Bite Sized Beta 001: The Room

As my hectic schedule continues to descend into the maw of the Holiday Season, I realized I wanted a way to post updates to the blog without having to commit to the big, long scheduled posts. Enter: Bite Sized Beta! These will be shorter, more targeted posts tackling some of the common beta /developmental comments I leave on drafts.

Today’s bite tackles The Room, by which I mean the space your characters are inhabiting in a given scene. Of course this is not always a literal room, but you can think of it as a stage play where the actors are sometimes outside, or in a courtyard, a ballroom, a cemetery, but no matter what, that box of a stage is where we are viewing the action, the characters, and the story. That’s your “room.”

In almost every manuscript I’ve read, I will reach a scene where I struggling to imagine where these people are. This can sometimes be called “white room syndrome” when an author fails to describe the space, leaving their reader with nothing to picture but a blank room. It’s understandable that this happens! Describing every room the characters enter can sometimes feel arduous and inconsequential, because sometimes there isn’t anything remarkable about the room. In the fatigue of drafting, these details are often the first to slip away from us.

Now, I’m not suggesting you add thousands upon thousands of extra words to your script by elaborating every last detail of every chair and tchotchke. Especially if it’s a space your characters have entered before, we often don’t need to see the entire floor plan. If it is a new space, however, your reader needs some key details to ground themselves in the story.

You can consider describing the smell of the room: if it’s musky, dust-coated from neglect, if it smells like someone hasn’t taken out the trash in a while, or there’s an overpowering scent of Yankee Candles that gives the MC a headache.

You can pick out a few items that suggest the theme of the décor: an abundance of faux gilded paint on overly ornate furniture; acid green upholstery with touches of green figurines all over the shelves; a more brutalist room with a lot of concrete, hard edges, and little warmth. None of these take that long to say, and while the details may not feel profound while you’re writing them, those little descriptors are opportunities to tell us something about your world, about the people who live there, and most importantly where the hell your characters are.

The second half of describing The Room is telling your reader who is in it.

I come across a lot of scenes where two characters will be talking and suddenly a third person shows up in dialogue that I didn’t even know was in the room with them. This may also seem inconsequential to the drafting writer who considers that character to be periphery at best, or perhaps in their minds it was simply clear this person might be there. Sometimes these characters exist to say that one line of dialogue and never appear again (which is an issue for another bite). If you do not tell your reader that other people are in a room, they will not generally assume so. Let’s not jump scare our readers!

And while we’re giving these white rooms a coat of paint, don’t forget to describe your characters! It can feel awkward to insert a person’s description in the midst of a narrative, and even like you’re interrupting the flow of events, but it’s all about execution. If big plot things are happening and energy is high, it certainly won’t feel appropriate to stop and introduce Nancy, and tell you how tall she is, how she does her hair, if she’s got a pleasant face and a nice outfit on today. And truthfully, the reader often doesn’t need that level of detail for every character they meet.

Just like your description of the room, these smaller characters can get a trait or two woven in so we have just enough to sketch them out. This could be a physical tick, a big pair of glasses, an abundance of freckles. You could use emotion to paint them physically: a mopey looking girl; a bloated man who always looks nauseous; a rail of a person who could be blown over by a breeze. If they are worth naming, if their voice is worth including in dialogue, my rule of thumb is they are worth describing.

So no more white rooms and jump scare characters materializing into scenes! And if you’re scared to overdo it, I’d say it’s always better to have an abundance to whittle down to the right amount than to have nothing but a void and some talking heads. It’s easier to edit, too!