Craft discussion uses “description”, “imagery”, “detail”, “symbol” and “setting” almost interchangeably. They name units of different sizes that fail in different ways, so the chapter separates them before using them.
The working definition
A descriptive detail is a concrete, specific unit of sensory or physical information, chosen from an indefinitely large set of equally true alternatives that go unmentioned, and included because it does work beyond accuracy.
Each phrase of the definition does work. Concrete and specific rules out judgements: the room was messy is a verdict that withholds its evidence, whereas three coffee mugs, none finished, ringed the base of the lamp is a detail, countable and particular, doing the work the verdict only asserted. The workshop slogan for this is show, don’t tell; it is more useful as a rule about where the inference happens. A detail leaves the inference to the reader, and a judgement performs it and hands over the result. Chosen from alternatives that go unmentioned is the centre of the definition: a detail’s meaning is partly made by what was not said, which is the ground against which the reader sees the figure. Sensory or physical restricts the subject to the perceptible; a reported thought may be characterisation, and a summary of someone’s finances is exposition, but the state of their shoes is description. Work beyond accuracy is the purposive clause on which the taxonomy rests, and the one the chapter later complicates.
Scale
The unit stretches from a single modifier to a whole chapter, and its typical failure changes with its size: modifiers pile up, a named object decorates, a detail sentence goes generic, a paragraph becomes an unselected list, and a set piece or a descriptive chapter halts the story for the author’s knowledge rather than anyone’s need.
Gérard Genette, the French narratologist whose terms for narrative time are developed in The Transition (Chapter 5), calls the largest of these a descriptive pause: discourse during which story time does not move. The term gives description its price. A detail embedded in a moving sentence is nearly free, while a paragraph in which nothing happens but looking is paid for out of the reader’s forward motion and must return more than it costs. This chapter takes the detail sentence as its working unit, since that is the scale at which a choice is visible and can be revised.
Description is not imagery
The confusion that costs most in revision is between description and imagery, because it puts a question about beauty in place of a question about function. Imagery is the sensory and figurative texture of the prose, what the language does to the reader’s senses. Description is an operation in the narrative: supplying information about the represented world. A page of metaphor can be rich in imagery and tell the reader nothing about the room, and an inventory can be dense with description and contain no imagery at all. The two are assessed separately, and a draft failing at one is often praised for the other. Hence a working rule: when a reader says a passage is beautifully described, ask what they now know. Nor is description the same as setting, which is a kind of content, since a face or a meal can be described as readily as a place.
Adjacent terms
The terms below recur through the chapter. Each names something next to the detail rather than the detail itself.
| Term | Meaning | Relation to the detail |
|---|---|---|
| Image | A sensory impression produced by language | The effect; the detail is the choice that produces it |
| Symbol | An object that stands for an abstraction | One possible implication, rarer than writers assume |
| Motif | A detail repeated with variation until the repetition signifies | A detail extended through time |
| Metonymy, synecdoche | Naming a thing by something associated with it; naming a whole by a part | Two descriptive strategies |
| Ekphrasis | Extended description of a made object, often a work of art (Greek, “speaking out”) | The set piece in its oldest form |
| Focalisation | Genette’s term for who perceives, as distinct from who speaks | Decides whose selection a detail is |
| Objective correlative | T. S. Eliot’s term (1919) for a set of objects or events that formulates a particular emotion | The best-known statement of what theme asks of a detail |
Symbol, motif and ekphrasis are special cases; treating them as the norm is how description becomes over-managed.
What the chapter leaves to others
Exposition delivered as description appears here only as a failure; how antecedent information should be distributed is Backstory and Flashback’s subject (Chapter 7). The use of a descriptive pause to slow a sequence before a shock belongs to The Transition (Chapter 5), which owns the measures of narrative speed. The opening page, where no detail is read as neutral, belongs to The Opening Pages (Chapter 9). Gesture around speech belongs to The Dialogue Exchange (Chapter 3), and questions about which character’s perceptions a chapter can report belong to The Viewpoint Shift (Chapter 13). Prose rhythm is not treated anywhere in this chapter: it matters, and it is a different subject.
See also: the Reference definitions, with the scale table and a fuller list of adjacent terms.