War of Worldcraft

There came a time in my writerly development when I scorned all form of description. This surfaced from disdain at my own writing, which was hefty, to say the least. Admittedly, I was trying to be Tolkein at age thirteen. I had become attached to (ad nauseam) settings, cultures, feasts. Plot? Who needed plot when the world was so consuming?

I remember the day I first felt description's double-edged sword. I was scanning a particularly wordy passage of Richard Adam's "Watership Down" (still a favorite) and realized how much I was actually skipping. It made me curious. I looked at my work with new eyes. Redundancy, filler words, tangents......the horror instilled in me resolve. Armed with this new consciousness, I began the great Description Holocaust.

The slaughter began. Few adjectives survived. All adverbs lost theirs -ly limbs. Clauses? Ha. Any commas not imperative to sentence structure were stricken. I uprooted flowers, trees, and roads. Without roads, perhaps my characters would finally cease to walk (their primary occupation). Fragments - oh glorious fragments! - reigned. Dialogue policed the nation, breaking up all potentially rabble-ous paragraphs.

But now I pick my way across the battlefield of my manuscript. I hear the ghosts. My characters speak, but out of shapelessness. Where the reader once swam in overbearing details, they now struggle to see the slightest beauty in the shadows.

A treaty must be made. We cannot go on like this, Description. Our lack of compromise will only, like most wars, destroy this precious world we've created.

I will let you have your landscapes and laws and languages and *cringe* roads. Yes, even the roads. But in return, you mustn't let my characters walk on them. Ever. They may run on them, ravage them, or race along them...but never...

So, Description, we shall see where this uneasy peace leads us.