7 Description Mistakes Every New Fantasy Writer Makes

Comments · 841

• JE

  @Jed_Herne · 2 years ago · pinned

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• JE

  @jerrysstories711 · 2 years ago

  I think writers neglect smell, taste, and touch because they&apos;re writing from their movie/TV experience rather than their life experience.

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• XA

  @Xaytan · 2 years ago

  I remember a description of an action scene I read where a barbarian type character was disembowling a guy.<br><br>The writer used extremely clinical, technical terms that told me he had opened up an anatomy book before describing it. Really wanted to show he&apos;d done his homework, I think.<br><br>But that&apos;s not how the PoV character, a savage and ferocious warrior, would think about the act of cutting open another man&apos;s belly and spilling his guts on the cold, thirsty ground.

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• TH

  @TheZetaKai · 2 years ago

  I had initially thought, based on the thumbnail image, that there was something wrong with describing a character with yellow eyes. As a fantasy author currently writing a book with a race of yellow-eyed people, I felt called out. Having seen the video, I can appreciate the difficulty that Jed must&apos;ve experienced choosing a thumbnail for a video topic that is ironically non-visual in nature.

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• MJ

  @MJ.JohnsonBooks · 2 years ago

  Tip 2: Filtering through the narrator was life changing for me.<br>When I began to intentionally run every aspect of my writing thought that lens, it took my story up a level.

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• RA

  @RandomDudeOnYouTude · 2 years ago

  “Now I want you to close your eyes” - I tried while driving in Atlanta traffic but it didn’t go over well.

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• TR

  @tripwire202 · 2 years ago (edited)

  I love that one of my characters is blind and that I&apos;m writing in third person limited. It forces me to get creative and think of more aspects of the world.<br><br>His thoughts are vivid and he explores his world in other ways. Hopefully it doesn&apos;t feel like anything is missing, especially since he rarely feels like anything is missing himself. (Born blind, very much accustomed to it.)<br> <br>He loves trailing his hand across the geometric panelling of the halls, so desperate for connection to the world around him that his hand continues to trail long after the winter cold has numbed him. He&apos;s a historian and a diplomat.<br><br>Other aspects of description: <br>He loves tracing his hands across scrolls. If he does not file down his fingertip&apos;s scales, it rasps against the greenfrond paper, breaking focus and whatever little calm he has managed to maintain.<br><br>(Other character perceiving him, one who has known him for a while). He moved with great deliberation, like he was acutely aware of where each limb was in space and hated even his most gentle intrusions upon the world. <br><br>Sorry for any disconnected/fragmented writing here. Have brain damage, will definitely be hiring an editor.

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• TR

  @TrayOfKimbap · 2 years ago

  Sure smell is important... but if I read the 145,763th female OC who is described as smelling like jasmine and roses despite being an adventurer who hasn&apos;t bathed from a month of tramping through the wilderness...

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• SO

  @SomeUniqueHandle · 2 years ago

  I think the &quot;What do they pay special attention to?&quot; question is key for establishing character personalities. &nbsp;If you have the stereotypical knight and princess story, your knight is likely to size up the people around him to figure out who could be a threat while the princess would pay more attention to social status using clues like clothing and manner of speech. &nbsp;The knight checks out the architecture for defensibility while the princess considers the style and history. &nbsp;You can then layer the characters&apos; opinions on top of their observations. &nbsp;One knight might admire the arrow slits in a building because it&apos;s yet another way to defend the building while another might feel disdain because the only honor way to fight is by sword. &nbsp;One princess might look down on all those who can&apos;t afford the latest finery while another might appreciate the skill of those who maintain their clothing well despite a lack of money. &nbsp;It&apos;s one way to &quot;show, not tell&quot; their personalities.

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• MI

  @midnightkatana9836 · 2 years ago (edited)

  My dark fantasy novel, which uses a gothic horror aesthetic, is set in a world of eternal night and darkness, which is the main aspect of my worldbuilding I focus on.<br><br>I chose it because i want to use lots of ocean and maritime metaphors and similes for my descriptions (using the bright full moon and starry twilight skies as consistent motifs) as well as just use vivid and cool imagery for my novel. For example, I feature a location in the book called the abyssal forest, and compare it to the twilight and hadal zones of the deep ocean

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• SL

  @sleepysera · 2 years ago

  The reality is though, that while familiar smells can trigger a strong memory response (when experienced in person!), people&apos;s ability to actually imagine a smell is overall surprisingly bad. Half of the time they don&apos;t even know or remember how a specific item smells, and even when they do, it rarely has a strong emotional effect.<br><br>Of course there are some exceptions - but those are mostly negative ones. The stinging stench of urine, the rotten smell of a food that has gone bad, that kind of stuff isn&apos;t hard to imagine, but those already are pretty common in fantasy books. <br><br>Meanwhile, no one&apos;s gonna gain much out of a book describing the camellia-scented love letter as such, because 99% of people will not know what a Camellia even smells like, and the 1% that do will struggle to remember it accurately and even if they do, it&apos;s very unlikely they are one of the few people who can accurately reproduce such a specific smell for their mental experience.<br><br>Humans are, for better or for worse, an overwhelmingly visually operating species, unless their visual sense is impaired. We conciously evaluate only about 0.0004% of sensory information anyways, the vast majority of it being visual, with the other senses trailing further and further behind, with smell being the most disregarded one. Of course it&apos;s very important to our ACTUAL experience, but our actual experience is decided by the 99.9996% of subconciously processed sensory information - which generally can&apos;t actively be called upon for our imagination. <br><br>So disregarding the description of certain sensations isn&apos;t really a sign of bad writing, it&apos;s just... efficient, since it is unlikely to elicit much of a response even if included.

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• ST

  @Stanger_dragons · 2 years ago

  I didn&apos;t have anything to imagine most my childhood was things I saw I don&apos;t remember my other senses

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