On Writing #1, Worldbuilding, Descriptions, and Purple Prose.

[bladespark]

This is part of a series I wrote for brony writers, a community that leaned so young at the time that many aspiring authors had barely taken high school English, because they were still in high school. So this series is aimed at the rank newbie, but I think thinking and talking about writing always has value! So I thought I'd share here.




I thought I'd do some blogs talking about writing. I don't have a huge audience, but eh, I still want to talk at whoever is actually reading.

So earlier today I ran across a thread where somebody asks the question:

How much detail is too much detail? Can a novice writer accidentally confuse world building with trivial minutiae that doesn't help the reader? Are those kind of details really all that bad?

Here's my attempt to answer, with examples included:

I think that huge amounts of world building should always go on in the author's head, but if all of that goes down on the page and none of it gets cut, then something is really wrong. What you need to do is know all the details, then choose which to describe, and do it in a manner that furthers the story while you're at it.

So say I'm doing this thing that involves a pegasus visiting a gryphon city. Here's four examples that maybe explain what I think should and shouldn't be done.

1. Too little info.

Jaybird flew into the gryphon's city and landed on the tower that was her destination.

Easy to see why this is boring. What's the city like? What does a pegasus think of it?

2. Too much info.

Jaybird looked down at the city that spread out below her. The gryphon city had been founded approximately two thousand years ago, by a band of gryphons fleeing an ancient disaster since lost to record. The founders had wanted a safe location, so they'd built it on top of a mountain, but over the last two thousand years it had expanded downward and now there were buildings on the valley floor too. Unlike unicorn or earth pony cities, there were no streets, since gryphons flew everywhere, and no ponies lived here. And of course it was entirely unlike the cloud cities that Jaybird knew, gryphons preferred to build on the ground, the homes being echoes of their ancestral dens. The houses were mostly built of stone. The ones on the upper slopes were clad in white marble that shone brightly in the twilight. Lower down were houses of dark granite. Down on the lowest slopes where the poorest gryphons lived there were mud brick houses.

Jaybird noticed all this as she flew over. She also noticed that there were windmills everywhere, turning in the constant breeze. These windmills powered a variety of crude machinery that helped the gryphons do things like pound paper pulp, pump water, saw wood for furniture, and so on.

Of course the age of the city meant that it had been founded pre-cataclysm, so the gryphons had been incredibly lucky that their city was still standing and habitable when all was said and done. In those long ago days gryphons and ponies had been allies. A gryphon might even attend a pony flight school, or compete in pony sporting events. These days the situation was very different. Gryphons and ponies had a wary peace these days. As Jaybird landed on the tower that was her destination she hoped that the peace held. She had never met a gryphon before, after all.

Do we need to know what the windmills do? Do we need to know all about the different kinds of buildings, and when the city was founded? And how on earth does this pony know that a thousand years ago gryphons went to pony flight school? I can dribble out a little more of this information as the story goes on, but just cramming it into a big info dump is a very bad habit that a lot of people (including me at times) need to break themselves of.

3. Purple prose

The cerulean mare spread her bedecked wings as she soared over the city, which spread its buildings in alien splendor below her. The sight that greeted her golden-hued eyes was strange, bedazzling, and entirely unlike anything she knew, for this city was not the cotton-walled cloud city of her own high-flying pegasus race, no, not at all. Nor was this city like that of the ground living unicorns which she had visited in recent memory. And how that memory gnawed at her yet, it was painful to think on what evils had befallen her there! But no, this city had no streets at all, no lanes down which one could wander, no roads over which traffic flowed.

It was painful to try and write that, so I am ending it early. >.< But you get the idea. The occasional bit of pretty metaphor is fine, rambling on and on in flowery language gets to be a bit much.

4. How I'd actually write it.

Jaybird looked down at the alien city that spread out below her. It wasn't like a pegasus cloud city, since it was built on the ground. It also wasn't like a unicorn city for there were no streets. What there were, however, were hundreds of windmills, mixed in with houses of varying shapes and sizes, that spread from the mountain's peak down to the valley floor.

She approached the weathered, ancient tower that was her destination, hoping that all would go well. She'd never met a gryphon before so she didn't know what to expect.

There. A dash of the info from the infodump, one tiny pinch of the purple prose (the word "alien"), something more than just a bland "And then the pony did X" but still to the point enough to not bore the reader.

Comments

[duskpeterson]

While I understand the point you're trying to make concerning flowery language, I think you should take into account the variety of stylistic approaches, and how different types of style appeal to different types of readers. Here are passages from two fantasy novelists. I'd argue that both of these are good writers, despite their vast difference in stylistic approach.

"When the moon rises higher, the shadow is lost. The white radiance trickles down the wall and makes pools on the coverlet, and then at last it reaches my sword lying beside me - they laid it there because they said I was restless when it was not ready to my hand - and a spurt, a pinpoint, of blazing violet light wakes far, far down in the dark heart of Maximus’s great amethyst set into the pommel. Then the moonlight passes, and the narrow cell is cobweb gray, and the star in the heart of the amethyst sleeps again; sleeps . . ." --Rosemary Sutcliff: "Sword at Sunset."

"He was short, just as his father had been, and stocky. His hair was a dark gold color and curled around his ears. It would have looked effeminate on anyone else. It probably endeared him to his mother when he was a child, but there was nothing endearing about him now. My hair was pulling free of my head, and I was standing on the tips of my toes to relieve the strain. I put both hands on top of his, tried to push the hand down, and found myself hanging entirely off the ground." --Megan Whalen Turner: "The Thief."

Dusk (who has been known to use the words "cerulean" and "bejewelled" at the appropriate moments)

[bladespark]

Heee. Yeah, no, if I wrote this today I'd probably say it a little differently. There is definitely room for style, and some things are flowery on purpose. Hell, I've done that myself. And had an editor get bitchy at me about it. (Didn't go forward with them, obviously, they were wrong for that story.)

[duskpeterson]

Oh, I should have taken into account this was an older essay!