Addendum

Maybe they have such integrity that they refuse to find terrestrial substitutes for ingredients which will be discovered only in the distant future.

The Missing Element in Science Fiction

There must be one somewhere, but I've never read any science fiction that Redwall's it up with lengthy feast descriptions. Don't these authors want to sell cookbooks?

Getting on the Wagon

How can books leech off the continuing success of open-world games? The answer is simple: Lengthy tower-climbing segments followed by even longer descriptions of everything in the vicinity. People love that stuff, no matter what was said in your fiction workshop.

Neo-Ludditism

There's going to be a lot of resistance to a function that examines the reader's data in changes descriptions of the main character to match it, but we just have to get used to it.

The Spirit of the Month

It's January, and you know what that means. You have to describe a scene depicted on a door in the story you're writing. It doesn't have to be relevant to the plot, themes, or setting of the story so long as it gets the reader to imagine your characters standing there for an hour looking at it while the page tries to shove them in to see the king or whatever.

Character Description Reminder

Don't forget you can describe how loud different characters sneeze. But you probably shouldn't. Mostly.

Addendum

You can use "unprepossessing" too, but your main character had better be a priest who solves crimes or something of that sort.

Describing Your Main Character

It's tricky, isn't it? Red hair or fiery red? Flashing eyes, glinting eyes, sparkling eyes, piercing eyes? That's what you might think, but you're wrong. The answer is "heroic." Heroic hair, heroic eyes, a heroic build and heroic height, heroic hands which end in heroic figures. Nobody actually pictures this stuff, they just want to know the guy's role in the story so they know whether to cast Sean Connery or old Sean Connery.

The Quandaries of Fantasy

Every fantasy writer sooner or later runs into the problem of whether he can call Chantilly lace that given that Chantilly is one of our Earth locations. On the one hand, it's a reference to non-fantasy stuff. On the other, so is lots of stuff. Getting hung up on that is like trying to cut off somebody's skin without getting any of the blood. Here are some points to consider.
- Who's the narrator? Even if you have an omniscient third-person thing going on, think about what kinds of references the narrator might make.
- What's the feel of the thing? Does everything have to be contained within the world, creating a sense perhaps of tension or urgency, or is it a breezier sort of story where digressions are allowed?
- Is there another way to communicate the information? Suppose someone has a pretty face and a ponytail, hanging down, a wiggle in her walk and a giggle in her talk. The reader will get the idea.

About Character Descriptions

Bad: "He was wearing leather gloves."
Good: "His leather gloves had spikes coming out of them that glowed with demon poison that dripped to the earth and scarred it forevermore."
Bad: "The man looked to be about twenty-four."
Good: "The man stood among twenty-four corpses, a number the same as his age."
Bad: "Her eyes, one green, one blue, blinked."
Good: "The apocalypse had already begun."