Why is descriptive writing so important in a novel? Because unlike movies, novels are not visual.

When you watch a film, all of the "description" is done for you by a camera and a microphone. All writers have are words. So you need to use those words to help the reader see and hear (and smell, taste, and touch, too).

You can use them literally ("she wore a red dress"). Or you can write more figuratively. For example:

• It's tough to describe the precise look on a character's face when they're in a really, really foul mood.

• But if you say that their face looked like "the sky before a storm," readers will get the idea.

Step One

The first step to vividly describing a place, person, or thing is to imagine it in your mind's eye. Alternately, if it actually exists you may prefer to look at it or a photograph directly. Either way, you'll start with some scene before you without dividing it into objects or attaching any words to it. Just form a "naïve impression" of the colors, textures, shapes, feeling, of whatever it is while refraining from your impulse to name them. Simply picture and observe.

Step Two

The next step is to carefully select the right words to convey it. If the words that come to mind don't seem adequate, look in a dictionary, ask around, or do some research if necessary, but be sure to keep searching until you have the closest match possible between experience and language. While it's okay to stop short of perfection, since words and thought inevitably fail to capture perception anyways, keep revising until you can't think of any way to improve your description further. At this point, your gut instinct should be telling you it's ready.

What I've said so far may sound obvious, but it's surprising how easy it is to get these two steps mixed up. Instead of allowing the meaning you want to express decide the words, you are enticed by alliteration, rhythm, and other literary elements, or you fail you to escape from common phrasing, and allow language itself to decide what it is you want to say. But this approach traps writers in worn out, traditional modes of thinking, which drains their images of vividness.

So now that we have a basic method, let's try to describe a lake at sunset:

The lake glittered in the light of the setting sun.

There is nothing wrong with this sentence. It might work well in many a story depending on the context. But it doesn't capture the particularity of the moment.

As the tip of the sun was about to slip below the green hills stretching in layered curves along the horizon, the lake caught its setting light, and glittering streaks of mauve and orange squirmed across the black surface with the undulations of the waves like worms of celestial fire.

Our second example may be slightly overwrought. The simile at the end adds precision to the image but may carry unwanted symbolic baggage, and we might find other ways to simplify it, but at least it transports the reader's awareness into the moment. This is not just any sunset on any lake at any time, but the particular phase of a particular sunset on a particular lake. You can see the effort made to envision a definitive scene and give it a commensurately definitive expression.

Step Three

You've probably noticed that the word count for the second example is much higher than the first, so once you've become proficient at writing with naïvety, the next step to consider is pacing.

You don't want to describe everything in meticulous detail all the time as this can overwhelm and potentially bore your reader. The key to writing memorably is effectively balancing action and particularity. But the ideal balance varies from story to story—with short stories tending to weight action more heavily than novels—and also depends on personal style. In this sense, writing with naïvety is a tool to help you discover what proportion works for you and the stories that only you can tell.

Being able to write vivid description involves three aspects:

• First, how to write figuratively (by using similes, metaphors and other figures of speech in your descriptions).

• Second, how to evoke all five senses in your writing.

• Finally, we'll look at how to use the best details in your descriptions (I will focus future parts on this aspect).

Descriptive Writing & Figures of Speech

The most important figures of speech are similes and metaphors. In fact, they lie at the very heart of great description.

Used well, they can transform a story. Used badly, or too much, they can kill your prose.

I explained in the first part of the writing section what these literary elements are, but how do you know when to use them? Follow these four rules:

1. Less is definitely more.

Similes and metaphors are like the finishing touches in a room—a cranberry scatter cushion here, a fancy vase there, two Georgian candlesticks on the mantelpiece.

Used well, they beautify a passage in a novel. Used too often, they make it look gaudy.

Solution? If in doubt, strike them out!

2. Avoid the commonplace.

What's wrong with these examples?

• He drank like a fish.

• She had the heart of a lion.

• The town was as dead as a dodo.

The first time they were ever used, way back when, they would have been fresh and clever. Now, they're not.

Use original and interesting figures of speech, and readers will sit up and take notice. Resort to similes and metaphors that come easily to mind and readers, dare I say it, will "avoid you like the plague."

3. Don't use two similes together.

Using too many similes, in general, is not recommended, but using one right after the other is a definite no-no. It simply doesn't work, as these examples show:

• She had skin like cream, hair like silk, and eyes like green marbles.

• He was as fearless as a lion and as fast as a cheetah.

• Frank stood on the edge of the diving board like a prisoner on the gallows. The short drop to the pool looked as daunting as the Grand Canyon.

4. Don't mix metaphors.

This is virtually the same point as above, although the problem is a more subtle one. Take a look at this:

Steve's mind was a machine. He could waltz through cryptic crosswords in mere minutes.

The trouble here is that the message is confused. First, Steve's intelligence is compared to a clever and efficient machine. Next, his speed at crosswords is compared to the speed and grace of a dance.

If you don't want the reader to say "Huh?", you must always "follow metaphors through" once you've introduced them. Like this:

Steve's mind was a machine. He could process cryptic crosswords in mere minutes.

Other Figures of Speech

Similes and metaphors are the "big two." But you have plenty of other figures of speech in your toolbox, which I've mentioned in that first part of the writing section.

The bottom line on figures of speech?

Good writing happens instinctively—you do it without particularly thinking about it. So don't think that you've got to consciously work examples like those above into your own novel.

Descriptive Writing and the Five Senses

One of the key things that a passage of descriptive writing should do is appeal to all five of the senses. Appeal to the sense of sight only (how things look) and your writing will lack dimension.

Movie makers have cameras and microphones, but novelists have only words to describe how things look and sound.

That's the bad news.

The good news? We can also use those words to describe how things feel, smell and taste, too. So to bring your writing to life and truly immerse your readers in the story, be sure to engage all of their senses.

The Sense of Sight

Okay, you don't want to restrict yourself to just how things look, but sight is still the most important sense to engage in good descriptive writing.

In the absence of a movie camera, describing how things look with words is the only way you'll enable your readers to "see."

Your best bet here? Don't attempt to paint the full picture, describing every tree and building and passing dog in sight. Instead...

1. Focus on just a handful of details (and allow readers to paint the rest of the picture for themselves).

2. Make those details the best ones you can find.

Understand that good descriptive writing is all about quality, not quantity.

You can make a reader "see" with very little (their brain will do the rest). And precisely the same thing applies to making them hear, taste, touch, and smell.

The Sense of Smell

Smell is the most nostalgic of the senses. Which of us isn't transported back to school when we smell chalk on the chalkboard, or to childhood summers when we smell freshly-mown grass?

Incidentally, smell is a useful way of getting characters to remember an event from the past, in the form of a flashback (assuming that this event is important to the understanding of the present story). But that's getting off topic...

For descriptive writing, evoking the sense of smell is a great way of saying a lot with very few words. Try to imagine the following:

• The smell of a woodland in summer after rain.

• Sour milk in the refrigerator.

• The first smell of the sea through a car window.

I didn't write those sentences descriptively like I would have done in a novel (I told you; I didn't show you). Even so, the mere mention of those things likely conjured up entire settings for you.

So again, just finding one really evocative smell to describe will go a long way.

The Sense of Sound

Few settings are silent. And if they are truly silent, describing the absence of sound will be interesting in itself.

Characters speaking and coughing and banging things with hammers is one way of adding a soundtrack to a scene. Another way is to incorporate the sense of sound into the description of settings and characters.

So if you're describing a seaside setting, for example, mention screeching gulls and waves breaking on pebbles to add an extra dimension to the description.

If you're describing a character walking through a hotel lobby, mention his cowboy boots click-clacking on the marble or the jangle of loose change in his pocket.

Sounds can sometimes be tricky to describe accurately, so here is a good place to use a figure of speech. One solution is an onomatopoeia...

• Jangle

• Clatter

• Crash

Similes work well, too, "the cry of the fox sounded like a child in terrible pain." If any of you have ever heard a fox cry in real life, you'll almost every time confuse it first for a crying child.

The Sense of Taste

You'll mostly evoke the sense of taste under two circumstances—when characters are eating and drinking, and when they are kissing and canoodling. (When they are actively using their mouths and tongues, in other words.)

But always look for ways to incorporate it in more unexpected situations in your novel. For example:

• When a character arrives at the coast, the usual thing would be to have them smell the sea. Instead, have them taste the salt on the breeze.

• When a young boy captures a frog at the bottom of the garden, have him lick it... then recoil.

• When a woman returns to her childhood home, have her taste her mother's roast chicken when she's still 100 miles away.

Even if you don't actually describe a taste, just mentioning the thing we taste with—the tongue—can be powerful in descriptive fiction. For example:

• It's the first icy day of winter and it starts to snow. A character looks up and tries to catch the flakes on her tongue.

• Further down the street, her younger brother licks a metal pole.

The Sense of Touch

Like all five of the senses, touch can be painful or pleasurable.

Make it pleasurable, like the feel of cool cotton sheets on a summer night, and the readers will experience the pleasure along with the character.

Make it painful, like being head-butted on the nose, and the readers will wince. Like you just did.

Sometimes, a touch is neither painful nor pleasurable but simply helps to describe the person or the place...

• A greasy stove.

• Cracked lips.

• A cold handshake.

Sometimes the touch itself is what is important, not what the thing being touched feels like. A character reaching out to touch another character can be extremely powerful under the right circumstances, as can the laying of a hand on a headstone.

Everything above boils down to one word: details.

Descriptive, sensual writing is about getting readers to truly experience a setting or a character through their senses.

So when you set out to describe a person or a place in your story, you should first make a mental list of all the details you could mention to bring it to life (with the items on the list appealing to a variety of sense).

It's then all about selecting the best details you can come up with, and leaving the mediocre ones out.

Using the best details in your writing will be the focus of the next few parts in this section.

Please remember to vote on this part!