors use too many descriptions, that’s just what your writing turns out to be. My writing mentor, Rachel Coker (go check out my review on one of her books, Interrupted!), said several weeks ago that adverbs and descriptions can really bring your writing down. Those of you who have read my writing before know I absolutely love using descriptions, so that was a pretty hard concept for me to swallow. But with a little time and effort, you can still get your writing to flow easily in a way that makes your reader know exactly what you meant without so much descriptions preventing your story from moving forward.
Take this example Rachel gave me one week when I was working on a mystery story. (The story was kind of challenging for me to write because while I love descriptions, with mysteries you really have to dive right in to keep the reader hooked.) Instead of “She laughed playfully before slowly falling asleep,” read this next example and see which of the two you like better – “He heard her tinkling laughter dying out as her heavy eyelids closed in sleep.”
The first is a really great sentence! … for an average writer, who, in this example, clearly used over-used adverbs that would put one to sleep if he/she constantly used sentences like that in a book. And the truth is, reading my writing in my head, I notice I use adverbs and sentences like that all the time. I hate it when my mom or dad reads my writing aloud, because suddenly I hear all the flaws and errors I made. How can I possibly call myself a writer? I think. Listen to this… this mess!
I find myself editing and going over and over fixing every little thing, every tiny detail that caused my writing to sound drab. It bugs me like crazy, but how I adore descriptive details! So I try to make sure I have limited descriptions… in a fascinating, hooking way! This can be hard, but if I relax and take it all by stride, my writing looks nice, clean, and interesting! And what reader wouldn’t love that?
