Let us imagine it

Description begins in the writer's imagination, but should finish in the reader's.

Stephen King, On Writing

When we read a novel, there are some parts of it — dialogue, for example, and action scenes — that we focus on intently, while there are other parts we may just skip over or skim or read without really giving the words our full attention. And these parts are likely to be description, especially description that continues for more than two or three words.

Are we really interested in exactly what a character is wearing? Do we care what color a house is, how many windows it has or what kind of shrubbery stands in front of it? Some writers are actually quite good at description, and entire paragraphs of it may be worth our attention. In most cases, however, the less description the better. It can get in the way of the story. And it can get in the way of our imaginations.

And that is Stephen King's point in the comment quoted above. Good writers, he argues, describe just enough to fire the reader's imagination. We all imagine characters and scenes in our minds as we read. I mentioned once before about being disappointed when, after imagining a female character as a blonde,  the author belatedly revealed her to be a brunette.

"I'd rather let the reader supply the faces, the builds, and the clothing as well," King says. "If I tell you that Carrie White is a high school outcast with a bad complexion and a fashion-victim wardrobe, I think you can do the rest, can't you? I don't need to give you a pimple-by-pimple, skirt-by-skirt rundown."

Just as an author's description can interfere with a reader's imagination, so can a movie version of a novel. The other evening I watched the film based on the novel Before I Go to Sleep, reviewed here last month. Both Nicole Kidman and Colin Firth were excellent in the major roles, yet both were jarring somehow because they were not the characters I had pictured while reading the novel. The actor playing the doctor was especially unsettling because he is a younger man in the novel. Had I seen the movie first, I would have pictured the actors in my mind while reading the book, and that too would have been jarring when the author's descriptions didn't match my film-shaped imagination.

And that may be why reading a story is better for us than watching it on a screen. It leaves more to our imagination.