I skip descriptive passages. You?

[Lisa-go-Blind]

No. There’s more to a good book than plot. And if it’s not a good book, then I shouldn’t waste my time reading it.

[Indistinguishable]

There’s more outside of the kinds of descriptive passages I glaze over than “plot”. And sometimes a book is good and has parts I find tedious.

[Euthanasiast]

If a book contains effective description, even if it is at times poetic (hell, especially if it is poetic), I’ll read it and enjoy it.

I mean, how could you even read authors like Cormac McCarthy using this method? I would think Blood Meridian would be an impossible read.

[Diogenes_the_Cynic]

@Euthanasiast

If a book contains effective description, even if it is at times poetic (hell, especially if it is poetic), I’ll read it and enjoy it.

I mean, how could you even read authors like Cormac McCarthy using this method? I would think Blood Meridian would be an impossible read.

McCarthy doesn’t do pointless description, though. There’s a reason for everything he describes. Also, he’s a genius at it. Most writers aren’t.

Blood Meridian is one of my favorite novels, by the way. Dark as fucking night, that book.

[Hazle_Weatherfield]

@twickster

If the books you read have passages you skip, you’re reading the wrong books.

Nope. “The World According to Garp” is one of my favorite books.

[MandaJo]

I have to teach my students to read description because they tend to reflexively skip it. In a modern thriller, that usually works fine, but for something like Melville or Poe (we are on Romanticism right now), you rather miss the point if you don’t read the descriptions–there is often a lot of ironic tension between what people are saying and what is actually happening. For example, in “Benito Cereno”, if you just listen to the dialog, it’s a long boring conversation about boats. But if you read the descriptions, you gradually come to see that one man is blinded by stupidity and preconceptions and the other is desperately trying to get him to see, and it’s both pathetic and funny. A while back, there was a poster here who hated The Great Gatsby because it was poorly written, and posted a passage with a bunch of redundant adverbs in the dialog tags to demonstrate. The thing is, they weren’t redundant, they were ironic–they were exactly the opposite of what was going on, which the poster hadn’t picked up on (presumably because they had skimmed the descriptions).

Alternatively, in older works the funny is more often in the descriptions than in the dialog. Great Expectations is an painful lecture on not getting above your britches if all you do is read the dialog–all the comic relief is in the descriptions. Kids skip those unless you show them how to read them, and then they hate the book and don’t see the point.

Anyway, I find myself reading descriptive passages in older texts aloud to my kids quite often in an attempt to get them to see the irony or the humor.

[RikWriter]

IMHO, expositive descriptions are in many cases lazy writing. Show, don’t tell, to me means make a description crucial to the ongoing plot if you’re going to go into detail…otherwise, just bare-bones it.

[Lama_Pacos]

I can’t imagine skipping over all the description; for me, that’s part of what distinguishes a novel from an instruction manual. If a writer can’t write well enough to make description interesting, I’m going to skip the book.

Though since a lot of posts upthread only mentioned various genre fiction, I guess if I primarily read that sort of thing I would also have a hard time slogging through “Eawwydthenmor was a beautiful elf with gigantic breasts and chestnut hair. She carried the sword Dragonrubyfire. She had +2 charisma and +4 resilience.”

[Frylock]

@Lama_Pacos

I can’t imagine skipping over all the description; for me, that’s part of what distinguishes a novel from an instruction manual. If a writer can’t write well enough to make description interesting, I’m going to skip the book.

Part of my problem is, it is difficult for me to imagine an interesting physical description, no matter how good a writer the description’s author may be.

I am not claiming it’s impossible, just stating I can’t imagine a thing like that.

What makes a physical description interesting? Can you point me to some examples?

-FrL-

[WhyNot]

@Frylock

What makes a physical description interesting? Can you point me to some examples?

If you took a couple of David Bowies and stuck one of the David Bowies on the top of the other David Bowie, then attached another David Bowie to the end of each of the arms of the upper of the first two David Bowies and wrapped the whole business up in a dirty beach robe you would then have something which didn’t exactly look like John Watson, but which those who knew him would find hauntingly familiar. John “Wonko The Sane” Watson is tall and gangly.

He lives in an inside-out house overlooking the Pacific Ocean. That is, to visit you park on the carpet. There’s a sign on the wall that reads, “Come Outside.” He considers the rest of the world to be “The Asylum,” because it seemed to him that any civilization that had so far lost its head as to need to include a set of detailed instructions for use in a package of toothpicks was no longer a civilization in which he could live and stay sane.

— Douglas Adams, So Long And Thanks For All The Fish

Okay, it’s not Shakespeare. But I read that over 15 years ago, and for a decade and a half, it’s wandered through my subconscious, and occasionally surfaces to leave me grinning like an idiot at quiet moments. It’s complete and utter nonsense, and yet wonderfully descriptive at the same time.

[MandaJo]

@Frylock

Part of my problem is, it is difficult for me to imagine an interesting physical description, no matter how good a writer the description’s author may be.

I am not claiming it’s impossible, just stating I can’t imagine a thing like that.

What makes a physical description interesting? Can you point me to some examples?

-FrL-

@Mark Twain in Huck Finn

Pap was agoing on so he never noticed where his old limber legs was taking him to, so he went head over heels over the tub of salt pork and barked both shins, and the rest of his speech was all the hottest kind of language–mostly hove at the nigger and the govment, though he give the tub some, too, all along, here and there. He hopped around the cabin considerable, first on one leg and then on the other, holding first one shin and then the other one, and at last he let out with his left foot all of a sudden and fetched the tub a rattling kick. But it warn’t good judgment, because that was the boot that had a couple of his toes leaking out of the front end of it; so now he raised a howl that fairly made a body’s hair raise, and down he went in the dirt, and rolled there, and held his toes; and the cussing he done then laid over anything he had ever done previous. He said so his own self afterwards. He had heard old Sowberry Hagan in his best days, and he said it laid over him, too; but I reckon that was sort of piling it on, maybe.

Physical comedy is funny. Alternately:

@Stephen Crane

She went into the blackness of the final block. The shutters of the tall buildings were closed liked grim lips. The structures seemed to have eyes that looked over her, beyond her, at other things. Afar off the lights of the avenues glittered as if from an impossible distance. Street-car bells jingled with a sound of merriment.

When almost to the river the girl saw a great figure. On going forward she perceived it to be a huge fat man in torn and greasy garments. His grey hair straggled down over his forehead. His small, bleared eyes, sparkling from amidst great rolls of red fat, swept eagerly over the girl’s upturned face. He laughed, his brown, disordered teeth gleaming under a grey, grizzled moustache from which beer-drops dripped. His whole body gently quivered and shook like that of a dead jelly fish. Chuckling and leering, he followed the girl of the crimson legions.

At their feet the river appeared a deathly black hue. Some hidden factory sent up a yellow glare, that lit for a moment the waters lapping oilily against timbers. The varied sounds of life, made joyous by distance and seeming unapproachableness, came faintly and died away to a silence.