My Thoughts On Overly Descriptive Writing
Those who have read either or both of my Barbarians of the Storm books, know that they are short and pulpy. I aim for something around 150-200 pages. However, a lot happens in these books and I keep things moving at a quick pace. The main reason for this, is that I write books I want to read. With that, my writing style for this series has certain traits that might seem taboo, controversial or amateurish.
One is my use of tense, as I write in a style that is made to “feel in the moment” and to read as if it is playing out in real time, in the present. I’m going to write about this at another time, however.
The thing I want to point to here is descriptive writing. More specifically, overly descriptive writing and why I’ve never been a big fan of it and try not to fall into that trap myself.
Whenever I’ve read “the classics” or the work of contemporary “famous” authors, I have found myself getting bored quite often. Now that’s not to knock the writing or the skill of the author, I just can’t stand reading a description of a simple bedroom for three pages, it’s overkill and tiresome. Granted, I also suffer from having the attention span of a doughnut… but then, so do many others.
One of the things that really made pulp stories appeal to me is that they just got to the fucking point and didn’t dilly dally on the details of grandma’s handstitched doilies and matching pillow shams.
If I’m being honest here, I always felt like overly descriptive writing insulted the intelligence of the reader. I also think that it projects too much of the author’s vision into the story in a way that doesn’t allow the reader to connect to and live within it.
No one walks into a room in the real world and needs the full history of every item scattered about. A few details to start the visual in the mind of the reader are necessary, but as a reader, I like to allow my mind to fill in the blanks and see what it sees.
Too many details actually wreck a scene for me, as my brain gets fixated on trying to hold on to an overabundance of mundane details that don’t really matter. I’m also a very visual person and don’t feel like I need to be spoon-fed everything in a scene.
With my own writing, it’s interesting to hear how different people interpret different settings and scenes, as well as what feelings come out when they find themselves in a scene I’ve written. I don’t want my writing to definitively define every single minute detail because I just find that boring and to some extent, pretentious. I want readers to invest themselves into the story and feel like they’re a part of it.
Plus, these stories are just meant to be fun, entertaining, action stories with characters I’m working really hard into developing into something that will last for the long-term. I want to create real escapism in a time when most of the art and entertainment is overstuffed with political and social propaganda. Modern entertainment has become the antithesis of what it’s supposed to be.
I like my stories to move, to flow and for the action and situations the characters are in to feel immediate and pressing. I can’t achieve that while describing a tapestry in the castle for a full page and I’m not going to bore my readers just to show off how much research I did in regards to textiles from the Middle Ages.
People are also free to disagree with me, as we all have our personal preferences. However, as I said earlier, I write books that I want to read and with that, you’ll never have to worry about me putting out some 1200 page brick with full chapters describing tile mosaics.
Granted, I could put out some 1200 page book at some point, but that would just be several books compiled into one meaty volume.