Take Notice
Or, the Goldilocks Zone
Let’s play a game.
Just kidding. First I’m going to talk your ear off, then we’re going to play a game. We will each play the game on our own time, not on Shelf time. We can meet back here later and talk about how it went.
It’s a mindfulness game, which is a type I’m really bad at. I’m good at games where you build a shelter and fight monsters as long as the monsters are not too hard. Any reasonable person would think I’m talking about Minecraft, but I’m not. It’s okay if you immediately thought of Minecraft. Anyone would.
I’m bad at mindfulness because I have ADHD and I absolutely suck at managing it. As a case in point, I just stopped writing this article for approximately 44 minutes and I have no recollection of what I was doing during that time. For part of it I was texting a friend and for part of it I was updating some outdated documents and for part of it I was looking at Instagram but there are still like 20 minutes unaccounted for. This happens to me all the time.
Ask me about my procrastiblanket.
Mindfulness does not come easily to me but today I’m going to talk about a mindfulness activity that I’m probably doing as you read because I will be at the airport when this article launches and the airport is a primo place to do this mindfulness exercise.
But first, I’m going to talk about the Goldilocks Zone of description in fiction writing. This is related, I promise.
The Goldilocks Zone for description means the narrow swath of real estate in fiction writing that is available for description without it being too little or too much. Too little description is sometimes known as white room syndrome, which typically refers to the lack of setting description. The writer may describe their characters, and what those characters are doing, but does not give any life to the backdrop.
Question: Have you ever arrived early to a stage play? I’m chronically early to stuff, so I have. When you get to a stage play early and find your seat and settle in, you have a nice amount of time to admire the set dressing. Set dressers are marvelously creative. I mean, not if you’re seeing Waiting for Godot. But like pretty much any other play. The set will have all sorts of odds and ends on it and you could spend an hour cataloging the items on the set if you put your mind to it.
But then the actors come on the stage and you don’t notice the set dressing with the same part of your mind anymore. It’s still there, and you’re still noticing it in a background kind of way, but it’s the actors and their movements, expressions, and words that you really notice when the play is happening. You may no longer notice that there is a gun hung above the kitchen door. Chekhov has strong feelings about that.
When you are writing—again, unless you are writing Waiting for Godot but you’re not cause it’s already written—you are in charge of the set dressing as well as the actors and all their movements, expressions, and words. You are the director. You’re in charge of the whole thing. It’s your job to make sure there is enough set dressing that you don’t fall prey to the white room syndrome, without forcing so much set dressing on the reader that you end up in the opposite situation, purple prose.
Purple prose occurs when writing is too descriptive and ornate, to the extent that it impedes the reader’s understanding of the text rather than encourages. Too much description is only one way in which prose can be purple, by the way, but it’s the way we’re talking about today.
In fiction writing, your reader does not arrive fifteen minutes ahead of the start time to observe the set dressing before the action starts. Actually, let me revise: I can’t say this never happens. If you reach out to your bookshelf and pull down your trusty old copy of The Hobbit you’ll find a story that starts with literally pages of set dressing describing Bag End before you get to Bilbo standing at his front door and saying “Good morning” to Gandalf, who has just showed up. So, in fact, this does happen in fiction; however, this type of exposition-heavy opening is fairly out of fashion in fiction writing right now and I don’t advise leading with several pages of set dressing.
Instead, your reader comes to the page with everything happening at once. Typically, characters are there, things are happening, people are emoting and speaking and moving, and the description of the setting happens within and amid all that other stuff happening.
If you are folding your descriptions of people and settings into the text organically, rather than frontloading with description, then you will likely notice you have limited space to include details. This means you have to include the details that actually matter and not just every detail you can think of. We’re writers, we paint with words, we can think of millions of details. We can spell out everything about a writing desk in a Victorian study—how big it is, what the ornamental carving looks like, what type of wood it’s made from, what the drawer pulls look like—but nobody needs or wants all that detail, because that’s not how the human brain works.
Once the actors are in place in a play, speaking and moving, we—the audience—notice the set dressing in relation to the actors and their actions. We notice a desk when someone slams their fist down on that desk. We notice the dartboard on the wall when someone picks up a handful of darts and starts throwing. We notice a sinkful of dishes when a character turns to it and starts sudsing. Otherwise these things are just broad, indistinct strokes of background color as we focus on the foreground.
This brings us to the mindfulness exercise. Well, it brings us almost to the mindfulness exercise. This exercise is one I use to practice understanding which details are the right ones to include when describing a setting or a character. I like to do this out in the real world but for the purposes of today’s Shelf Life we’re going to use a random picture generator. I’ll share the links here, one for random pictures of people and one for random pictures of places.
The exercise is this: Click on one of the links to get a random picture of a person or a random picture from a National Park. Look at the image but instead of cataloging it or trying to memorize it, try to notice what you are noticing—and in what order.
I got a photo of a woman in a hat. The first thing I noticed was her hat, likely because it was pulled down over her face hiding all but her lips. Next I noticed her lips, because she had them rounded as though saying “ooh” or “oh.” Next, I noticed her hat had an interesting chain detail for a hatband with a charm on the front. I went on to notice additional details about the photo, like the style and done of her hair; the shape of the little bit of nose I could see peeking out from under the brim of her hat; the slope and shape of her shoulders; the color and shape and type of the hat; the color and style of shirt she was wearing; and the color and lighting of the backdrop.
Now: Stop and take a moment to be impressed because that exercise is not easy for me to do. My brain wants to jump around and notice everything at once and then cross “looking at this photo” off the list and move on to the next thing. That’s where mindfulness comes in: The act of paying attention to what I’m doing, rather than to all the various stimuli around me.
The purpose of this exercise is to understand what details are the most prominent and noticeable and separate those from the less-obvious, less-noticable details. Is the order in which I noticed details the same order that anyone would notice them in? I don’t know—but it doesn’t matter. The important thing is there is an order and I know what it is.
If I have all day to stare at a photo, I can notice every detail. The second people photo I pulled up was a photo of swimmers entering the ocean from the beach. I only looked at it for a few moments before closing the browser tab. I noticed that there were five people together in a group in the foreground entering the water. I noticed that the person in the center of the group was a boy or young man, and that he was jumping into the water as though excited. I noticed another group of three ocean-goers in the middleground and a few more swimmers dotted throughout the background. That’s all I was able to notice in the time I had. I can’t recall the gender presentation of anyone other than the jumping boy and I cannot tell you what color swimwear anyone was wearing nor what color hair anyone had. The water was blue and the sky was bluer. That’s all I can remember.
When writing descriptions, I posit it is a best practice to limit your description to the most noticeable details of a setting or person—the one or two things you would notice first about that person, rather than a laundry list of all their characteristics. It need not be the details anyone would notice first—after all, you are the writer and what you notice is what’s important here.
You should assume, when writing, that your reader does not have all day to look at the photo you have created with words. Instead, they have a few moments to absorb the description before moving on to the next thing—the action, the dialogue, the subtext, and so on. When a person only has moments to absorb the details of an image, they are only going to retain the most noticeable things—but they will retain those. You can build additional details into their mental image later on by adding new details—but add visual details with discretion.
The primary reason for writing descriptions is to give the reader enough detail to form a picture without giving the reader so much detail that they don’t have an opportunity to form a picture. This can be challenging for some writers who have a very detailed image of their hero or heroine and balk at the idea of anyone picturing them differently than just how the writer intended. But for the reader to truly invest in a character or setting, they have to bring some of their imagination to it. A book that leaves nothing to the imagination can’t capture a reader’s imagination—can it? If you include every detail in a chronicle of events, you don’t have interesting fiction, but rather a fictitious newspaper article. Or that part of The Iliad where Homer explains who is on what boat, and what the sail of that specific boat looks like, and how everybody is related to each other, for like fifty pages.
Nobody enjoyed that part of The Iliad. Anybody who tells you they loved that part of The Iliad is lying.
Editor’s Note: The procrastiblanket grew by one (1) square during the writing of today’s Shelf Life.
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