Before I answer those questions, I'll say that these questions are trick ones. Unfortunately, you all failed to go deeper into each question. Sure, they're all valid responses, but all of them are dancing around the true questions I asked. These questions are all meta. I'll start with this one.
A) Can you explain why one kind of description works in action-adventure, and fails in romance?
Or, do you understand genre as a rhetorical contract between author and reader, delivered through tone, enforced by context, and expressed through the micro-choices of description?
Genre is a collection of tones that the reader expects in the story. You deliver those tones in a synopsis and build context in which the reader knows they're reading either action-adventure, slice-of-life, romance, whatever. By mashing those tones from different genres, you get the subgenre on which your story is built. This makes your story unique. But how does it correlate to this question, you might ask? I'll say that storytelling is communication. In other words, genre = tone as interpreted through context.
And description is the paintbrush with which that tone is delivered.
You, as an author, make the context of your story. Let's say you made it primarily action-adventure. The reader, inferring that the story is AA from the context, expects the usual fighting, going places, doing things, and worldbuilding. The reader primes himself to see the language game of action-adventure occur, and therefore any tonal mismatch will make it jarring. The reader does not expect the hero who just slayed hundreds of evil goblins to suddenly cry because one goblin looked at him cute. This is called a tonal mismatch, and it makes the story lose coherence.
Also, if you still don't understand what "description" means, it's anything that the narrator chooses to emphasize in that current context—either to further the story or explain things so the reader can understand what is happening. This description divides into two types: external and internal.
External description is what happens outside of the MC, be it showing off items, actions taken, what others did—i.e., anything that gives the story momentum. In other words, kinetic energy, plot pusher. Internal is the subjective thoughts, character-to-character interaction with words (not fists), and, importantly, emotion.
In action-adventure, you can have however many external descriptions you want, because the language game of the action-adventure genre you and the reader agreed upon makes that coherent in that context. Internal description takes the backseat to the external, because people are here to see someone getting punched and punching back. In romance, it's all about internal description, because you're trying to connect two dummies together while making it coherent. Sure, external description could be dominant, but the language game of the romance genre is all about how that makes the reader feel about the things that are happening.
When you use external description in romance—let's say the hero punches the demon queen—you make the context internal still, to show that the hero is punching her because she cheated. The emphasis is on the internal description.
When you use internal description in action-adventure—let's say the hero uncovers the true meaning of the thing they've wanted the most and it sucks—you still link it to the external context, to the adventure itself, to make the external context richer. The emphasis here is still on the external description.
And all of that is connected to tone. If you can't swap out the tone to fit the context without violating internal logic, you suck at describing things. That's why action-adventure romance stories exist, and they often suck: because they either focus on external description or internal as their main one. It either becomes too action-heavy, diminishing romance, or romance-heavy, diminishing action. They want the best of both worlds, not knowing that you can't really merge them seamlessly together unless you're a great storyteller.
And with that one question, I asked three:
- Do you know how communication works in a narrative? Not just "I said, you heard," but "I implied, and you inferred." Most of you failed here, because you didn't even think of a reader on the other side.
- Do you know what your reader thinks they’re reading? Genre as expectation. If you don’t know what “flavor” you’re giving the reader, you can’t keep it consistent. Some of you almost got there.
- Do you know how every description changes the genre dialect you’re speaking in? Every line of description alters the genre-tonal contract, and sadly only Thompson got it right.
B) Can you choose to withhold visual detail to emphasize emotion instead without losing momentum?
Or, can you bend the reader’s emotional trajectory using only narrative voice and selective perception?
As I previously discussed, description is divided into two: internal/external. I asked how you can further plot only using internal description. Sounds hard, right? You need to write in the POV of a character and not make it boring. But it's not that hard, because you already have what you need: emotion, dialogue, and subjectivity. Who manages all of that? The narrator.
The narrator is the voice that tells the story. He controls what is shown, what is said, and how it is interpreted to the reader. Everyone knows that. But who controls the narrator? You. Or rather, the ghostly version of you, called the implied author. You see, the reader has no you sitting in the room, monologuing about the story like an unhinged person. No, there's only the narrator and the reader who is reading what the narrator is saying. And from what the narrator says, the reader creates a construct of you inside their mind, called the implied author. That implied author—the voice behind the narrator—is what makes all the decisions about the tone, context, and how it is delivered to the reader.
So, to deliver emotion without losing momentum is about knowing how to weaponize your voice to make an impression on the reader through the narrator. Empathy, understanding of context, and persuasion are your friends. You basically show off your rizz (charisma) to make the story truly work with your own voice. This is why villainess shoujo stories work despite having no external plot happening at all. It's all about understanding the feeling of the narrator and making the reader have empathy with her. This is where Shinji in
The End Of Evangelion going insane goes hard without stopping—despite the visual being a void where nothing happens.
This question was about:
- Do you understand the narrator as a construct—and not as a neutral camera floating around? Everyone focused on the immediate, about showing, not telling, yadda yadda, not thinking about long-term consequences.
- Do you realize you are manipulating the narrator to manipulate the reader? No one.
This question wasn't about the immediate. It was about knowing that you are trying to manipulate a reader to have a specific emotion using a narrator. Knowing that you know that you are manipulating the emotions of the reader was the real question.
C) Can you describe a place that reveals character without mentioning a single emotion?
Or, can you use subtext—aka using external description to write internal description?
This is just subtext. Any respectable author knows how to write one. As some of you had pointed out: show a haphazard room and voila, subtext. That's surface-level subtext. But what is subtext? It's making the reader think—to find the real emotional core, the real context, through the external description. Basically, make the readers think hard enough for them to make speculations, for them to have their own interpretation of the context. It's using their empathy and curiosity against them.
The most basic subtext is the hero's partner saying "I'm fine," cracking her knuckles, while you as a reader know she's not fine at all. You don't know what the author had cooked with that character, but you can take the previous context (let's say she found out he was having an affair with a demon queen from before), and boom, you now have a subtext that is logically coherent in the story. Or maybe she's just angry because the hero forgot about their anniversary—and boom, another subtext that makes sense. Whatever. What that means is that you, as an author, need to trust the reader to infer the emotion you want to show without showing it, to make the reader feel that emotional vacuum and insert their emotion into it—to make it meaningful, making the reader closer to the story, making the reader continue reading your story.
Basically, subtext is the emotional void the reader can see and can put the puzzle together and fill that hollow gap with the meaning the reader himself has constructed. To use subtext well is to know when to be silent emotionally and trust the readers that they'll fill that gap of trust. Like they trust you to deliver the story, you trust them to think about your story. This is a rhetorical contract that subtext makes full use of.
There are no hidden questions—only whether you know what subtext even is. No one name-dropped it, despite it being an intermediate+ technique. Sad.
If you read this all, thank you for coming to my late-night anti-TED Talk, lmao. I thought I would find better answers, but all I got were things that work instinctively and semi-logically, never systematically. Whatever.
