Arts & Entertainment, Writing

Descriptions

Lesson time 10:15 min

Neil shares his techniques to liven up descriptive prose, including cold opens, withholding information, finding emotional weight, and choosing memorable details.

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Topics include: Tell Readers as Much as You Like · One Memorable Detail · Appeal to the Senses

Neil Gaiman

Teaches the Art of Storytelling

In his first-ever online class, Neil Gaiman teaches you how he conjures up new ideas, convincing characters, and vivid fictional worlds.

Preview

I remember Stephen King once said to me that Amy Tan grumbled to him that when writers get interviewed, the one thing they don't ask us about is the words. And the words are the most important things that we have. The words are what we're doing everything with. If you're writing a novel, you're going to have to use 70,000 of them, 100,000, 200,000 of them. So in the next class, we're going to talk about words. We're going to talk about language and all of the things you can do with it. We're going to talk about humor. We're going to talk about world building, all as things that you can do with words. [MUSIC PLAYING] I do not hold with anybody who says no exposition, no description. You describe what needs to be described. You explain what needs to be explained. You are god when you are writing. You are absolutely in charge. You can do whatever you like. There are no rules other than tell a great story, tell it as best you can. But there is an enormous pleasure to just telling. And sometimes you can describe places. Let's see. In "Neverwhere," what I was doing was describing a world. And the world of London below was as much of a character as any of the characters in the book. So one of the things that I loved doing was describing places and describing people and trying to make them vivid, trying to make the imagery vivid in your head. I might not actually describe what somebody would look like. But I would paint a picture that would get you as a reader to imagine what they looked like. For example, fashion in bodyguards seemed to be everything. They all had a knack of one kind or another. And each of them was desperate to demonstrate it to the world. "At this moment, Ruislip was facing off against the Fop With No Name. The Fop With No Name looked somewhat like an early 18th century rake, one who hadn't been able to find real rake clothes and had to make do with what you can find at the Oxfam shop. His face was powdered to white, his lips painted red. "Ruislip, the Fop's opponent, looked like the kind of dream one might have if one fell asleep watching sumo wrestling on the television with a Bob Marley record playing in the background. He was a huge Rastafarian who looked like nothing so much as an obese and enormous baby. "They were standing face to face in the middle of a cleared circle of spectators and other bodyguards and sightseers. Neither man moved a muscle. The Fop was a good head taller than Ruislip. On the other hand, Ruislip weighed as much as four Fops, each of them carrying a large leather suitcase entirely filled with lard. They stared at each other without breaking eye contact." It's a way of describing people. On the other hand, this is a description of a city, and it's a description of a familiar city. "Three years in London had not changed Richard. Although it had changed the way he perceived the city. Richard had originally imagined London as a gray city, even a black city, from the pictu...

About the Instructor

Award-winning author Neil Gaiman has spent more than a quarter of a century crafting vivid, absorbing fiction. Now, the author of Stardust, Coraline, and The Sandman teaches his approach to imaginative storytelling in his online writing class. Learn how to find your unique voice, develop original ideas, and breathe life into your characters. Discover Neil’s philosophy on what drives a story—and open new windows to the stories inside you.

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Neil Gaiman

In his first-ever online class, Neil Gaiman teaches you how he conjures up new ideas, convincing characters, and vivid fictional worlds.

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