(no subject)

[wolffyluna]

Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your ears: do you know of advice/resources/essays/etc for writing Description That Exists, or, hopefully, Description That Is Good And Not Bad?

(I have been reading the beta notes on my novel, and when two different people are like "this appears to be happening in a blank void populated by formless, gaseous beings," that's when you know you got to fix that >.>)

Comments

[queenlua]

i'm not sure i know a particular essay on the topic but, if i were in your shoes, i'd probably reach for an author i admire/like who i feel like does description well? i recently reread parts of Woolf's To the Lighthouse when i was trying to achieve an atmospheric effect in something i was writing. (though note she's y'know more on the literary side of things so i wouldn't necessarily fully ape what she's doing if you're aiming for something more genre-ficiton-y. but you can still draw on parts of those ideas!)

[wolffyluna]

This is probably the correct response. (Though in my experience trying to eat other authors' power tends to be Unpredictable for me-- I tried to understand how one author wrote his good action scenes, and instead worked out how he structured his plot! Which was helpful, but not what I was planning to do ^^;)