The Mythcreant Podcast 535 – Clarifying Confusing Description
We all love to describe things. Why not add a little more description? Even more. What could go wrong? Oh, no, now the description is confusing. We’ve got to clarify it, but how? Fortunately, that’s the topic of today’s episode. We’ll discuss how to tell if your description is confusing, what to do about it, and also why a certain gate is the bane of Oren’s existence.
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Michael Martin. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreants podcast with your hosts Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny.
[Opening theme]Chris: Welcome to the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Chris, and with me is…
Bunny: Bunny.
Chris: And…
Oren: Oren.
Chris: Now folks, to understand this podcast, you have to know about the space I’m recording in. So it’s thirty-two feet by fourteen feet with windows on the east and west sides, has two floors, and the staircase is along the wall on the south side, ending in a five-by-five foot landing on the top floor, and then a tile entryway about the same size on the bottom floor. Now, the TV is in the center of the bottom floor facing north, but along the north side is a beanbag, a couch, a laptop desk in that order going from east to west. Okay, so can you picture it perfectly now?
Bunny: Your recording room has two floors?
Oren: I live here and I’m pretty sure I don’t know where I am anymore. I think I’ve gotten lost sitting at my computer.
Chris & Bunny: [Laughter]
Oren: I’m gonna need GPS coordinates.
Bunny: Yeah. What latitude and longitude though? I feel like that’s the thing that willl finally paint the picture.
Chris: Gonna give you all the dimensions for all the rooms now. And then I’ll just, like, tell you how many feet north or south they are. East or west. Instead of saying where they are next to each other.
Bunny: Please tell me you were walking around the living room with a compass.
Chris: Gotta figure out how to orient here in my own home.
Bunny: Yeah, you gotta use absolute units, not right and left.
Chris: This episode is on description, and in particular clarifying it when it is overwhelming and confusing. And as silly as that description of where I’m recording is, that’s the kind of errors that I see when people are trying to describe something in their narration. There’s a number of things happening there where instead of building a picture for you, I’m telling you about all these separate items, and then somehow you have to do the work of placing them all. And I’m being overly precise and technical about it, and that’s kind of what tends to happen in people’s description.
Oren: The moment you start bringing out precise measuring units, it’s like, eh, it’s not that you’ll never need those, but you probably don’t need them most of the time. If there’s a situation where you were considering them, the answer to whether you need them is probably no. Probably just going to make things worse.
Chris: First, it might be good to talk about just why you shouldn’t make readers do too much work. Especially since we have people sometimes going around being like, “Oh, but I just wrote this to challenge the readers.”
Oren: It’s ’cause what you have to say isn’t that important. Respect your readers’ time.
All: [Laughter]
Bunny: You’re not special.
Oren: Like, a perfectly self-serving perspective: it’s that your readers are not gonna tolerate having a certain–more than a certain amount of their time wasted. From a moral perspective. It’s like, okay, is it really important to what you’re saying and is what you’re saying really important enough to need a full description of the living room? Is it really? Not like the answer is never gonna be yes, but it’s gonna be pretty usually no.
Chris: Part of the issue is trying to do too much. Obviously in this situation. Whereas if I had a floor plan and I was, like, telling a mystery story, for instance, and the floor plan and the precision of it is that important. That’s kind of when you need the actual drawing in the book to make that work. And obviously if you’re in indie publishing you could make that happen. For traditional publishers I don’t know what it takes to convince them to include something like that. But that’s only because in a mystery story, you expect the audience to follow along perfectly and part of the fun is that they are putting in–they are trying to solve the puzzle themself. That’s when you need something like that. And generally there are times–and we’ll talk about that when you do need to convey some aspects that are a little bit complicated. But not usually something that precise.
Bunny: Maps in the front of books are a staple of fantasy. People should be able to have, like, a general idea of what you’re talking about without having to refer back to a map. But I will say they’re useful. When I was reading The Tainted Cup, I referred back to the map a couple times and that was fine. I think I would’ve been able to understand the book perfectly fine without it. And that should be the litmus test. You shouldn’t rely on having a map in the book. But that is a tool that writers sometimes use.
Chris: But even then you have only so many maps. You wouldn’t, for instance, have a map for every fight scene. Sometimes for a fight scene the environment does matter and that can get complicated.
Again, just going briefly back to, like, the problem with making readers do work; why it has to be simple as possible. There’s this principle I love called ‘cognitive load’ and I was talking about it before I had that term. But then when I was researching learning and education for making courses, I found, like, oh! That’s what they call it in education. That’s great. That’s perfect. Cognitive load. Basically, the idea is that, like, even a reader who has some kind of genetically enhanced super brain. Created by aliens has limited brain power. Nobody has infinite brain power. Everyone has limited brain power. And the more of their brain power that you use on one thing, the more you degrade their ability to understand everything else.
So if they have to use their brain power assembling all these pieces together into an image or making a connection between two different ideas. Or, like, let’s say you have unusual phrasing with a word they’re unfamiliar with or any small thing that they have to use a little bit of extra brain power on. That means they have lower ability to make a second logical leap or understand anything else. Also, they have less attention to devote to the other regular details. So they’re more likely to miss something important. They’re less likely to remember what you’re saying. And some of that spare brain power’s just needed to enjoy the story. Right?
So a reader who has to focus too much of their attention on just figuring out what all the individual words has none left for, like, what do those words mean together and following along. That’s why you just need to lower cognitive load as much as you can. I mean, and sometimes you’ll wanna spend it to get some result. But the point is that less is always better, so you know, make it as easy as you can.
Bunny: Occam’s description. The simplest description is usually the best one.
Oren: Or, like, not even necessarily the simplest ’cause we’re not advocating that you make everything bland and be like, “There was a hallway. There was a room. A person was in the room.” That’s not the goal here. The goal is to focus on the things that matter. And to not waste time on things that don’t matter, which would be, like, most of the furniture in most of the rooms you’re in.
Chris: And also describe things effectively so that it’s easier for people. And I think one of the issues with a lot of these really big blocks of complicated description is not just that you’re asking readers to use their brain power, but it’s so much in such a small space.
You could have in a paragraph maybe one new term, maybe two. And other than that, you don’t wanna have more than one. Too many fantasy world labels, for instance, on cities they’ve never heard of or character names that they aren’t familiar with in one paragraph. Because again, if you use up all of their brain power on one thing, then they get less for the rest of the paragraph. So then when you have, like, a big block of description that’s, like, super technical it’s all at once and it’s just overwhelming.
Oren: It was just interesting ’cause for most of the time when I see people arguing about this, they’re arguing against what seems like an imaginary opponent who wants their writing to be super bland. And so they’re like, “No! My writing’s not gonna be bland. I’m gonna write it as much as I want. And if it’s confusing, that’s the reader’s problem.” And for the most part it’s like, that feels like a straw man.
But there was that Kirk Vonnegut writing rules article I did a little while back in which he–or the advertising executive that wrote this for him–basically said that readers only want to see stuff that’s like what was written before and don’t do anything new. And it was like, all right, I guess we found him. We found the person making that argument.
Chris: We found the straw man.
Bunny: His name is Vonnegut.
Oren: It’s here. He’s made of straw. It was Vonnegut or this advertising guy. Fuess, I think was his name. It’s one of those guys.
We’ve been talking about, like, too much information. I often find it confusing when they leave things out ’cause there are things that need to be there.
This was one of the issues I was having with Beneath the Rising, which is a cosmic horror story. And to a certain extent maybe that was on purpose. Maybe I was supposed to feel disoriented, but a lot of it was just like, wait, we’re on a plane now. Okay, the plane is landing and it’s a rough landing. What is happening? There are missing transition moments, so I didn’t know where we were from one scene to another.
Chris: Some writers have more trouble with this than others, and I wish that I had better tips and recommendations for how to fix if you have missing context. But I think in a lot of cases what happens is that the writer knows what’s happening. And so they don’t realize what the reader needs to know. ‘Cause they’re not in the reader’s shoes. And so then they leave out some very basic context about transitions and things like that, that readers need. And that’s kind of a hard thing and it can lead to narration that’s very confusing.
I will say for description, one thing that you want to look for is that you’re not just focusing on evocative details. I think the difference between mediocre description and great description is really getting specific and having those interesting details instead of using sort of vague terms. But if you have nothing but the little details, then you’re not creating the big picture. ‘Cause you wanna create the big picture first in more general terms that are really easy to pick up. And then you associate the little evocative details with that big picture. And if you forget that first part, then there’s just a bunch of details and we get back to the reader and ask to try to assemble them into a picture of some kind. And that’s a lot of work to figure out.
Oren: This was a really interesting one because I started listening to a book called The Marvelers, which I couldn’t tell what was wrong. I could just tell that I was not really seeing the world. The world did not seem novel to me, even though it’s like a magic school setting. And if I stopped and thought about what I had just heard, because I was listening to it in audio, there were lots of details, but I just couldn’t imagine like, what is this supposed to be? It didn’t seem like an interesting world, and I didn’t know what was wrong. And I was so desperate to find out what it was I bought Chris a copy of the textbook so that she could look at it and tell me what the issue was.
Chris: And it’s honestly really interesting. So yeah, this is a middle grade magic school story and honestly the descriptive details in this book are gorgeous. I love them. They’re so beautifully written. But has the very, very big problem of not including general descriptors and context so much so that when I was looking through and just trying to read it, I was just exhausted. Just exhausted by reading a middle grade book. And no doubt the cool details is what got it published anyway.
Okay. For an example: what would happen is like, I think–again, I have to say “I think” because there’s a lot of uncertainty in trying to read this book. Where, like, an airship comes to take the child away to the magic school and there’s no text just saying that it’s an airship. Instead, it’s all these shapes and pieces of it are described and I have to figure out that it’s an airship.
Oren: The way you would normally do it is you would describe some details of a shape or a prominent fixture, and then say, like, the airship descended or something. It’s kinda like instead of ever saying the word elephant, it’s like you just describe different parts of an elephant.
Bunny: The details have to be details of something. They can’t just be details.
Chris: And you would do it different ways, depending on the narration. You could say, oh, and then the airship appeared through the clouds. And then describe the airship. And first again, start with general descriptors like it was long and sleek, or had a big pillowy airbag. Or give some general “this is what it feels like,” and then you start looking at the individual details a little bit more.
Or you could just–you’d be like, oh, I saw something through the clouds. Some shadow, some long, sleek shape because the protagonist hasn’t identified it yet. And it’s like, “Oh, it comes closer and I can see that it’s an airship,” and then start to notice details as it comes closer yet.
But the point is that normally you would say what it is. And it’s okay to start with, like, a few adjectives to give a general sense of size, where it is, how far is it from the protagonist, and things like that. Especially when you walk into a space, it’s like, oh, this is a cozy room. That’s cramped with lots of oddities. And then you would start describing the oddities. But the whole cozy room with oddities tells the reader what impression that you want to create with all of the details, and makes it easier for them to understand the relationship between all those details and the narrative in general. So they know why you’re talking about details.
Bunny: I think this is related to another descriptive mistake that I’ve made and I’ve seen other people make before, which is describing a really big significant thing last. I had a set of description of, like, a town. And then after I described the town, I was like, oh, I’m gonna describe, like, the airship.
Oren: Yeah. Always airships.
Bunny: It was an airship. It all comes back to airships. “The big airship hanging above it.” And my readers were like, “Wait, I had to completely revise my image of this town once you described, like, an airship hanging over it after you described the town.” And also, wouldn’t that be the first thing the viewpoint character notices because it’s unusual. It’s out of place in this town. And yeah, that’s true. If you describe a desk that’s got pencils on it; also, there’s a golden retriever sitting on top of the computer. You really have to revise your mental picture and kind of go backwards. And that’s not ideal for keeping readers in the moment.
Chris: It’s okay to have the protagonist notice something belatedly. But then you usually make a point that they’re like, “Oh wow. That golden retriever was so still I didn’t notice that there was a dog right there.”
Oren: Or, like, there was a shadow and the person just assumed it was clouds, and looks up: It’s like, “Oh, it’s a ship. Oh, okay.”
Chris: Otherwise, if something is big and you’d expect them to notice it. And especially if characters are gonna interact with it later.
Again, my favorite example of this is always gonna be in Eragon. In the beginning where we’re following this shade antagonist character who was in the woods and is throwing red balls of fire at the elves to steal the McGuffin–
Oren: Just as one does in the woods, right?
Bunny: Just chilling.
Chris: –and at some point he was in the woods on the path, and then he just gets on, like, a tall rock pillar. And like what? Where did that come from? There was a big, tall rock pillar that you could just get on. And where was it before? And then he’s out there with his minions or, like, orcs, basically. ‘Urgals.’ And then at the end when he leaves he gets on his horse. You’re like, wait, there was a horse hanging around during the fight this whole time?
Bunny: Horse: famously not spooked by fights.
Oren: Yeah. Very calm horse.
Chris: I think there was another book, this one called Tiger’s Curse, where in the prologue there’s just people who pop into the room. Like really important characters. We describe the king in his throne chamber and some of the environment, but neglect that two people who are, like, really important to the protagonist are also standing there.
So yeah, that definitely happens and it’s very confusing when it does. Again, another reason to think about when the protagonist encounters something new–goes into a new area, especially. But like, yeah, an airship approaching would be another example–to draw the big picture first, make sure everything important is in place, and then dive into your details.
Oren: And when we’re on the subject of things where you are going to need to spend the audience’s cognitive load, you are gonna have to be able to do things that might be a little confusing. This is often gonna happen if you have a big speculative fiction conceit. For example, in The Expanse I noticed that once they started getting into, like, the space fights it was sometimes hard to keep track of because they are describing this very complicated maneuver where the battle is decided by who can force the other ones into a high-G maneuver they can’t get out of. Which is not very intuitive.
I don’t think most people, except for space nerds, even know what that means. So it’s not easy to describe that. But to a certain extent, that is unavoidable because that’s, like, central to The Expanse. You can’t take that out. So anything you can do to save your audience’s attention elsewhere will make that easier.
Chris: I think that it’s worth talking about layouts and spatial relationships a little bit.
Oren: I hate ’em.
Chris: [Laughs] Because sometimes you will have situations where you do have to convey something for a fight or a battle. Oren has a couple of these in The Abbess Rebellion that we worked on together.
Oren: Oh yeah. Oof.
Chris: I just had to kind of repeat and clarify as best we can. Because one of them is a fight that takes place on either side of a gate in the city. Which, that’s perfectly normal. But the thing was that this is a gate by the harbor, and it’s designed so that people coming invading from the harbor can’t get into the city. But instead the protagonists are out on the outside of the gate trying to keep the antagonist from leaving through the gate towards the harbor.
Oren: I created so many problems for myself with that plot.
Oren & Bunny: [Laughter]
Bunny: Dimensionality: two out of ten.
Chris: It’s interesting that they’re on the wrong side of the gate. The gate is designed to defend from the other side, and that affects the fight, and that’s interesting. But just trying to explain that concept is surprisingly complex. And so had to repeat it multiple times, tried to clarify it as much as we could, what was going on there. Other times the language needs to change. Basically, if you’re describing spatial relationships the thing that you need to know is that people can only really handle two things in relationship to each other. But you can chain them if you want, a bit. So the couch is across from the TV. The coffee table’s in front of the couch. The remote is on the coffee table.
Bunny: And all three of them are trying to get through the gate!
Oren & Chris: [Laughter]
Chris: That’s defended from the wrong side! So that’s an example of something where I’ve got a series of statements that will only take you so far. If you have anything more than two items you need to come up with a shape the reader is familiar with as a shorthand for how they are positioned. So, you know, you got your four ducks standing in a row. Or your four ducks in a square or six ducks in a circle.
Oren: Another one that I had a huge amount of trouble with was when there was a battle that was going on in different parts of the city. And where the different things were happening mattered because it affected how long it would take them to get from the important locations to another, or whether they could intercept certain enemies or whatever. And oh God, that was so hard! It was like, wait, what street are they on? Where is that related to this hill? And is the hill part of the gate that is being defended from the wrong side? Does anyone know? There’s a granary in here somewhere, I think.
All: [Laughter]
Bunny: You are supposed to know, Oren. It’s your job.
Oren: No one knows. I did try to spend some time before that, getting the reader acquainted at least a little bit with the city and the way that it was oriented. Where the harbor was in relation to everything else.
Chris: Yeah. And often you couldn’t rely on them to remember something like that.
Bunny: I do think probably one of the most difficult things to describe, period, is battles where you’re supposed to understand what’s going on. And it is, I think, valid to have a protagonist out of their depth in the middle of a battle and swords are clashing everywhere. They’re confused and trying to figure out what’s going on. It’s fine for that to also come through in the description, at least to an extent. When you’re supposed to have, like, a clear view of what the battle is and how things are moving and who’s trying to get where at what time, that is legitimately probably one of the most difficult things to describe.
Chris: In Abbess Rebellion there’s another battle that, when I was editing, I had to stop and ask Oren what the layout was. And so I was like, okay, I just don’t understand what’s happening with these ridges and this spot that they’re camping and then there’s a fight there. And after talking to him, it’s like, okay, so we have ridges on three sides and then no ridge on the fourth side. So I was like, how ‘bout we just call this a horseshoe so that we have a shape that people are familiar with? But then I looked up, okay, did horseshoes exist then? Is this anachronistic? But they did. They did exist. So we used the horseshoe.
Bunny: Horses have had shoes for a long time.
Chris: So then by just calling it the horseshoe wedge–and then we would say the opening to the horseshoe–that made it a lot easier to communicate.
Oren: At one point there was a battle where it was more conventional with, like, the two sides lining up to face each other. And you’re supposed to refer to the flanks as right and left. But I ended up calling them east and west simply because I knew that if I had to reverse them every time I was talking about the different sides, that would be so confusing. ‘Cause when you have two sides facing each other one side’s left is facing the other side’s right. And if I had to talk about, “We must move our right wing to attack their left wing,” it’s like, wait, why are there right and left wings on different sides? It’s ’cause the mirror versus–ugh! No, it’s just the two east wings are fighting. And it’s like, that’s not how this is normally described, but I just decided to make that sacrifice.
Chris: In general, I would say right/left are the type of technical language that are generally to be avoided. In this case, east/west might have just been the best way to go in this situation. But if you can give things more of a descriptive label…In some cases if a character has two arms gets injured a lot of times you don’t have to specify whether it’s the right or the left. Let them imagine it whichever way you want, and sometimes it won’t matter.
But then if you need to keep track of them you call them the injured arm versus the uninjured arm. Or this is the sunny side of the yard or the shaded side of the yard. And that’s usually better because it’s easier to remember. It has associations and implications to it, as opposed to something like north/south, right/left. But again, sometimes there’s a reason to specify it’s the right or the left arm because it matters that it was the arm that they write with, for instance. Sometimes you want to, but those are things that I also try to avoid if I can.
Oren: So here’s a question; so we talked about battles, but zooming in a little bit to like more of a fight scene, which still could have a number of combatants, and each combatant you add is more strain. How much can be done at the word craft level to make that less confusing versus how much do I just need to reduce the number of people in this fight scene?
Chris: Sometimes it’s realistic to have more people, less is gonna be easier. So basically the more things you have, the less you can kind of depict them and bring them to life in an immersive way. The bigger your battle is, the more you’re gonna have to summarize. The more you’re gonna have to describe people in general, instead of talking about what individual people are doing. And that’s gonna lower the level of immersion is the consequence of that.
So I always do think that it’s, in many cases, good to make the scale smaller, the scope smaller, so that you can bring what you have to life. I think, for instance, it makes a lot more sense to have a shorter fight. Where you can really stay in the moment. Then to have a longer fight where you’re then starting to summarize portions of the fight. I don’t think that makes any sense to do that.
Bunny: There’s another consideration, which is if you have more people, you also have to deal with the choreography of more people to avoid the trap of one-person-at-a-time fighting. So that’s also something to keep in mind. Fewer people makes that less likely to happen. Or if you have a lot of people, honestly, for the clarity of your description and avoiding turn-based combat side of it, setting your thing in a narrow hallway.
All: [Laughter]
Oren: It’s interesting ’cause once you get up to a certain number of people, it almost becomes easier because you can be like, okay, “There was a big melee going on around me.” And then the two relevant people who were important are across from me and I only have to describe them. As opposed to a combat that has five important participants. It’s like, ooh, that’s so many! How do I keep track of five people in this fight?
Chris: Well, if you only remember one thing, remember not to try to recreate an image. It’s too precise. It’s got too much information. It’s worth a thousand words, and you don’t have a thousand words. You don’t. You have to give up that level of control. And instead, just evoke the imagination and keep it kind of vague and let the readers imagine it how they want to imagine it, and just like set atmosphere and bring across the important points.
Oren: Well, with those words of wisdom, I think we will go ahead and call this episode to a close.
Chris: If you found this episode helpful, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I wanna thank a few of our existing patrons. First, there’s Amon Jabber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s the professor of Political Theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.
[Closing theme]