All language subtitles for MasterClass Neil Gaiman Teaches The Art of Storytelling - 12Descriptions

I remember Stephen King once said to me

that Amy Tan grumbled to him

that when writers get interviewed, the

one thing they don't ask us about is the

words. And the words are the most

important things that we have. The words

are what we're doing everything with. If

you're writing a novel, you're going to

have to use 70,000 of them, 100,000,

200,000 of them. So, in the next class,

we're going to talk about words. We're

going to talk about language and all of

the things you can do with it. We're

going to talk about humor. We're going

to talk about world building. All as

things that you can do with words.

I do not hold with anybody who says no

exposition, no description.

You describe what needs to be described.

You explain what needs to be explained.

You are God. When you are writing, you

are absolutely in charge. You can do

whatever you like. There are no rules

other than tell a great story, tell it

as best you can. But there is an

enormous pleasure to just telling. And

sometimes you can describe places. Let's

see. Uh,

in Neverware, what I was doing was

describing a world and the world of

London below was as much of a character

as any of the characters in the book.

So, one of the things that I loved doing

was describing places

and describing people and trying to make

them

vivid, trying to make the imagery vivid

in your head. I might not actually

describe what somebody would look like,

but I would paint a picture that would

get you as a reader to imagine what they

look like. Um, for example,

fashion in bodyguards seemed to be

everything. They all had a knack of one

kind or another, and each of them was

desperate to demonstrate it to the

world. At this moment, Riseip was facing

off against the fop with no name.

The fop with no name looked somewhat

like an early 18th century rake, one who

hadn't been able to find real rake

clothes and had to make do with what he

could find at the Oxfam shop. His face

was powdered to white, his lips painted

red. Rise, the Fox opponent, looked like

the kind of dream one might have if one

fell asleep watching sumo wrestling on

the television with a Bob Marley record

playing in the background. He was a huge

Rastaparian who looked like nothing so

much as an obese and enormous baby. They

were standing face to face in the middle

of a cleared circle of spectators and

other bodyguards and sightseers. Neither

man moved a muscle. The fop was a good

head taller than Riceip. On the other

hand, Riceip weighed as much as four

fops, each of them carrying a large

leather suitcase entirely filled with

lard. They stared at each other without

breaking eye contact.

That's a way of describing people.

On the other hand,

this is a description

of a city and it's a description of a

familiar city.

3 years in London had not changed

Richard, although it had changed the way

he perceived the city. Richard had

originally imagined London as a gray

city, even a black city from the

pictures he had seen, and was surprised

to find it filled with color. It was a

city of red brick and white stone, red

buses, and large black taxis, which were

often, to Richard's initial puzzlement,

gold or green or maroon, bright red post

boxes, and green grassy parks and

cemeteries. It was a city in which the

very old and the awkwardly new jostled

each other, not uncomfortably, but

without respect. A city of shops and

offices and restaurants and homes, of

parks and churches, of ignored monuments

and remarkably unpalatial palaces. A

city of hundreds of districts with

strange names. Crouch End, Chalk Farm,

Ears Court, Marble Arch, and oddly

distinct identities. A noisy, dirty,

cheerful, troubled city which fed on

tourists, needed them as it despised

them, in which the average speed of

transportation through the city had not

increased in 300 years following 500

years of fitful road widening and

unskillful compromises between the needs

of traffic, whether horsedrawn or more

recently motorized, and the needs of

pedestrians. a city inhabited by and

teameming with people of every color and

manner and kind.

And that's the kind of place where you

just go, "Yeah, I'm going to describe

it." There's no reason not to. There's

no reason to

show don't tell, whatever that actually

means. When you want to tell somebody

what a city looks like, tell them.

Why show it? Why not just tell? It's a

lovely scene setting and it sets up a

place in which the story is going to

occur.

So for description

what I try and do

is I will scene set I'll set a scene for

people. I'll describe a person. I'll

describe a gate. I'll describe a grave.

But what I will do is assume that people

generally know

what a tree looks like, what a house

looks like, what a door looks like. So

what I'll try and tell them while I'm

describing

is what makes this a little different?

What makes this memorable?

And

it doesn't have to be very big.

It can be a fairly small image,

but it can be a tree that looks like a

clutching hand trying to grab the

clouds.

And suddenly you know why that tree is

different to all the other trees

and it evokes emotion.

And that's the other lovely thing that

you can do if you can with description

is do more than one thing at the same

time.

Um,

I used to be spoiled

because when I would write comics, I

would just describe what we were seeing

to an artist and tell them to draw that

thing. In pros,

you have to be more evocative.

When you're writing a description, um,

the most important thing is to find

something. Find one thing that is

memorable, one thing that's important,

one thing that's different.

And then look at that using a sense. It

may be touch. It may be smell. Smell is

often ignored in writing and smell in

the real world is subliminal, rolling,

evocative and very very likely to take

you to very strange places. It can be

taste, it can be touch. You you need to

invoke whatever is going to be

strongest. And it's not just the way

that something looks. Something looks is

always it's always useful. It's always

important. Um but sometimes how it feels

can be much much more powerful.

In Coraline,

I have Coraline

going through a tunnel, a weird kind of

little tunnel to get from the world that

she's used to. She's opened a door that

normally opens onto a brick wall and now

it doesn't. There's a passage.

And

let's see.

Here's a little bit in Coraline.

Coraline turned her back on the door and

began to run as fast as was practical

through the dark corridor, running her

hand along the wall to make sure she

didn't bump into anything or get turned

around in the darkness. It was an uphill

run, and it seemed to her that it went

on for a longer distance than anything

could possibly go. The wall she was

touching felt warm and yielding now, and

she realized it felt as if it were

covered in a fine downy fur. It moved as

if it were taking a breath. She snatched

her hand away from it. Winds howled in

the dark.

She was scared she would bump into

something, and she put out her hand for

the wall once more. This time what she

touched felt hot and wet as if she had

put her hand in somebody's mouth and she

pulled it back with a small whale.

And it's the kind of moment where touch

suddenly becomes the only sense that

matters. And a moment like that where

you're touching something warm and wet

um is the stuff of nightmares.