Book Review

Book: Word Painting: A Guide to Writing More Descriptively by Rebecca McClanahan

This book was both really good and really bad. I was immediately turned off by the overly-flowery language that she insisted on using through the entire book (although it did instill in me that purple prose is not descriptive prose). I also felt that she used an incessant amount of repetition that made this book a hard one to get through. And I vehemently disagreed with her idea that shorter sentences and paragraphs slow things down--they absolutely do not! They speed things up like a punch, punch, punch. Anyway, despite these seemingly insurmountable complaints, I finished the book! And here is what I learned:

• Avoid adjectives that label or explain. They are not description.
• Use active, vivid prose.
• Description isn't optional if you want a story to sell, or be read!
• "Description isn't something that we simply insert, block style, into passages of narration or exposition... the term passage suggests a channel, a movement from one place to another; it implies that we're going somewhere."
• Words to avoid like just, was, that, etc.
• Figures of speech and what they actually are in a handy-dandy list; although I have a degree in English I always confuse the various types of figures of speech.
• 9 out of 10 exercises in a writing book are stupid and a waste of time, but that 10th one might just give you an amazing idea for a part of your book that you were stuck on.
• A refresher course on point-of-view and the ways that each one can limit your description or expand upon it. Very helpful if you're writing in a POV you haven't really used before.
• "The difference between activity and action is the difference between running on a treadmill and running in a race." Very good to note.
• Various ways to increase tension using description.
• The difference between tension and suspense.
• You can't write description for descriptions sake, it needs to add to the story. (Like a line from one of my favorite movies, "it must contribute, it cannot simply lie around.")
• You can't describe something or someone once and expect the reader to remember; it's better to give descriptions gradually over time so they can build on their image of the person, place or thing.
• Theme in a story comes organically, but can be greatly increased by use of appropriate description.
• Last, but not least, don't lose sight of the big picture by focusing on little details that don't matter.