…I scraped away more dirt in the light of the electric torch I had provided. The surface I uncovered was fishy and glassy – a kind of semi-putrid congealed jelly with suggestions of translucency. I scraped further, and saw that it had form. There was a rift where a part of the substance was folded over. The exposed area was huge and roughly cylindrical; like a mammoth soft blue-white stovepipe doubled in two, its largest part some two feet in diameter. Still more I scraped, and then abruptly I leaped out of the hole and away from the filthy thing; frantically unstopping and tilting the heavy carboys, and precipitating their corrosive contents one after another down that charnel gulf and upon the unthinkable abnormality whose titan elbow I had seen.

HP Lovecraft, 'The Shunned House'.

That's enough of that.

What gets you is the elbow. Please. Take this away. Is it supposed to be a horror story, or a very long joke? The elbow makes a good punchline. Come to think of it, a lot of horror stories work remarkably like bad jokes. I can think of several from The Twilight Zone…

So what was I going to talk to you about today? Ah, yes. Describing things you readers haven't seen yet. This is particularly difficult on a page, because you don't have the benefit of CGI. You've got to use your imagination to engage the reader's imagination. And if you're not careful, you end up like HP Lovecraft here, oozing 'semi-putrid congealed jelly' all over the place. Stop it, and follow these handy hints for describing the indescribable.

1. Eschew emotive descriptors. Don't write like this:
   

   …for on the lips were gouts of fresh blood, which trickled from the corners of the mouth and ran over the chin and neck. Even the deep, burning eyes seemed set amongst swollen flesh, for the lids and pouches underneath were bloated. It seemed as if the whole awful creature were simply gorged with blood. He lay like a filthy leech, exhausted with his repletion.
   
   Bram Stoker, Dracula

   
   
   Just cut it out. It's not the 1890s anymore, and readers are tired of being told how to react. Describe things more concretely than that. Do it like this:
   

   …they breasted a rise and halted, looking down at a wide, slow-moving river, gray as pewter beneath the overcast sky. On the northwestern bank – their side – was a barnlike building painted a green so bright it seemed to yell into the muted day. Its mouth jutted out over the water on pilings painted a similar green. Docked to two of these pilings by thick hawsers was a large raft, easily ninety feet by ninety, painted in alternating stripes of red and yellow.
   
   Stephen King, The Wind Through the Keyhole.

   
   
   Now, I don't know whether a monster's hideous elbow is going to turn up in this story, but at least I can see the river and the raft. Work from there.
2. Try to relate what they haven't seen to something they have seen. For example, O Henry needs to tell us about a painting. We can't see it. He could have gone on about it at length, style, colour, etc. But he didn't. He sums it up nicely with this:
   

   … I saw a painting the other day that was sold for $5,000. The title was "Boadicea," and the figure seemed to fill all out-of-doors. But of all the picture's admirers who stood before it, I believe I was the only one who longed for Boadicea to stalk from her frame, bringing me corned-beef hash with poached egg.
   
   O Henry, 'An Adjustment of Nature'.

   
   
   If you read the short story, you'll realise that the model for Boadicea is an attractive former waitress of the narrator's acquaintance, but note the shorthand way of describing an historical painting.
3. Realise that it doesn't matter. Don't sweat the non-essentials. You know what? You're going to describe a sofa, and no matter what you do, the reader is going to put her own sofa there. Oh, your sofa's green, and hers is white? Well, is it important that your sofa is green? Is the greenness of the sofa relevant to the story? Then bring it in. Harp on that sofa. If the fact that it's Chippendale, or Queen Anne, or whatever, is significant, make sure you force the reader to see this. Otherwise, let him imagine the dreadful horsehair thing Aunt Bunty's got in the back parlour. Honestly.
   

   There was clearly nothing to do but flop down on the shabby little couch and howl.
   
   O Henry, 'Gift of the Magi'.

   
   
   The couch is shabby. Do we care what colour it is? Nope. I think it's sort of a faded mauve, what about you?

Now obviously, armed with this glittering array of insightful writer-type knowledge, you will now go out and describe all sorts of things. You might describe science-fiction landscapes, or impossible Escher-type inventions, or horrid monsters' elbows, or even trendy furniture.

I know what! Let's issue a challenge. You describe something, and put it at the bottom of the page. Then, we'll ask other h2g2ers to try and draw, photoshop, or montage it. The art folks can link their efforts to the page and post them on their favourite artwork site. (I use a blogspace myself.) Then we can test our ability to describe and see.

'Unthinkable abnormality', indeed. Hanging's too good for him…

Writing Right with Dmitri Archive

Dmitri Gheorgheni

05.01.15 Front Page

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