How did,Why and when did description fall out of fashion?

[Thrice Great Hermes]

This question is very relevant to me, because my natural inclination is towards thorough description. Logical I'm quite concerned that what I feel is essential to good writing would be rejected by modern audiences. I initially associated the term "purple prose" with a florid,grandiloquent and highly poetic style of description. While all that stuff can be beautiful, it can be obstructive, so deep into metaphor and abstraction that it becomes difficult to under what the writer is actually trying to convey. To my surprise I have seen the term being applied to even literal and concise descriptions, those descriptions were just thorough.

So what happened why has truly painting, the imagination of the audience fallen by the way side, in favor of stark description and letting the reader envision things for themselves?

Who got lazy, was it the writers or the audience.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

Description isn't out of fashion.

Purple Prose is an extreme and out of fashion.
Info Dump isn't really description relevant to the story or it would be exposition.

 

[The Big Peat]

I'm not sure I'd agree that descriptive authors are out of fashion, but I'd agree that advice pushing authors away from descriptive flourishes is very in fashion.

 

[Brian G Turner]

Yep, as Ray says - there's a focus now on engaging the reader and keeping them engaged. That means trying to retain a sense of immediacy as much as possible.

And also that any essential information/backstory is dripped through the entire book rather than all dumped into the first chapter, or prologue.

I think most aspiring writers over-do things early on in their development - but learning to tighten and become more concise is a worthwhile lesson to apply.

 

[The Judge]

I don't think it's laziness, so much as a (perceived) lack of time so people want everything that little bit more quickly than they used to (of course they haven't really got less time than people 50 years ago, if anything they have more leisure time, but they waste it in different ways). I'm also convinced that attention spans are much less than they were, which is perhaps a corollary of doing everything quickly and being so tuned into electronic media etc. As a result readers just can't cope with long descriptions before they're losing patience and wanting more action.

 

[The Big Peat]

I do question this idea that readers can't cope with long descriptions and want immediacy before anything else. I have to say, I look at the heavyweights of fantasy, and I'm not sure immediacy is a virtue I'd ascribe to them. But maybe that's what you can get away with as a genius, and a mistake for others.

 

[Juliana]

As a reader, I prefer just the bare bones of description. But that's not a question of laziness in reading, just that I prefer to fill in the blanks with my own imagination rather than have every detail colored in for me. So as a writer I tend to follow my personal guidelines, too.

 

[Randy M.]

I don't think it's laziness, so much as a (perceived) lack of time so people want everything that little bit more quickly than they used to (of course they haven't really got less time than people 50 years ago, if anything they have more leisure time, but they waste it in different ways). I'm also convinced that attention spans are much less than they were, which is perhaps a corollary of doing everything quickly and being so tuned into electronic media etc. As a result readers just can't cope with long descriptions before they're losing patience and wanting more action.

The discussion of description in writing has been going on since at least the early 1900s. The more fulsome descriptive writing of the 18th and 19th centuries began to ebb as travel became easier for a greater number of people (from carriages to trains and then cars and planes), and then too there were advances in photography and then film, which made previously little seen corners of the world visible to broad audiences. Within a 30 year span we went from Oscar Wilde and Henry James to Gertrude Stein and Hemingway. Even 30 years ago I was in a writing class where another student said he thought Hemingway wordy.


Randy M.

 

[Ihe]

Nowadays readers have access to so much stuff! The stimuli we are exposed to is overkill. The offer exceeds the demand, so people will follow the path of least resistance to get their thrills (more thrill-seeking now as well). We seek instant gratification, and as rule of thumb, have no patience to endure Tolkienesque description anymore, even if it is relevant. Also, as we are exposed to more imagery, as someone mentioned above, there is no need to describe everything as much, and people get annoyed with info-dumps or extended exposition much more easily. Before, people treasured books because they WERE treasures. Today, with overabundance of books/internet/kindle/series and movies based on books, the relative value of stories has diminished significantly. And so you need to make your story interesting very fast, and keep it that way until the end. It is definitely the reader's new criteria that has shaped things as they are now. Commercialized stories will always cater to the audience at some level. The changing styles of writing are reactionary movements that reflect society, as does all art.

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

I think it is partly due to the fact that people have so many other options for entertainment and also due to the fact that they are accustomed to ... I won't say instant gratification, but to getting their gratification more swiftly than they did before.

There was a time before TV and movies, when for middle class people (the rich had plays and the opera on a regular basis and actual travel) most of the time the only thing that could take them out of themselves and into far away places and exciting situations was a book or a serialized story in a magazine or newspaper. So when they had a book they wanted it to last. They were in no hurry to finish the book and get on to the next activity, because most of the time there wasn't anything nearly as enjoyable waiting to immediately take the book's place.

When that was no longer the case, I think that was when things began to change.

And yet it is true that the most popular authors do tend to use a lot of description. But if you asked their readers how they felt about description they would say they don't want much. Some of them would be surprised at how much description their favorite writers use (although usually much less than a 19th or early 20th century writer would). So to a certain extent it is how the author uses description, and not how much. If the writer uses it in such a way that a reader soaks it up without noticing what is happening, then it enhances the enjoyment without the average readers realizing what it is they are enjoying.

A lot of readers and writers say they want a book that is short on description because they want to imagine how everything looks for themselves. Not me. I don't read somebody else's book so I can do all the imagining myself — I have my own writing for that. I want to see what somebody else is picturing, I want the world or the setting, and the people, that they are creating as close to how they envision as I can come, just because it is going to be different from anything I could imagine on my own. That's a large part of the pleasure for me. But I don't want it to be clumsy and intrude on the story. I want it to enhance it.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

I don't read somebody else's book so I can do all the imagining myself — I have my own writing for that.

Indeed

But if you asked their readers how they felt about description they would say they don't want much.

I think you get different answers from people that mostly read and read many authors, or that really read much less than the Films they watch at home and perhaps only read very popular or tie-in titles.

It's interesting what the majority of recent (say 10 years) titles are that are common in the Charity Shops in town. It's not directly related to selling volume. Some titles hardly end up there at all. Others you KNOW you can pick up easily and so you try the 3 for 1 Euro places first. Others they get so many they could nearly build a book fort with them.

I'm not writing for people that only read a few books a year and mostly only buy hyped titles or TV/Fim tie-in. I'm writing for people that want to read and for who reading is more limited by ability to spend, that as an activity for when their TV is broken or they are away from it.

But I think what people SAY they want and like is an unreliable guide. The better guide is what books did they like over the last 12 months. Like Goldilocks, description has to be more or less right, but so has dialogue, plot, action, characterisation. It has to be a good book.

 

[hopewrites]

I think it's more to do with how description is used rather than the amount of words dedicated to it. Pacing. If the story I'm reading takes a leisurely stroll through thoughts, I have more mental time to stop and smell its roses. If the pace is breakneck, [expletive] form, function, and anything I can predict for myself just get me to the next plot point RAAWRR!! at which point I may or may not need to back up a paragraph or page to actually read what was written, rather than what I assume was written.

Descriptors are que cards for mental imagery, if the imagery is already in the mind of your reader -so much the better! if not, they can always google it later, like those vocabulary words.

When people couldn't look up a word or a descriptive term, the mental imagery had to be provided along with it. "The melodic quality of her dulct voice was more captivating than the words she used to entangle men's attention, before her sharp stiletto heels stamped out their life." Would now be criticized as over descriptive, or wordy. All the phrases used are relevant, and build on each other. But if you know that dulct means melodic, that stiletto heels are sharp, that to be entangled is to be captivated... Then it's a rather redundant sentence. "The sweetness of the Orange" is important information to someone who doesn't know oranges are sweet, has never seen or tasted one, and therefore has no imagery to draw on when reading "tempted by the Orange held out to him" wtf is so tempting? If the author doesn't say, I have to make it up for myself or stop and look up what an orange is. 10:1 I'm going to make it up myself and be wrong, which may or may not effect whether or not the story continues to make sense later. Suppose I decided Orange is a kind of puppy. Well, later, when people are peeling and eating puppies, getting sticky with their juices... It's a whole other story isn't it.

So the challenge is as it ever was, to provide the right amount of relevant information to keep readers reading the story the author thinks they've written.

 

[The Big Peat]

I'd sum up the lesson I've taken from this thread as:

Description is good when it creates immediacy and bad when it opposes it.

By immediacy, I mean the sense that the story is happening immediately before you; I could probably use the word immersion just as well (I don't know if that's how others were using it). Great description creates that by painting vivid pictures. Excessive description ends up telling people what they already know and that mars the immediacy.

Description will never be dead. After all, stories are describing what's in your head. 'Description', as in tons of it... a snappy sentence beats a purple paragraph anyway. And that's coming from someone who likes description.

 

[Lew Rockwell Fan]

One reader's reaction:
Depends on what you are describing and how important the details are.

I get bored with long descriptions of how some character looks. I probably won't form an image incorporating all those details. It's a waste of time.

I get bored with long descriptions of sex. I'm not down on text porn. But in a story, holds up the story. As porn it fails because it is interrupted by the story.

 

[Phyrebrat]

I also feel we lose a sense of mystery if too much is said. Especially for character description. It's like the date analogy; if you go on a first date and the person inundates you with every detail of their lives you become fatigued and weary. Not to say wary .

pH

 

[Pentagon]

From a personal experience, when I first started, I used the Police 10pt description to ensure that I had accurately covered EVERY detail of a character as i was concerned about not covering the description in a thorough way. Since, I tried not putting much if any description in at all- initially it's hard to let go. I know what my characters look like damnit and so should everyone else. But since trying I honestly think that hair colour, eye colour etc are things the reader can imagine themselves, but it's not a chore it's something readers will do automatically.

The trick is to give them enough to go on that they're not snapped out of the dream and then they can get on with it.

I will say one example where I was 'snapped' out of this, was reading Dan Abnett's Eisenhorn, where 300pages in, I was told that one of the characters, whom was the daughter of another major character was black. I am sure it was mentioned much earlier but having missed it, I had already imagined what the characters looked like and had to re-imagine it. What I'd take from this, is that description of major characters should only be used at the beginning and not reiterated through out the piece.

Equally, the only thing I've really wanted to say about my protagonist is gender and age, the reader can get on with the rest.

 

[allmywires]

I get bored with long descriptions of sex. I'm not down on text porn. But in a story, holds up the story. As porn it fails because it is interrupted by the story.

Well that rather depends on what genre you're reading, doesn't it, and how skilled the writer is.

I don't know if I agree about people having shorter attention spans, because old classics from the Victorian age are still wildly popular with people my age and younger (somehow the youth of today manage to ignore their 500 whatsapp messages and snapchats to make it through those...). If someone is an avid reader, they read for pleasure, and most people I know who love to read always want more of their favourites, no matter if it's two paragraphs or world building. My guess is it's more about marketing and selling than the actual audience - about being able to get it distributed to the maximum amount of people, and read quickly to gain a following. Once you've got people hooked they'll read damn near anything in a world they love. And it is harder to sell something that's slower moving than something that zips off the page, particularly in SFF, which weirdly apparently still has a reputation as being inferior to all other kinds of fiction (I read an article on the Guardian yesterday about Game of Thrones - a frankly embarrassingly bad article, actually, which I should have been forewarned of when it started with the quote 'why would any self-respecting adult watch a fantasy series about dragons, zombies and magic?' Erghhhhhh.)

And, as always, it's about the quality of description and how engaging it is. All these discussions always boil down to - yes, there are recommendations, but ultimately, if you're an engaging storyteller you can get away with bending the rules every now and then. Write, critique, receive feedback, learn, write again. Great novels break rules and bring something different to the table. Forget about the law, man!!

 

[Nick B]

I use people description sparingly, just get the important details in ie Travis was a big guy, tall and muscular, with a short beard and untidy hair.
This seeds the reader with all the details they need to have to get a sound image of the character.

 

[Thrice Great Hermes]

I'm not sure I'd agree that descriptive authors are out of fashion, but I'd agree that advice pushing authors away from descriptive flourishes is very in fashion.

What constitutes a flourish and what is a necessary descriptive element? And who decides that?

 

[Thrice Great Hermes]

Yep, as Ray says - there's a focus now on engaging the reader and keeping them engaged. That means trying to retain a sense of immediacy as much as possible.

And also that any essential information/backstory is dripped through the entire book rather than all dumped into the first chapter, or prologue.

I think most aspiring writers over-do things early on in their development - but learning to tighten and become more concise is a worthwhile lesson to apply.

Concision is fine omission is not, I don't like the prospect of parceling out information as it relate to what a thing is supposed to be,unless I or an author is being deliberately vague. It's probably something that I picked from visual media,but when an element comes into the scene it should be seen by the audience.