Evocative phrasing makes it easier for readers to imagine your story and builds atmosphere more effectively. In turn, that creates novelty and makes your prose engaging. While there’s a lot of pressure on writers to be creative, that doesn’t mean your description must be spontaneously generated by your subconscious. It’s a craft you practice, like everything else. Let’s go over tips for bringing your description to life.
Use Specific Terms
The more specific your choice of words, the easier it is to imagine what you’re talking about and the more unique your prose becomes.
- “Plate mail” or “chain mail” is more evocative than “armor.”
- A “Volkswagen Beetle” is more evocative than a “car.”
- An “inchworm” is more evocative than a “caterpillar” and definitely more evocative than a “bug.”
The only risk here is getting so niche with your terms that it becomes questionable if your reader (or your viewpoint character) knows them. If you want to include “clematis” instead of “ivy,” the plant will need its own description.
Show as Much as Practical
While there are some limitations, you generally want description to show as much as possible. Look for vague umbrella terms that can be illustrated with more specifics. This will take more words, but it’s usually worth it.
- Meals like “breakfast” are better described as specific foods like “fried ham and sunny-side eggs.”
- Look out for vague and value-laden adjectives. Instead of writing that your character is “beautiful,” write that he has “luminous green eyes under dark lashes.”
- Replace named emotions with body language. Instead of saying a character looks “surprised,” say “their eyes widened” or “her brows lifted.”
You can test whether you’re showing enough or being specific enough by asking “What does [your term or phrase] look like?” If the answer requires any thinking, the descriptor is too vague.
Use Active Verbs
When describing a scene, it’s really easy to use verbs such as “is,” “was,” “were,” “are,” “has,” or “had.” If you have those verbs in your description, you probably want to swap them out for verbs that are more active and flavorful.
- Instead of “There were two couches in the room,” write, “Two couches faced each other across the room.”
- Instead of “Inside the bowl was a pile of glowing stones,” write, “A pile of stones glowed inside the bowl.”
- Instead of “The tree had golden leaves” write, “Golden leaves dangled from the tree’s branches.”
Using active verbs for objects in the environment gives you an opportunity to contrast them or work in their position, such as my example of couches facing each other.
Include Movement
Unless you specifically want to evoke a sense of stillness, avoid making the environment feel static. The world is a living, breathing place, and showing that will make your description feel more immersive. So think about what might be moving, even if it’s only periodic.
- Out in nature, animals can skitter or fly around, insects can circle or swarm, there might be wind or precipitation, the sun and clouds can change position, plants will sway, and water might trickle or run.
- In the city, vehicles of all kinds can be moving down the street, doors might open and close, people may be out and about, and pigeons or crows might be hopping and pecking at crumbs.
- Indoors, lights might flicker, computers can wake up or go to sleep, pets of all kinds may stir, sinks might drip, and fans might be turning.
Including movement is not so essential that you should add a pet only to create a plot hole because no one’s around to take care of it. Simply look for opportunities where movement can be included.
Go Beyond Visuals
Adding some sensory description other than visuals will help you make the environment feel immersive and push you to do something a little different.
- Sounds can help you highlight and emphasize movement. Those flickering lights might be buzzing, and water might run through pipes as someone turns the shower on.
- Including smells means naming what the smell is associated with, such as roses, soil, or the sea. That makes it easy to include potent imagery, similar to metaphors.
- Taste and touch involve direct contact, thoroughly submerging your character in their environment. They are also the least used, so they’ll help your description stand out.
You don’t have to collect all five senses in every bit of description; just avoid writing nothing but visuals.
Use Associations
Word choice isn’t just about literal interpretation or even connotation. The association we have with items is important for building atmosphere. Conversely, using terms with the wrong association can ruin the mood.
- Let’s say someone’s wearing a hat with a feather. A peacock feather suggests they’re dolled up, a swan feather will make them sound elegant, and a robin feather naturally calls Robin Hood to mind.
- A group of people casting a spell might form a star, evoking celestial mysticism. Alternately, the same shape could be compared to a flower, suggesting gentleness and beauty.
- Adding a pull chain to turn on a light or ring a bell can create a darker atmosphere than using a pull string or knob.
Associations are especially important to keep in mind when using metaphors.* Don’t use a metaphor unless the imagery it calls to mind has an association that fits the atmosphere of your scene.
Make Telling Colorful
Occasionally, showing exactly what the viewpoint character perceives isn’t suitable. We might have insufficient language for the expression someone is making, or you may want your viewpoint character to receive a mysterious impression that doesn’t come from an identifiable source. When you need to tell, use metaphor, imagery, and colorful expressions to make the description more specific and evocative.
- If your viewpoint character has a surreal dream, you might write, “My body crystallized into stained glass and then spun like a kaleidoscope.”
- If someone looks “disappointed,” you might write, “It looked like the twinkle in her eyes had been doused by a fire extinguisher.”
- If you want an ancient book to come off as mysterious and creepy, you might write, “The calligraphy wove through my mind, forming inky webs I couldn’t brush away.”
Switch Up Common Words
We can end up using the same words frequently because they reasonably come up a lot in the story. For these common actions and items especially, a spreadsheet of choice words can help you avoid redundancy or find the word that best matches the situation.
Common words vary by story, but they often include:
- Walking and running
- Sitting and standing
- Laughing and smiling
- Trees, grass, and clouds
- Pavement, concrete, and roads
- Couch, tables, and chairs
Don’t twist yourself in a knot trying to call a couch something other than a couch. Just keep an eye out for words you’ve used a lot and consider doing something different.
The more evocative your description is, the fewer words you need to have the same impact. Not only will your description be more entertaining, but your story can move along quicker too.
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Another fun way to make description evocative is to use it to characterise the POV character.
If the POV character describes Jimmy the office worker as “a human with the strangely blunt teeth typical of their species” we know we’re in the head of a nonhuman with sharp teeth.
I have a hard time finding alternative ways of saying ‘smiled’. Or at least finding alternatives that I like. I can only handle using ‘beamed’ or ‘grinned’ maybe once per book.
Thanks for the post – there are a couple things in it that I’m going to pay more attention to in my writing!
Chris, Chainmail is an incorrect term for this type of armour. The correct term is Mail armour.
“Correct” terminology is highly subjective here, but regardless of which dictionary you use (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/chain%20mail), more people will know what you mean if you write “chain mail” than if you use the less descriptive “mail.”
Dictionaries are often to be taken with a grain of salt, I would rather listen to the opinion of experts and they all say Mail Armour, because “Chainmail” is as redundant as “helmet helm”:
https://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/nmt3t9/bitesized_badhistory_dungeons_and_dragons_and/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share
Also I like challenging the views of society, that’s why in my world there would not be an all-powerful Pope ruling over Europe, because it’s nonsensical and fiction needs to be believable.
I’m not saying that you’re not right about the chainmail thing (the German Kettenhemd is different in that aspect), but from a reader’s perspective, people might bail at having new words for an object they know under another one thrown at them.
It, of course, depends on what group of people you write for, but most people will look at a piece of mail armour and think ‘chainmail,’ not ‘mail armour,’ simply because that’s the term used by laypersons for this type of armour. It might not be correct, but that’s what they use. They might have to look up the expression ‘mail armour’ or spend half of the book wondering ‘what the heck is that person wearing?’ Always consider your audience as you write.
The Pope is a completely different thing – social concepts are more malleable in speculative fiction, language isn’t necessarily as well.
Many stories, including even children’s media have done so and it actually helped with its quality. Of course I would always explain in a work what the word means via a knowledgeable character and I do see no reason why it would look weird doing so, unless your smart one is an arrogant fool.
I agree that the Pope thing might not be the best example, I just wanted to emphasize that myths about history need really to be corrected or else we get all the bad witch tropes Oren and others hate so much and not without reason .
Well, if you explain that ‘mail armour’ is the correct expression for ‘chainmail’ early on, everything is fine.
Often, the words we use are not the most precise ones, though, which is why there’s a difference between two or more laypeople discussing a subject and two or more people with experience in the matter doing the same. Sometimes, instead of insisting on a specific expression not used by the majority, it can pay off to simply use the expression which everyone is using anyway.
Using ‘chainmail’ instead of ‘mail armour’ also isn’t exactly a historical myth. The armour exists, even if ‘chainmail’ is a redundant expression for it. The word will still evoke the proper picture in people’s minds. A historical myth would be that all Vikings were Scandinavian or that women did not appear in public in Medieval Germany, for instance.
Hello!
Yeah, I really gotta agree with Cay here, and drawing parallels to either the Pope or to witch hunts really doesn’t make sense. Whether or not calling “chainmail” “mail” is more accurate, it’s hard to see how it makes a social difference either way. Witch hunt tropes are hated because they play into the oppressed mages trope, and historically play into extreme sexism and violence, while the chainmail… well, it just seems like semantics to me, and likening it to these actually significant examples feels disingenuous. There’s no question about whether the thing we call chainmail existed; it’s just a matter of what to call it. You don’t risk perpetuating bad tropes. And if more people understand the word “chainmail,” then you’re sacrificing comprehension by using a slightly different but technically more accurate word, and you risk readers thinking that your character is covered in envelopes.
As a side note, it’s interesting to examine how words have evolved. If the vast majority of people agree that the word “chainmail” refers to the thing you call “mail,” the two might as well be synonyms, regardless of what it was called in the past. Actually, the first use of “chain mail” appears to be from 1789 (https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/296872/who-first-objected-to-the-term-chain-mail). So the word has been around for a while, with these connotations, regardless of whether it’s technically redundant or not.
To me this seems more like an appeal to the masses, just because a lot of people say something it isn’t true. One piece is popular, yet it is one of the worst animes I have ever seen, from its characters to its tropes.
Maybe it is my passion for history, but I still do not like myths or wrong informations of periods, even if they are just some words. By giving readers interesting informations and facts, like the real terminology term for something as an example, you can easily captivate them with texts like these and increase the interest of your audiences for the story, because people like learning new things. That is how lore became one of the most appreciated story elements due to giving people interesting trivia to go after.
Stories don’t always suffer because new or correct words the public never heard of are written there. Some of the best stories are those written by people with a colorful vocabulary.
It’s odd that you argue “appealing to the masses” is a bad thing when it comes to clear language. I’d think it would be best to appeal to the masses there, because that means more people understand you. The masses are your readers, and presumably you want to appeal to them.
And it’s hardly dampening your vocabulary to call that kind of armor “chainmail.” It’s all well and good if you want to teach them that what we call “chainmail” should actually be called “mail,” but scoffing at the idea that anyone would or should use “chainmail” is just rude, and implying that it’s the ignorant masses’ fault our vocabulary isn’t colorful enough is also rude. I don’t care whether or not it’s more true that “chainmail” should be called “mail”; I care that readers might be confused. If you want to call chainmail “mail,” you’re going to have to explain it, and if so, great! But you really can’t fault people for going with the clearer option. And acting like they’re lying or maliciously spreading misinformation (by implying that “mail” is more “true”) seems needlessly aggressive and presumptive.
Yes, it’s always a good idea not to confuse the readers, which is what my comments on chainmail so far were about. It doesn’t hurt anybody to call it ‘chainmail,’ even if it’s not 100% correct.
I write pulp – a way of writing that is for the masses. That means I do not use complicated words just for the sake of them. I try to keep my language simpler, so it flows better and allows for the reader to immerse themselves more easily in my stories. That includes using words for things which are well-known, not showing off my control of the language for the sake of it.
Appealing to the masses can lead to stagnation in creativity and hinder the development of new or better ideas just because the masses don’t like it. The best works were always those who challenged modern convensions like Star Wars in the past. I would use a language everybody would understand, but that doesn’t mean that I can use words that are not well known. Even children Cartoons love throwing academic or complicated terms all the time and they do not suffer from it, it is the opposite.
Also I never implied that writers who use incorrect terms or even false accounts of events are purposefully lying and malicious, that is not what I have been doing here. All I wantd to tell is that the correct term for “Chainmail-armour” is “Mail-armour” and nothing else. I just wanted to correct one small mistake, but Chris and everyone is free to use more well known terms for something and anybody else. I disagree with the use of this word, but I am not going to prohibit anyone from use it, unless we are in an university.
In the end everyone is wrong in their lives at some point in their lives, like when I confused the demon Kali with the Goddess Kali. I do not think people are inherently evil for saying something wrong, I do apologize if this is the case, this was not my intent.
I think it’s time to end it, we are at an impass.
Yes, I agree that we are at an impasse. For the record, I find the history of mail/chainmail pretty interesting, and I had no idea this was a contentious subject, so thanks for sharing. And I agree that challenging conventions is a good thing — but the scale you’re speaking of is challenging entire genres, as with Star Wars, whereas challenging the usage of one word is likelier to leave confusion rather than subversion. I never said you can use words that aren’t well-known, actually I wholly endorse that! I try to sneak in “judder” when I can because it’s a fun and underused word. But I wouldn’t do it in a context that would confuse my readers. Like I said earlier, if you want to explain it, then do! Just know that it will have to be explained, because most people don’t know this (or probably particularly care one way or another).
As a side note way you speak of “the masses” leaves a bad taste in my mouth. There’s something elitist about it, like calling them “sheeple.”
Also the 18th century is gone and was full of bad ideas, we know better what the people in the middle ages did and they were much brighter and lived much brighter lives than what we imagined.
The 18th century was full of awful ideas, but calling that type of armor “chainmail” was not one of them. And frankly comparing those two categories of idea just feels silly.