Fake mouldings, potted palms

Last week, I wrote a ‘Pears, walnuts, blue cheese’ email, the gist of which was that if you need to characterise a minor character fast, you just choose a very small handful of ingredients – three or four. You lay those in front of your reader. Then move on.

I illustrated the notion with a very short – 200 word – scene that characterised a woman (Marianna) by calling attention to:

• The room (luxurious and aesthetically considered)
• Her appearance (slim and aesthetically considered)
• Her politeness
• The hollowness of that politeness – the real relationship here is that of master/servant, with Marianna very much in the former role

The scene, obviously, gets its zing from the contrast between the third and fourth bullet points there, but I did also say that you can apply the same basic technique to pretty much anything, including scene description.

To prove it, let’s take this really tiny description (from the same book, This Thing of Darkness.)

I meet Carolyn Sharma, Livesey’s fiancée. We meet in the lobby of my hotel, drink coffee, decaf in my case. The hotel is nice. Cheap, of course – police budgets aren’t designed to support long haul travel – but nice. The lobby is black and white and a soft coffee-tinted cream. Fake colonial mouldings and potted palms. Sharma wears khaki shorts, boat shoes, and a blue linen shirt, the colour of the sky.

That’s 70 words long. The first sentence is just a statement about what’s happening: it’s not a description of anything. The second sentence just says where we are: again, it’s not actually descriptive. Then there are 35 words from “the hotel is nice” to “potted palms” which do constitute description, before the paragraph ends by turning its attention to the person again.

There’s terribly little there. If we unpack it, we have:

• Nice
• Cheap
• Colours (black, white and coffee-tinted cream)
• Colonial mouldings
• Potted palms

There’s no real zing in that description, the way there was with the one of Marianna.

It’s easy to think that must be bad. (“No zing? But that means you’ve just bored the reader with some pedestrian text. Shouldn’t everything be zingy? Where’s my zing?”)

On the other hand, this is 35 words in a 115,000 word book. And whereas, in the Marianna scene from last week, it did matter who Marianna was, here it truly doesn’t matter where Fiona and Sharma meet. We’re not going to be in this place again. Nothing really consequential happens here. They happen to meet in a hotel lobby, but could meet in a sitting room, or a coffee shop or, indeed anywhere.

But the reader still needs something. Suppose the scene ran like this:

I meet Carolyn Sharma, Livesey’s fiancée. We meet in the lobby of my hotel, drink coffee, decaf in my case. The hotel is cheap but nice. Sharma wears khaki shorts, boat shoes, and a blue linen shirt, the colour of the sky.

You could, in theory, run the rest of the scene from that introduction, but the effect would be placeless – absent – unreal.

In a way, you could argue that that shouldn’t matter. The key here is the conversation between Fiona and Sharma, nothing to do with where they met. But placelessness affects everything. If the reader doesn’t feel themself to be in a real place, everything that follows will be drained of reality Our manuscript assessment team sometimes get manuscripts like that – entire books that almost seem to be set in a blank white room. Those books always fail because they never fully engage the reader. You have to encourage the reader to get on the train before the train can move them anywhere.

So this tiny little description of mine scatters just enough ingredients to give that air of reality. Cheap-but-nice hotel lobby. Black, white, cream. Fake mouldings, potted palms. That’s enough to ground the reader, to give them some sense of real people in a real place. And that – for in inconsequential scene like this – is all you need.

My description, please note, follows the “three or four ingredients” rule economically, then exits. Bingo.

Incidentally, it’s also worth addressing a concern that afflicts a lot of writers (and not only amateurs.) Writers often think, “If I’m describing something, doesn’t my description have to be, you know, useful?”

And the answer to that is no. My little scene offers almost nothing of value to someone actually wanting to visualise the room, in the sense of finding it on a map, sketching a rough layout, or anything else. The hotel I’m describing is in Norfolk, Virginia, but I don’t:

• Say where in the town it is
• What the street view outside is like
• Where the hotel reception is or what it looks like
• Whether there are sofas or chairs or beanbags or tables or nothing at all
• Whether it’s busy or not busy
• What’s black, what’s white, what’s coffee-coloured

And so on. If you were trying to specify a location for an actual human to find and identify, you’d have to supply those details – but you aren’t and you don’t. It doesn’t matter how much you leave out. The more, the better. You can ignore the practical elements of your description almost completely.

So for really simple, boring, don’t-matter-at-all descriptions, I think you can use the three to four ingredient rule and be done with it.

Where you want a bit more of an emotional flavour to the description, then you use the same technique – but throw in a bit more zing.

Here, for example, is a tiny vignette in a London coffee shop, where Fiona is meeting an expert witness:

‘Who cares, right?’ [says Willans, a telecoms expert]

‘Yes. Who the hell cares?’ [says Fiona.]

All enquiries have their moments like these. That sense that an important truth is here, lurking somewhere in this coffee-scented steam, this pinboard wall flapping with student posters. A truth that might just jump up and settle if only I knew what to ask – and how to recognise it when it arrived.

Again, there’s almost nothing descriptive there, except the bold-highlighted elements both suggest something confusing and hard to see. Steam blurs things. If it’s coffee-scented than that’s somehow a sideways pull on your attention. A pinboard wall flapping with posters means that any individual element is hard to pick out and understand.

Partly that hard-to-see theme reflects the current murkiness of the enquiry. But it also reflects Fiona herself – her always fragile mental health, a theme that recurs at the end of the scene.

Note though that the three or four ingredients rule is still doing its stuff: coffee + steam + notices on a pinboard.

Note too that I’ve still told you very little about the coffee shop. (How many tables? How busy? View outside? Size?) The little bits I’ve given the reader are enough to make the scene rooted, not placeless.

Finally note that your zing – the little bit of remarkable – can come from anywhere. Last week, it came from the clash between surface politeness and no real politeness at all. This week it arose by offering descriptors that both referenced visual confusion – mirroring both the investigation and Fiona’s headspace.

The sweet joy of writing is its extraordinary versatility. Metaphor and meaning are scrambling to get into your manuscript at every pore. Your job is just to marshal the sluice gets to determine what does and does not get admittance.

Pears, walnuts, blue cheese: it’s the formula that keeps giving.