THE ICE PICK

Word Painting: a Guide to Writing More Descriptively, by Rebecca McClanahan. Cincinnati: Writer’s Digest Books, 2000. ISBN 1-58297-025-4. $14.99.

Description can create the illusion of reality and establish our characters, our point of view, and our setting. It can speed up or slow down our stories or provide the needed links between scenes and summaries. It can be anything from a transitional device to a unifying thematic one. And nowhere is the challenge of writing description greater than for the writer of "non realistic" fiction. "We’re trying to render and maintain a world . . . that we’ve not experienced firsthand." In doing so, "we can’t assume that [our reader] will enter our fictional dream as easily as the reader of a contemporary realistic novel would."

McClanahan begins by explaining how we can sharpen our powers of observation, because our ability to describe things depends on our ability to see, smell, hear, touch, and taste them and to interpret and understand what we have observed. In the following chapters she discusses the tools a writer can use in description and how to create the effects we want in mood, plot, pacing, characterization, point of view, and setting. She also explains how to organize the description of a setting or a person and how to introduce a story’s setting.

Throughout the book there are exercises designed to help us understand and apply the ideas McClanahan introduces. For example, within the section on characterization, she asks us to imagine what container our characters would pack for a weekend away and what they would put in it. What would their grocery list would look like? What would they put out for a yard sale?

There is a selected bibliography for further reading and study, plus a good index, and the book is very well organized.

Packed with practical advice and information, this is a wonderful book. But it is not an easy book, nor one to be skimmed quickly. You need to take your time with it, working through the exercises and seeing how you might apply them to your own writing.

{Published in GPIC, the Oklahoma Science Fiction Writers Newsletter, Dec. 2000. Reprinted in SF & Fantasy Workshop Newsletter, Apr. 2006.}