Description Overload or Heavy Duty Rewiring?
Comments (0) No Goodreads Friday today. In fact, I’m not sure if I want to contine that cop-out. It’s so damn lazy to scour a review site and paste the text into a blog post, no matter how funny or enlightening it may be. I need to write some quality posts, dammit. Starting today!
During one of my online searches for new books to read, I came across this one: The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr. Here’s what Donna Seaman from Booklist had to say:
[Carr] looks to neurological science to gauge the organic impact of computers, citing fascinating experiments that contrast the neural pathways built by reading books versus those forged by surfing the hypnotic Internet, where portals lead us on from one text, image, or video to another while we’re being bombarded by messages, alerts, and feeds. This glimmering realm of interruption and distraction impedes the sort of comprehension and retention “deep reading” engenders, Carr explains. And not only are we reconfiguring our brains, we are also forging a “new intellectual ethic,” an arresting observation Carr expands on while discussing Google’s gargantuan book digitization project. What are the consequences of new habits of mind that abandon sustained immersion and concentration for darting about, snagging bits of information? What is gained and what is lost?
Whew. After reading that, I began to wonder if I’m becoming one of the “Rewired.”
I just finished Prey, the fourth book in Rachel Vincent’s Shifters series. It’s one of the most action-packed installments yet, with plenty of bitch-slapping, blood splattering, and broken bones. I like action in my stories, and if the violence contributes to the story and helps color it, even better.
But when the description weighs down the action, I start to drift away or rush through the words.
Before I get any angry e-mails, I just want to clarify something: I like Rachel Vincent. When I came across the ARC (advance reader copy) for Stray, the cover photo and copy on the back drew me in. No matter how hard I resisted, I kept picking up that ARC and looking it over. I don’t normally go for paranormal stories; they’ve always rubbed me the wrong way, and with the current masturabating fest over vampires these days, I’m less inclined to venture into that genre. But I took the ARC home and read it in four days. Then I ordered the second book in the series.
No one’s done werecats before. Vincent has created a believable secret society of shifters who are a part of the human world, yet apart from it. In their human forms, these werecats hold ordinary jobs, have human friends, and even go to school. Some male werecats date and marry human women. Females, however, are pressured into marrying, since they’re the only ones capable of passing on the werecat gene. It’s a fascinating yet misogynistic world that the heroine, Faythe Sanders, lives in, and she’s rebelling against what everyone wants for and needs of her. On top of that, her progressive father, the Alpha of their Pride, has designated her to succeed him.
Best of all, there are no fucking vampires. I’m so sick of vampires.
The ARC and first printed edition of Stray exceed 600 pages (subsequent reprints have trimmed the story down to a svelte 400-something tome), but I was eager to move into this urban fantasy. I wanted to learn more about Faythe and cheer her on as she took on sexism and the bad guys. Thing is, because she stands a chance of disappearing along with other fertile tabbies (their word for female werecats), she’s pretty much imprisoned in the family ranch house. But she gets to Shift, prowl around in cat form, be delightfully snarky, and learn more about her missing friends. And we get to meet the Pride, including fan-favorite brother, Ethan, and her jilted ex-boyfriend, Marc, who was forced into werecat-dom through a Stray attack that infected him. But after all this, Faythe does confront the bad guys.
Over 300 pages later.
That’s halfway through the freaking book. Granted, Vincent needed to set up the world and help the reader understand exactly what Faythe has to deal with (and her reasons for running away and enrolling in grad school before the story begins). Plus, it’d be very unrealistic if her family just let her roam around the ranch without any supervision; the grounds aren’t exactly intruder-proof. Honestly, I can’t see any other way she could have written the first half of the story… but then, I haven’t read the 400-page version yet, so I don’t know what she cut out. I imagine that it was a lot of description.
Understandably, in order to create a fictional world, a writer needs to have description. And the better picture it paints, the better. A character can simply walk into a room, or he can saunter into it, maybe even hop into it. How does he handle his wounds? Does he sit silently and gently rub his teeth over his bleeding lip, or does he adopt a grim stance and ignore his firing nerves? What kind of hair does he have? Is it a dull brown or a shiny umber with red highlights that show up in the sun? Without description–excellent description, at that–you have a dull story nobody wants to read.
Vincent pours description into every scene, especially the fights. We get shattered bones, fountains of blood, shocks traveling up limbs with each impact. You can imagine every single move with this kind of description. But after a while, I found it a little overwhelming and ended up skimming. I wanted to know how the skirmish ended and who came out victorious. Personally, I believe action scenes should be short on detail. When the punches start flying, so do my eyes; I want to go as fast as the action, but it’s almost impossible with some scenes in this series.
Now, that doesn’t mean I want to read a scene that goes: “He threw a punch, and the other guy groaned and fell to the floor.” A simple yet vivid “His fist crashed into the goon’s chin, sending him sprawling to the floor with a moist gurgle” would suffice. I don’t need to know how loudly the bone shattered, or how high the blood flew and where it splattered. I like little details woven through the action, not flooding it.
From what I can remember, a lot of the action scenes in Prey described each punch, each weapon hitting its victim, how the victim fell, the associated sound effects… Almost every paragraph seemed to be made of these details, and when the scene stretches over a few pages–with some dialogue thrown in–it becomes a chore to read a scene that would probably happen in less than three minutes in real-time. It’s because of this that I nearly missed one of the most shocking and emotionally-packed moments in the story that happened immediately after a lull in fighting.
That’s one of the dangers of writing. It’s so easy to get carried away with fleshing out a scene that a writer wants to capture every sensation, sight, sound, and smell that’s conjured in the mind. Trust me, I deal with it every day. It’s a struggle to decide how much description should go into a scene and how much I should cut out. And if I think it’s pure gold, the emotional hold on the words is even stronger. Sometimes I give in to my whiny inner-bitch and keep the targeted section, and other times I suck it up and remind myself that the deleted portion will go into a “deleted file.” At least it was written, right? I’ll always have the deleted stuff in some form.
Despite my complaining, I’m not going to drop Rachel Vincent from my to-read bookcase. She has a talent for creating enticing characters, and I like visiting her werecat world.
If anything, reading this series has made me a more cautious writer. Do I really need to describe every finger twitche, every sniffle, and every blink? How much of my dialogue should be pertinent information? How much of the description adds texture, and how much of it bogs down?
But then I wonder how I’ve evolved as a reader. Have I become so used to ridiculously fast-loading Webpages that I expect my reading material to be the same? Have I become impatient, incapable of allowing myself to be completely immersed in a world, only believing that I’ve given myself to another writer when I’m actually skimming the surface and waiting for a chance to break free?
I guess I’ll find out when I read Shift.
Themocracy