Permalink Submitted by Sara (not verified) on Thu, 08/25/2016 - 09:30
I've been thinking a lot about this since you noted it as an issue in MM. I don't mind reading scene-setting description, in fact often I enjoy it and I find it helps me get rooted in a story. And little tidbits about dress, appearance, food, etc., do too.
But I've long known that when I come around to my own writing, I find I have no idea how to weave in that effortless mode of description that I enjoy reading; while constructing paragraphs I just don't know where to put the description or even what sorts of things I'd describe. Funnily, the last year of house renovations has helped me figure out why -- it's that I simply don't see these things. The number of times Joel has asked me if I notice anything different after he's put in hours and hours fixing something, and I just can't. Even if I do happen to look at a ceiling, I'm not going to notice the popped nails or the cracks in the plaster. Remove me from a room, and I am unlikely to be able to tell you what kind of moulding it has, or what sort of doorknobs. When they redid the floors and repainted the walls in my building over Easter break, I returned to a strong sense of displacement because I knew things were different but <i>I had no idea</i> how things were before. I still couldn't tell you what color the walls were before. The carpet was vaguely brownish, I think.
I think this obliviousness is related to my difficulty in remembering faces (or recognizing the same face both with and without SCA veil), and that makes a lot more sense now why I have such trouble writing the descriptions.
I've been thinking a lot
I've been thinking a lot about this since you noted it as an issue in MM. I don't mind reading scene-setting description, in fact often I enjoy it and I find it helps me get rooted in a story. And little tidbits about dress, appearance, food, etc., do too.
But I've long known that when I come around to my own writing, I find I have no idea how to weave in that effortless mode of description that I enjoy reading; while constructing paragraphs I just don't know where to put the description or even what sorts of things I'd describe. Funnily, the last year of house renovations has helped me figure out why -- it's that I simply don't see these things. The number of times Joel has asked me if I notice anything different after he's put in hours and hours fixing something, and I just can't. Even if I do happen to look at a ceiling, I'm not going to notice the popped nails or the cracks in the plaster. Remove me from a room, and I am unlikely to be able to tell you what kind of moulding it has, or what sort of doorknobs. When they redid the floors and repainted the walls in my building over Easter break, I returned to a strong sense of displacement because I knew things were different but <i>I had no idea</i> how things were before. I still couldn't tell you what color the walls were before. The carpet was vaguely brownish, I think.
I think this obliviousness is related to my difficulty in remembering faces (or recognizing the same face both with and without SCA veil), and that makes a lot more sense now why I have such trouble writing the descriptions.