Editing for Atmosphere

I am, like most writers, a weird pretzel of an overwriter and an underwriter depending on the circumstance. When I’m trying to hammer a scene into shape, my prose tends towards the simplistic, or the ‘windowpane,’ though I often include too much of my thought process (or my character’s though process, or worldbuilding, or dialogue, or…).

One place I tend to cut close to the bone is in physical description — especially early in a story, especially when I’m drafting. Glossing through descriptions and throwing in ‘basic’ placeholders allows me to get into the meat of scenes more quickly, which is particularly important in the early days when I’m trying to get into gear on a project. I get into trouble, though, when those ‘basic’ descriptions become so ingrained in my memory that I stop seeing them for what they are: 2D renderings of something that ought to eventually be painted in 3D color.

I’d consider my descriptive writing to be among my weakest points, and in general, I don’t find my prose to be particularly evocative or beautiful. This is something I’m working on, but hooboy does it take time! To that end, though, I’d like to show you some of the progress I’ve been making in my writing and how I’ve started training myself to make it.

While combing back through the first few chapters of my new WIP Salt, Steel, Silk, I identified important moments of description (of character or setting) by highlighting them. Then, once all of my description was picked out to be easily found, I put my own writing away and started grabbing books from my shelf.

I read through some of my favorite descriptive passages from authors I admire to get the flow of prose I’d like to emulate in my head. For this particular exercise, I decided I wanted to get some very specific writing advice in my head, so I searched for videos that read comparisons between weaker / barer bones prose and stronger or more evocative prose. I happened upon a fantastic TikTok comparing the writing of Sarah J. Maas and Rachel Gillig. This was a particularly helpful video for me, because while my writing in general doesn’t read like Maas (I don’t write characters like her, I don’t write interiority like her, and in particular my action and dialogue scenes are markedly different), my descriptive prose absolutely reads like Maas, which is something I’d ideally like to avoid.

(As the above creator says: nuance alert! If you love Maas, that’s fine. I don’t, but even her fans would likely agree that, while her sentence-level craft makes her work digestible, it isn’t one of her greater narrative strengths. As a result, it isn’t an element of her storytelling that I would like to emulate.)

My favorite thing about comparative resources like the video above is how it highlights what kind of tiny, nuanced details a writer like Gillig pulls out of the story in order to create an immersive sense of place. After watching the video several times through, I felt like I was ready to tackle the largest / chonkiest descriptive passage in my WIP thus far.

While I was making my edits, I tried to keep the following things in mind:

• How does the protag feel about the location?
• What’s about to happen in this location?
• What kind of history does he have in this location?
• What time of day is it, and how does the time of day / temperature / other changeable elements of the environment impact his experience of the location?
• What unique sounds, sights, and smells might he encounter as he enters?
• What’s so interesting or unique about this location, and how can I pull upon those sensory details in order to better ground the reader?

Though I often have a vague list of running questions of ^that general variety in my head when I’m writing the rough draft of a description, my rougher drafts almost always feel like shorthand; I state general facts instead of evoking specific imagery, and my attempts to pin down specific imagery tend to get a little stilted or wobbly.

Additionally, I kept a few other prose-level concerns in mind:

• Am I adding distance between the reader and the protag by inserting filtering phrases?
• Am I blending interiority and description, or does my switching tend to happen in blocks?
• Am I varying the feel, length, and style of my sentences in order to promote better narrative flow?
• Am I using specific words and generating specific images, or is my phrasing more general? Similarly, am I zooming in and zooming out of important details as needed, or is my zoom lens getting stuck?
• Naturally, I know what the protag is thinking and what he’s trying to say, but how well is that line of logic getting communicated to the reader?

To put it mildly, this is a heck-ton of stuff to keep in mind while combing through a single page of writing. But if I let myself gloss through these moments without giving them enough thought, I suspect my craft will never level up to where I’d like it to be.

I hope that taking a look at my thought process might help those of you who are struggling with descriptive writing in your own work, not by holding my process as an exemplar, but because it might help you figure out what questions to ask yourself about your own writing.

If you’re interested in getting a look at the original and edited excerpts I’ve described above, you can find them in the full version of this post on my Patreon. I gate longform content like this at the AuthorShip+ tiers, so if you’re interested in craft of writing content (and videos, and the opportunity to AMA in the discord server), consider becoming part of the crew!

Thanks for stopping by, and as always, happy writing!