I received the edited version of my book Beast Master. It was rather depressing all the changes that were suggested, but that is why you have an editor review it. Nina Munteanu made lots and lots of useful comments and even pointed out a grammatical usage which is different here than in the UK (which goes to show that spelling is not the only thing which is different). It will take a while for me to get through them all but one comment really stood out. She felt there wasn’t enough physical description, both for place and character. I found that both amusing and lowering because I had realised there was very little description of any kind and had done a huge edit to include description (mostly physical I have to admit), obviously not very successfully. Thinking about how important description is led me to think about why I didn’t include it in the book from the get go. That led me to thinking about books I read and the descriptions in them.

There is a lot of encouragement for budding authors to use literature as models for their own writing. In fact there are courses which are based around using the classics to help writers improve their own writing. I read a lot but physical description has never really impacted on me. I read for the story and the action. I couldn’t tell you what the main character of any of the books I read looks like, or what the land they are living in looks like. But I appreciate description which adds to suspense such as:

The suspense in this first stanza is wonderful.  This is followed by the highwayman’s description which I could care less about. I wanted to know what was going to happen, so although I read the next stanza, I barely paid attention. Why? The only reason I can give is that I am a greedy reader and want to know what happens next NOW! As a result, all those little details describing the highwayman are ignored by me, skipped over, consigned to the background, in my hurry to get to the action. And the upshot is I ignore them in my writing. So now, I have to figure out how NOT to ignore them and believe me, I find it difficult, very, very difficult to describe what I see in my mind’s eye.

PS Loreena Mckinnitt has put the above poem to music. It’s worth a listen.