I can see it in my head, but what the hell is it called?
Have you been there? I was last night.
Maisie and Chamberlain return to the main antagonists house which is a big, rustic, wood, and glass mansion with a log cabin aesthetic. I stared at the gap in the sentence for quite a while trying to find the most concise description that would not drag down the narrative.
Should I google housing styles? Variety of architcture? Wood houses? If you’re like me, you an spend lots of time consdering options before you even begin to type a term into the search bar.
This mornng, I wandered into the office and suddently arrived at “Lodge House” for a search term and the visual on the search returned appropriate images. But even so, there is a LOT of variety of what you might be looking at and here comes the judgement call for how much description you need here.
My internal visual is something with lots of large windows with a wooden framework and wainscotting. This is not so integral now but it is crucial to one of the last chapters and the fate of a couple of the protagonists. In some instances, just calling it a rustic lodge house and some general square footage would be enough to put a personal image in the reader’s mind . But, if in this case, the image in the reader’s head doesn’t meet the image in my head then when I have to call back to it, confusion may ensue in the reader and take them out of the action.
So, to both not slow down the narrative but still deliver the information I have chosen to employ a little innocent dialogue. “With all the windows in this house”…etc. And when this is combined to a revisit of the house in Chapter Four during the day the clouds reflectng off of the windows and the smell of cedar should be enough breadcrumbs to reasonably set up what you need to know later on.
Do you have similar stories of struggling with descriptions? Let me hear about it in the comments!
Evil Chocolate 