What Makes Good Description?

Confession: To lose weight, I decided not to buy desserts. Instead, I buy flour, sugar, eggs, and butter and tell myself that if I want to have a dessert, I have to make one. Then I make one, and take the leftovers into work the next day. It makes me very popular, but I'm not losing weight.

Reading:

• Someplace to be Flying, by Charles de Lint

Writing:

• "Ferian Fetlock Cures a Horse"

Revising:

• "Dolly Hobbles"

My stories tend to be very dialogue-heavy. To me, speech is the best window into character, and one of my greatest strengths as a writer (if I do say so myself) is to write dialogue in the voices of the characters who are speaking it.

My weakness, though, is description. All too often, I will write a scene with riveting dialogue but no sense of where that is taking place. That reduces the story to two floating heads gibbering away. I have to constantly remind myself that what people are doing, where they are, and what it feels like is just as important as what is being said.

So every so often, I'm going to practice a bit of description.

There's a thunderstorm outside right now. When the rain started, I thought the air conditioning was turning on. Only it came not from the vent overhead, but from the bathroom window. It was a pervasive rising hum, like some massive machinery of nature grinding into life. Each moment I expected the swelling noise to ebb, to fall into a sinusoidal pattern of waxing and waning sound. But it did not. Instead the noise increased to a deafening pitch until, finally, the deep bass notes of thunder shuddered through the structure of the house. The tension of the storm was lessened, and although other rumbles came, and other gusts battered the window, none could equal the first dismal climax.