Notes from a Paul Park Workshop

Using Description in Your F&SF Writing

Feb 6, 2007

I was lucky enough to take a workshop recently with Paul Park, author of the Princess of Roumania series, of which the third book, The White Tiger, has just been released

In a one-day workshop at Seattle's Richard Hugo house, science fiction and fantasy novelist Paul Park discussed description and its role in story writing. Here are my notes from the workshop.

Discovering the Story Through Writing

2) A forward momentum is acquired; as the image is clarified, it is more likely to suggest another image.

This is to some extent an old fashioned idea, that of liberating the art. The prose becomes the window into the story, and it must be made as clear and unnoticeable as possible.

There are other ways of looking at this idea. Perhaps one could think of the process as one of decorating the window itself, because there is no story object. Or it may be a window whose vision depends entirely on the reader, and how what they bring to the story shapes it. In such a case the writer's only hope is to make each story as vivid and emotionally colorful as possible, because it is futile to try to make ideas clear.

Paul talked about a piece of writing possibly being like a glass window: the story object is on one side and the writer's prose is the windowglass, which should be as clear and unobtrusive as possible. But, he said, that's one way of looking at it -- another is to say that the story is the window, and consists of the prose, so there's no underlying story that is revealed through the prose but still somehow separate from it.

If we position ourselves somewhere between these models, we realize there are two separate things that happen in writing:

1) We play with the reader's expectations, which means we are always predicting what the reader is getting from the story. Suspense is dependent on this process.

Description

Stories move at different speeds, and the writer is usually just trying to slow things down by placing obstacles in the way. Description can act as something to hold up and slow the narrative when necessary.

(A possible writing exercise: description of a location as colored by emotion, i.e. as seen through the eyes of someone whose spouse has just betrayed them.)

Description needs to be organic - it should feel natural, as though it has grown out of the story rather than being stuck in there. Imagery should serve the emotional purpose of the story, and create some tension between what the imagery is saying and the plot is saying.

Pov distance is part of the story's mood. You can make things new through pov and language that affects the character's attitude.

Pick key details and make them count. What tells the reader this is different from any other place? Description should reveal a world that exists beyond the location. Give a location enough autonomy that it doesn't seem used only for a particular effect. Writers who fail to do this don't create a whole world for the reader to live in, but do the equivalent of simply creating Essex, NJ.

Conveying Effects Through Description

Through an unusual pov, we can see things that we recognize and find familiar. Such povs need to be credible. How do you use language to create mental effects?

This came up in the context of a workshop participant who had written from a deer's pov. Paul suggested that focusing on smell and sound and ignoring sight might be a good way to convey the way a deer might think, and that you also want to limit vocabulary - "two-legs" instead of "human being", for a particularly cliched example.

The only excuse for adverbs is if they're used to contradict the words they're attached to and thus provide more information. If they don't contradict/clarify the words they're modifying, they're pointless. Use them only if we doubt them - otherwise, they're only reinforcing what we already know. Something like "ran quickly" doesn't tell us anything more than "ran" -- they're running, after all. But "ran lethargically" does give the reader more information.

E.M. Forster talks about flat and round characterization. A flat character performs the same role throughout the work of fiction and is recognizable throughout the piece, but lacks the ability to surprise us. Rounder characters may be undergoing transformations and are harder to pin down.

When you choose to look at a character from different povs, this can result in a flat character if they're all saying the same thing, or they can be set against each other in different ways and put in conflict with each other. This forces the reader to fill in the gaps. The reader is complicit in the creation of the character and its integrity is created between the actions of the reader and writer.

In the pov of a non-stranger, it's better to break up the chunks of description and slip them into the narrative, like pills concealed in cheese.

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