Tavia Chalcraft wrote:
Someone (Neil?) raised the question of description in fanfic. Do people prefer people and backgrounds to be described, and in how much detail?
How
overt does this have to be before it gets annoying? Does anyone have any useful hints?
I agree with Mistral that it varies widely by reader. I think it's an larger issue in fanfic because some of us may assume that the reader is familiar enough with the show that background detail is unnecessary. We don't need to introduce the characters, the ships, the environment, etc. The readers know what the characters look like, how each generally behaves, etc.
Personally, I think the test for sufficient description of people or background is whether or not that description is necessary for the story. Does it enhance the reader's understanding of the plot or the character interaction? Does the environment affect the outcome or even the state of mind of the characters? Does it say something that X is wearing red instead of black, etc.
Morrigan "Auron may be different, Cally, but on Earth it is considered ill-mannered to kill your friends while committing suicide."
Morrigan said:
I agree with Mistral that it varies widely by reader. I think it's an
larger
issue in fanfic because some of us may assume that the reader is familiar enough with the show that background detail is unnecessary. We don't need
to
introduce the characters, the ships, the environment, etc.
1. I've written several stories with the precise intention of sending them someplace nicer than the average quarry or power plant 2. But there are so few standing sets...oh, excuse me, glimpses into the Liberator--we don't know if there's a dining room or even how many cabins there are overall
-(Y)
From: B7Morrigan@aol.com
Personally, I think the test for sufficient description of people or background is whether or not that description is necessary for the story. Does it enhance the reader's understanding of the plot or the character interaction? Does the environment affect the outcome or even the state of mind of the characters? Does it say something that X is wearing red
instead
of black, etc.
As a reader, I like a bit more than the strictly necessary. I want description that sets a bit of atmosphere and helps me visualise the environment.
If you're writing from a character's POV (in either 1st or 3rd person) then you can describe it through their eyes (ears, nose etc) and so use description as a characterising tool. A shadow-tripping dreamhead seen through Blake's eyes, for example, might be very different to the same person seen by Jenna, or Gan, or Servalan. Likeiwse environment - the same planetary landscape might be bleak and forbidding or wild and exhilirating, depending on whose POV we see it through.
Description can also be used for authorial mouthpiecing, if you're into authorial mouthpiecing (which I am). I did this quite a bit in A Casting Of Swords (in Stadler Link), which was basically written to give the New Age a kick up the arse:
"On the right was a self-proclaimed tattoo parlour, though once it had been a Space Command gunship, the windows punched out and the military drab painted over in wavy lines and stars and non-circular dots. In the twilight the bright colours faded towards monochrome." - The tattoo parlour has no part whatsoever in the plot, it is just there as a symbol of hippiedom's last futile gasp on "a world that hadn't yet died, but only because it didn't know how to."
"The driver was a woman, young by any affluent standard, long hair hanging in unwashed cables, red highlights weaving through the black. She had a gold ransom stud in her nose and luminescent mirrors across her eyes. If she hadn't been so short and chubby, she'd have looked like one of the vultures that sometimes still drifted down from the sierras." - The reference to affluence is intended to indicate expected longevity outside the domes, while the ransom stud says a lot about the local economy (it's based on the way pirates used to wear gold earrings to buy their release when captured), and its 'primitiveness' contrasts with the mirror shades she wears. As with the tattoo parlour, we have ancient and modern interpenetrated in a makeshift culture scavenged from civilisation. 'Unwashed cables' connotes a lack of ready access to basic hygiene. The comparison with vultures is not symbolic of anything, not even scavenging, it's just based on my impressions of some of the women I saw in village tavernas on a birding trip to Spain. They really did look like vultures in profile. (And I like vultures.)
"She watched the last glimmer of a sun already set fade from the sky, the orange sheen dissolving into the shifting ooze of the Med-Atlantic interface, the last dying flicker on the distant mining rigs doggedly levelling the Atlas." - All imagery of a world that isn't so much dying as being systematically put to death, and none of it directly relevant to the plot, but very relevant to the theme. If you've ever stood on the beach at Tarifa (I have, obviously, otherwise I could never have set the story there), then you'll know that the sea is not normally 'shifting ooze', it is bloody rough. (Tarifa is actually a surfing resort because of the high winds.) I've only just noticed that the alliteration in the last sentence - dying, distant, dogged - evokes a remorseless, mechanical sound, like a jackhammer, though the symbolic deployment of Atlas as a mythical figure as well as the mountain range is very deliberate. This is a world where myth is obsolete, which is pretty much what I wanted to say with the story.
Of course, that's only how I wrote it. How anyone else actually reads it may be utterly different.
Neil
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