How’s your summer been? Mine’s been busy, and honestly, a little stressful. From a girls’ trip to Arkansas, to a tennis injury, to outdoor musicals, concerts, and to one unfortunately high plumbing repair bill, I haven’t had much time to sit down and rest–let alone write. Even with Friday afternoons off, I feel like I just haven’t had time to accomplish much of what I’ve wanted to get done, and the time I do have has been recovering (i.e. napping).
Other than the plumbing situation (which, yikes that was expensive) and the tennis injury (I won the championship, and I am almost completely healed), my summer activities have all been fun things I wanted to go do, but there’s a small part of me that’s excited for colder weather and an excuse to stay inside.
However, as the summer draws to a close, and my schedule (hopefully) starts to lighten, as promised, I am bringing back the blog posts! I’ve got a couple of posts drafted, but if you have any publishing or writing questions please send them my way. Actually, if you have any questions, I’m happy to answer! They don’t even have to be about writing.
(Want me to tell you the story of how I got my dog? Recount my recent tennis victory and injury? The best way to make an iced latte? My opinion and defense of the Oxford comma? My favorite TikTok trend? Ask away, people! You can pause your reading of this blog post to message me; I won’t be offended.)
But I digress.
I want to move into this next portion of the blog post with a shout out to my dear friend, Alice. She is responsible for asking many of the questions that have prompted blog posts. Without me ever saying anything, she has a knack for knowing when I’ve run out of ideas, and always asks questions that serve as wonderful jumping off points for these posts.
So thank you, Alice!
Her question that prompted this post was about description. She sent me a reel where someone was responding to another post asking how to describe a person’s hair color. The original post was trying to figure out how to describe the exact hair color of her main character and provided a picture for reference.
The person responding was a poet, so a description such as “auburn” or “burgundy” wouldn’t be quite the way he’d describe that hair color. He went on to list some really beautiful imagery, but also said that while that’s how he’d write that color, sometimes a simpler description would suffice. It all depended on what you were trying to do as the writer. Are you merely providing a hair color, or do you want to use that description to tell the reader more about the character through the color of her hair?
For me, description doesn’t always come naturally–especially the more poetic and beautiful description. When I’m first drafting a scene, even if I’m picturing the scene in my head, most of what ends up on the page is dialogue or inner thoughts, with only a few sprinkles of description.
Afterwards, I go back in and add more description to fill out the scene.
When I was editing Veritas, one of my friends went through and marked all of the places where the movie in her head stopped playing or became fuzzy, and that helped tremendously! It was intriguing to see where I thought I had been descriptive enough, but hadn’t quite hit the mark. So now when I’m drafting, I try to pay a little closer attention to the description, but it’s still not something that comes effortlessly to me.
Even though I’ve had experience writing poetry, my descriptions never tend to feel very poetic (at least, not to me). I’ve read some writer’s books who seem to have a natural talent for very beautiful writing, but any time I try, it sounds silly, cheesy, or forced. My descriptions are more functional and serve to depict the scene–as if it was a movie in my head–but to also give the reader space to picture what that description looks like to them.
Needless to say, I may be my own worst critic here, but I feel as if this is one area of my writing that could always use more refinement.
Britnie Jenkins 