Description is not an innate talent. Just like in the visual arts, there are literary techniques that are used to create the desired effect. You might be using them unconsciously, or perhaps the problem is that you’re not using them at all.

When crafting an image, you’re probably trying to evoke a mood in the reader—a sense of wonder, grief, whimsy—and the worst thing you can do is tell them what you want them to feel by relying heavily on abstract words like sadness, joy, or frustration. For one thing, it creates a sense of distance from the narrator. If the character is feeling something but the reader doesn’t, it takes the reader out of the narrator’s head, reminds them that they’re actually sitting there reading a book. That’s not what we want. We want to create an immersive experience.

Abstract language could actually lead to the reader resisting the emotional experience of the narrator. If the reader believes they’re expected to feel pity, for example, the reaction is likely to become contempt instead. Think about it this way, abstract language is somewhat manipulative. You’re telling me how you want me to feel, instead of doing the work to produce something that makes me feel that way. As a placeholder in the first draft, that works just fine. But ultimately, doing that work is the writer’s job, not the reader’s.

Abstract language also limits creativity. If you put a perfectly good word there that gets the point across, you’re not reaching for the limits of your skills, experiences, or vocabulary. Trying to evoke a specific mood without using emotion words (sad, grief, frustration, rage) forces you to make an effort, and that effort usually produces a greater effect.

This is not to say that abstract language has no place. It is very useful to the writer, as you plan a scene or try to figure out what the character should be feeling right now. But it’s the machinery behind the curtain. You don’t let the audience see the pipes and gears that make the spectacle work.

As the writer, you take that machinery and you build around it, making it more complex so that the audience is dazzled instead of underwhelmed. Suppose you have a common scenario in fiction; someone has died. Your character is sad. So what? The dead person is imaginary. So is the grieving character. How do we make a real, breathing person care about a few wisps of thought that emerged from the brain of someone they don’t even know? It doesn’t get much more abstract than that.

You do this using the circumstances of the plot, and the style and details of the prose. Let’s try an exercise.

Step 1: Establish Mood Based on Plot Circumstances.

In most fiction, the mood is determined by the circumstances of the plot. Someone has died at this beat in the story, therefore, the character is sad. More specifically, the character is grieving.

Step 2: Flesh Out the Scene with Specificity and Detail.

How do we evoke grief for not just the character, but the reader, through the circumstances of the plot? Let’s flesh out the scene.

• Someone has died and the character is sad.
• The character’s child has died.
• The father comes home from the hospital and finds his child’s dirty dish on the counter.
• The father comes home from the hospital and finds his eleven-year-old daughter’s sandwich knife hanging over the sink, in case she wanted to make another snack later.

Compared to the first example, the last is more compelling, but these are still dry circumstances unmarried to prose. It’s annoying to rely on the circumstances to do the job for you. It feels grating—you know I’m trying to make you sad, but you don’t know these people. In fact, they don’t even exist. Why should you be sad about an imaginary eleven-year-old or her imaginary father? It’s not enough to present a scenario, it has to be an immersive experience to pull the reader in.

Step 3: Use Language and Prose Style to Evoke Emotion

Marcus’s fingers trembled as he inserted the house key into his door. He didn’t remember the drive home, and wasn’t looking forward to stepping inside, where he would undoubtedly see toys that would never be used again, unfinished homework, and other detritus left behind by a happy hurricane girl.

He took a deep breath and braced himself the way he usually did, with an orderly list of things he had to do. Things he could control.

1. 1. Pick up Chloe’s toys and put them away, so they wouldn’t upset him.
   2. Find a nearby funeral home and call to make arrangements.
      • He didn’t know what “arrangements” were. He assumed that he and Maggie would need to make a decision about cremation or burial.
   3. Call Emily’s mother—Valerie?—so that she could tell Emily. He would need to track down her number. Maybe Maggie had it.
      • Text Maggie to get Valerie’s number.
   4. Call the school to let them know.

He made it through the first few items on the list. The soft fur of stuffed animals crumpled around his fingers as he picked them up, markers clattered into a cardboard box, and a tiny silver charm bracelet glinted in the corner of his eye on the end table, but he didn’t flinch, didn’t break down.

Marcus felt like a ghost on the phone, listening in vague astonishment to the steadiness of his voice as he said things like “My daughter has passed away,” and “Thank you, Valerie. We’ll let you know when we pick a date.”

To call the school, he needed the number on the side of the refrigerator, so he crossed into the kitchen.

He’d just dialed when he saw Chloe’s butterknife set precariously at an angle over the sink, in case she wanted to make another peanut butter and honey sandwich. She was a fiend for peanut butter, and it was the only snack she made for herself. Marcus remembered her at age four, with short, spiky brown hedgehog hair and sparkling eyes. She was grinning unrepentantly in the sunlight, peanut butter all over her face. She had never really stopped moving, almost vibrating with energy even when sitting down. It made her seem larger than she really was.

This afternoon, she’d been still and small under the blue cotton hospital blanket. Her neck was enveloped in a plastic neck brace, the blue of the padding much darker than her blanket. Her cheeks were swollen, discolored red with new bruising, and the left temple held a sudden, jarring divot that never should have been there. 

Now Marcus flinched, now he felt himself breaking into a thousand tiny pieces, the way he had when the doctor told them she was brain damaged, the way he had when he said there was nothing more they could do for her. He hadn’t known, before that, that you could shatter twice, three times, during a single conversation. 

“Hello,” a brisk voice said in his ear, “this Ava Barnes at Pine Hills Elementary School, how can I help you?”

“You can’t,” Marcus said hoarsely. His cell phone slipped through his fingers, and it shattered, too.

 

Hopefully that serves as an example, because to be honest, I cried a few times while writing it and I would hate for all that to go to waste. Here are a few of the techniques I used to create this effect.

Concrete Language

When you want to create a large emotion, it’s best to start small, and connect it to the physical world as much as possible. We don’t feel emotions because of emotions, we feel them as a reaction to what we perceive. It’s an important intermediate step. 

Everyone remembers the scene from Mulan where they’re walking through a devastated village and she finds the doll. They also showed snow-covered bodies nearby, but the real poignancy of the moment came from the doll. It’s a way of bridging the tragedy of mass death (which tends to feel abstract in narrative), with something small enough to grasp, literally, in your hands.

The opposite of abstract language is concrete language—language that appeals to the senses, using words that we can see, feel, smell, and hear to evoke the desired emotion. Concrete language relies heavily on specificity. You don’t care about a formless, imaginary eleven-year-old, but you might care about one that you can see in your mind’s eye. To see her, though, you need details from the writer.

Escalation and Deescalation

You don’t start at eleven, you build up to it. From his relative state of calm as he opens the door, the reader is able to follow his rise to the emotional climax, pulled along with him. 

Falling tension afterwards is also important. If you cut the reader off at the peak and pick up in the next chapter, the transition will be jarring. The emotions feel unresolved.

Internal Life: Thoughts and Feelings

The character shouldn’t spend time thinking about how sad they are, they should be thinking about certain subjects because they are sad. In my case, the father’s initial thoughts about funeral arrangements are a distraction from his pain. Perhaps your character is willing to consider a path forward that they’d previously dismissed because they feel hopeless, now. Perhaps they’ve been trying to avoid thinking about a previous grief in their life, but it’s all washing over them now because the emotional dam has finally burst.

The character’s regular thought patterns change because of the emotional state. Perhaps their sentences grow longer and more frantic because they’re in pain, or slower and choppier because they don’t have the energy to spare.

Further Reading: Seanan McGuire’s Every Heart a Doorway stands out as an excellent example of image-based literature—she created a death world with pomegranate juice and stillness and pale white dresses. All of the secondary characters have their own world with a strong, unique central image.

Exercise: Choose an abstract mood that you want to evoke in your story. In fantasy and science fiction, we’re often trying to evoke a sense of wonder or whimsy. In romance, we’re probably going for attraction, frustration, or affection.

Write a list of 3-5 abstract circumstances that could support that mood. Perhaps the character is watching a spaceship take off, or walking into a magical marketplace for the first time. Perhaps it’s the first meeting of the character and their love interest, or a scene where they’re in conflict, or the first time the character realizes she loves the romantic interest.

Develop one or two scenarios which strike you as the strongest, using your language skills and prose style. 

What mood is the next scene in your novel trying to evoke?