Lesson 17: Description for World Building by Pavell

[AceTrainer14]

Hello everyone! @Pavell has written a neat little article for us this month, following on from our past world building lessons but with a focus on describing it. Join the discussion in the comments below!



A Touch of the Real

Hello everyone, and welcome to April's Academy lesson! I'm Pavell – call me Pav - and I will have the audacity to tell you how to write today. This month's lesson overlaps somewhat with one of the biggest jobs an author has to undertake – world building. However, rather than focussing on what your world should look like, this lesson will instead explore ways to develop and describe your world as you write.

I've often noticed that authors, especially new authors, tend to have lots of ideas and great imagination but nonetheless struggle to get these ideas down on paper. This is why throughout the lesson I have also suggested writing exercises to do as practice. Practising like this is a great way to build your own confidence even you just write rubbish. In actual fact, writing a few hundred words of rubbish is often the best way to practice, since you don't have to worry about everything else you need to do to write a great story.

Tip One – Take a Walk!

There is a problem that pokémon fanfiction authors often run into, and that's describing a familiar world to readers. Describe too much, and you end up boring your readers. Describe too little, and the world becomes difficult to visualise. This is often true when it comes to towns and cities in the pokémon world – surely everyone knows what Celadon City looks like, right? The problem is that the Celadon City of the games, and even of the anime, is very generic. We all know there's a department store and a gym and the game corner, but what does the rest of the city actually look like?

Exercise – Take a Walk!

It may seem daunting to have to think up details like this, but don't worry! The answers are all around you! The next time you go for a walk - or ride the bus or the train, whatever – look, really look, at your town. What do the houses look like? What kind of businesses are there, and where are they? If you live in a rural area, look at the countryside. Take notes if you like. Get obsessive over the details.

Then, when you next have time to write, write a few hundred words taking what you saw and putting it into a canon location. Here's what I came up with:

Dr Imogen Joy eased her way around another knot of students. Not one of them deigned to notice her as she passed. The alleyways and courtyards this side of Celadon City were packed with the overspill of the University, gossiping on every bench, colonising every fountain. Bars and bistros and the higher class of takeaway restaurants was what Yellow Quarter was known for, sandwiched between the huge Department Store district and the sprawling campus of Celadon University.

Left into Ozerell Alley, down past the modern art gallery … Dr Imogen had forgotten how twerpy students could be. Truth be told, this wasn't the city she remembered from her own University days. When she had been a student here, believing herself to be much cleverer than she really was, there was only Celadon University. Since then other colleges had sprung up like mushrooms. Yellow Quarter had become more modern, more hyperactive, more … wireless.

But some things never changed. The winesink called the Brindled Scholar sat at the end of the alley, sun streaming though the thick glass windows like molten gold. Not a stick of furniture in the place was less than a hundred years old. And the barman himself – they used to joke that he was THE Brindled Scholar – smiled his timeless smile as she entered, same as it had been twenty years ago.

“Ims! You won't be paying for your own drinks again, I'll bet,” he said by way of greeting.
“Don't kid yourself,” Imogen replied, “It was my name they wanted to get with, not me.”

In this case, my walk was around Birmingham city centre. Yellow Quarter was inspired by the pedestrian area Brindley Place, which is where I got the name Ozerell Alley (From Oozells Street, believe it or not. Truth can often be more ridiculous than fiction). The bar was exaggerated from several pubs I saw around the city centre. Notice I've mentioned canon locations – in this case Celadon Department store and the University – without actually showing them. Instead they're an extra tip-off to the reader that the scene is set in Celadon City.

This piece I threw together in about fifteen minutes, and as you can see, so much of the detail I didn't really make up. Have a go yourself, see what you come up with. Try taking a virtual walk using Google streetview, and see the streets of a city you've never been to.

Tip Two – What Species of Tree?

“But Pavell!” I hear you object, “I can't be adding this much detail to my scene! The action will grind to a halt!”

Fair enough. This leads me on to my next big tip – small details can have big pay-offs. One of the reasons it's generally not a good idea to over describe is because readers tend to fill in gaps in the description with their own imagination. By using quick, strong description you can help that along, building up an image of your world without actually doing much.

I'll show you what I mean. Take this paragraph:

Red hastily turned a corner and almost ran into a man with his pokémon. “Sorry!” he blurted and ran on down the street, almost slipping up once or twice.

There's enough information there to tell us what is happening, but apart from that there's not a lot to it. But suppose we add in just a few description words (In bold):

Red hastily turned a corner and almost ran into an old man with his poochyena. “Sorry!” he blurted and ran on down the rainy street, his trainers slipping on the pavement.

There, with only using two more words we've built up a much more vivid image of the action. It looks childishly simple when you look at it like this, and in a way it is. Let's try something else:

Red hastily turned a corner and almost ran into a sailor with his machop. “Sorry!” he blurted and ran on down down the crowded street, slipping on a discarded pasty.

And there, with a very few different descriptive words, we've changed the scene into something else entirely.

Another way you can achieve the same sort of effect is by being specific with nouns. This is easy when it comes to pokémon – in our example with Red, we could simply substitute “pokémon” with a species name, and voila. But you can do the same with any number of things. Why not say “cottage” or “bungalow” instead of “small house”? Why not an “oran smoothie” rather than just a “fruit smoothie”? Books can be “hardbacks”, cars can be “SUVs”.

If you're in Viridian Forest, why not use specific trees rather than just generic trees? Oak, elm, ash, beech, rowan … if you're no naturalist, then it's easy enough to look up pictures or find them on Wikipedia (I did, notice the links). Try and look at this as an opportunity. Perhaps the sheer size of a giant sequoia gets your imagination going, and then all of a sudden your characters are climbing 100ft into the branches to catch a pokémon instead of just finding it in the long grass.

The same can hold true of locations, incidentally. The forest isn't just a forest – it's the Chetwood. The little village with the Pokémon Centre your character is rushing to? It's Pikewick, and suddenly it's that little bit less generic. Again, your local area is a good source of little details. Names of places are everywhere, and they're so easy to find that you need not go to any special effort to research them.

Tip Three – Enhancing the Emotion

When writing emotional or climactic scenes, how real you want to be depends on the genre and tone of your story. When it comes to making these scenes feel real and alive you'll naturally be trying to balance the drama of the scene against the description.

Exercise – Write a Memory!

A useful exercise for this sort of thing is to mine your own experiences. Try choosing a memory and writing it out like it was your story. Try using third-person rather than first person. As for the memory, it could be anything – your proudest moment, your worst day ever, the best kiss you remember, your saddest moment. Here's one of mine – the few minutes after I had been told my uncle was dead:

My uncle was dead. In a way, I had known that something was up the moment I heard my parents come back from the hospital. Sat on my bed, in my so, so familiar room, everything looked the same and yet … now things were slightly different.

Outside my window, the sun was shining. It was a lovely clear day, and as I looked vaguely out, I could see the flowers blooming bright and colourful in the garden. On the face of it, I thought that ridiculous. The sun wasn't supposed to shine on death, least of all not in Britain. It should at least be cloudy, and probably rainy, too. But then I thought of my uncle's relentless cheerfullness – how he had accepted that he would be dead sooner rather than later, and would go with no regrets.

Perhaps, then, the sunshine was appropriate. He was gone, and I would miss him, but I realised I had alrady accepted that this day was coming. Today was not a sad day. My uncle wasn't in pain any more.

On that day, it was the weather that sparked my thoughts, and got me thinking consciously about how I was feeling. It's a real moment with a complex setting. The point here is that this kind of messy, complex reality is easier to invent when you use your own experiences. What do you remember the most? What details have you forgotten? What was going through your head at the time?

And don't be afraid to mine other people's experiences! Asking questions of people can give you the raw material you need to start the words flowing – sites like The Experience Project are there to be plundered.

And Finally …

I've talked a lot about practising, so I thought I'd mention an oft-forgotten corner of the Workshop. The Weekly Prompt Thread is full of little ideas to use as starting points for practice, and I recommend taking a look at it. There's always the option of sharing what you come up with, so don't be afraid to post your drabble!

 

[Legacy]

Awesome tips, Pav!

I am very guilty of often over-describing during my scenes. Finding that balance between painting a good picture for the reader and not bogging the thing down with too much is part of the art of writing.

Great lesson.