Fantastic Description!

I had an idea for a post last week, but as I began writing it out, it seemed pathetic (and not in the good Charlie Brown way) so I abandoned it and now I'm posting this instead.

I have been engrossing myself in edits lately and I thought I would bore all of my avid readers with a blog about it. This blog will be minimally comical at best, so if you want a good laugh check out some previous blogs or read something else - I promise not to be offended (but I am known to lie on occasion (also known as daily)).

Writing fantasy is challenging because fantastical works need to very visual. Fantasy stories hold scenes and characters that may not have been previously imagined by readers, so a writer must have intense powers of description to make these elements believable and see-able (if that's a word). The more I read fantasy (even my own) I can detect good description and bad/lacking description. A good fantasy novel does not force a reader to re-read a section three times to fully comprehend what images are being handed to them. In the same vein, a reader shouldn't be left wondering what a character or scene is supposed to look like (although some readers will never be content no matter how much description you give them, but we'll pretend those people don't exist). As a general rule, a fantasy novel needs a lot of quality description to allow the reader to believe the story and to be immersed in the lore of the tale.

So as I go over my novel: Two Heads Are Better Than One, I'm finding places that need clarification and places begging for better description and as I work on these I hope it makes the book stronger because description is the biggest key to fantasy.