What’s Your Book About? The Challenge of Book Descriptions

by
Scott D. Parker

What do you think about book descriptions?

When someone asks us what our book is about, some of us are hamstrung. Having lived with the book for potentially months, we know the ins and outs of the story. Some of us launch into a massively detailed description of the book, the characters, the plots and sub-plots.

That’s not entirely helpful.

You’ve read a lot of book descriptions. I know I have. They either catch you or they don’t. Well, there’s another thing that can sometimes happen: the book description that tells too much. How irritating are those movie trailers that all but show you the entire film? We are all sophisticated viewers (and readers) so I don’t think we need every single beat of a story told in a description.

The reason I’m talking book descriptions is that I’m preparing my next book for publication. It’s called TREASON AT HANFORD: A HARRY TRUMAN MYSTERY. I’ve been re-reading it and making edits and changes most of the summer. I’ve got a cover concept (well, at least five) and I sent it to some of my fellow graphic designers to get their take. One of them came back: what’s the book about?

So I sent the description.

What’s problematic about a book featuring Harry Truman is that most folks know he was president and probably instantly jump to that conclusion when they think of Truman. But my tale takes place the year before he became vice president and then president. So I needed at least a sentence or two to lay the groundwork that I’m referring to Senator Truman and not President Truman.

After a few attempts, here’s what I wrote:

Before he became vice president in 1945, Senator Harry Truman led a congressional committee dedicated to ferreting out corruption during World War II. The investigators of the Truman Committee adhere to a simple credo: help the country win the war and bring our soldiers home.

In the spring of 1944, Truman receives a series of ominous letters from a lawyer out in Hanford, Washington. His client, a common farmer who lost his land when the government confiscated miles of territory for a secret project, has been drafted to keep him quiet about what he’s seen going on around a local warehouse with direct ties to the giant facility in the area.

Fearing the worst, Truman leads the investigation himself, bringing along Carl Hancock, a former policeman. Soon after they start poking around, Truman and Hancock witness a pair of brutally murdered corpses, a town clouded in secrecy, and the warehouse owner who is ready to pull strings and dismiss the pesky senator.

But the man from Independence, Missouri, is tenacious, and in no time, Truman and Hancock not only find themselves embroiled in the top-secret world of the Manhattan Project but also must confront the worst act of treason in American history since Benedict Arnold.

 

Analysis:

To me, paragraph one sets the stage in the reader’s mind that this is Senator Truman I’m writing about. Paragraph two features the incident that gets Truman’s attention and start the investigation. The third paragraph ups the stakes by throwing in corpses and the world of 1944. And the final paragraph—which could almost be a log line itself—tosses the phrases “Benedict Arnold” and “The Manhattan Project” into the mix, letting the reader know the just how high the stakes are.

I think it’s a good description and should tell potential readers whether or not they’d like the book.

Then there’s the elevator pitch. Maybe it’s the log line, the one-sentence version of the book. Kudos for any creative type who can sum up a work in a sentence. It’s crucial, mind you, but it’s a skill that must be learned if you don’t already have it.

Like I just wrote, the last paragraph of the description could serve as the elevator pitch, but I also have a sentence on the cover: Before Harry Truman dropped the bomb, he had to save it.

I debated whether or not to include ‘A Harry Truman Mystery’ or not as a sub-title and will likely opt not to have it and leave in the cover blurb. Not sure. Still tweaking the cover concept.

What’s the cover look like? Well, you’ll just have to watch a little bit longer.

What are  your thoughts on book descriptions? How do you structure them?

Not a Good Eye Witness

We live on a small connector road that's only a few miles long, named for the family that built the farm we live on. Our closest neighbors to one end are half a mile away; I've never measured it, but at a guess our closest neighbors in the other direction are as much as 3/4 of a mile from us...  Maybe even a little more.

We know it's normal for hay to be delivered on flatbeds and we know who comes to mow the lawn. We recognize the trucks of farm hands. 

We know what's normal. 

Last Friday morning waa anything but normal. It started with bringing Murph outside around 5:35 am. She has a run line and I clipped her up and started my routine. I went around the side of the house to get the hose to fill the watering can. 

Our cellar doors were open. 

That made me jump. I went to the back of the house to raise the pump and Murph started barking. Across the road from the barn, on our farm field, there was a car. And two people were outside of the car looking across the field. Now, I hadn't heard the car and when I saw it I could tell that it had been turned off but I still initially thought they'd stopped to look at deer or something. I didn't think much of it.

Then they started walking down the road past my house.

Maybe the car had broken down? We must have 54 feet of fencing running along the road in front of our house.  Maybe more. They walked past the house and past the spot where the drainage culvert runs under the road and turned right... walking down our farm field on the far side of the ravine. 

Murph is continuing to go crazy so by 6 almost everyone is awake and in the kitchen. I watch these two guys, who I woukd have guessed as teens, walk down the field, go to one side and then the other and then return with a third person on a piece of equipment, like an ATV with a bucket on the front. 

We live on 500 acres. I couldn't begin to tell you where all the property lines are... all told, there are three houses on different parts of the property.  Neither of them are the closest houses to us. 

I know what's normal around here. Enough to recognize abnormal when it happens and let the property owner know something is amiss. 

This was when I realized that I hadn't taken a very good look at the guys who'd gone down our field. Sure one was taller, with dark curly hair, while the shorter fellow had sandy hair. I could see the tall one's white t-shirt easily across the field. The shorter guy's blueish-green shirt meshed in with the trees in the distance. 

It was easy enough to walk over and take down the car's details but I realized after I texted Bill and heard that nobody was expected and certainly not at 5:45 am that if there was a real problem I'd be giving the most mediocre, general description ever. 

It reminded me of something Anthony Bidulka said years ago when I was at one of his book signings. He said he pays attention to physical details of people around him because it informs his character descriptions. 

Studies have shown that eyewitness testimony is often unreliable. 

The start of my Friday the 13th last week proved that, even as a writer, I wouldn't be much better than anyone else. Part of the reason was that I didn't see the need to pay attention to these guys until they were walking away from me at a great enough distance to not be able to see much that would be useful for identifying them. 

 

Want to play a fun game with yourself? When you meet up with a group of friends, guess everyone's age and height. Then confirm that information. How good are you at telling how old someone is or how tall they are? This is a great thing to do at a meeting of mystery writers. Another thing to do? Have different people come in wearing masks and costumes. See if you can use other physical characteristics to identify who is who. 

Writers, remember if you're writing a mystery that not every potential witness is a good witness... but paying attention to the physical characteristics of the people around you enable you to produce rich descriptive details of the characters in your works.

Also... remember that how a person describes another comes down to perspective. A young child may describe Dad as a giant when he may be average height. Descriptions in writing are about seeing the world through the character's eyes, not your own.

What's In A Description?

Jay Stringer

I've been thinking a lot on character descriptions lately. As we work through the copy edits for my first book, and fresh eyes are examining the text, I'm seeing just how few physical descriptions I give to people.

If I mention their physicality at all, it will be vague; the way their smile turns, a particular look that they give with their eyes. The rest of my descriptions will be about their attitude, or their accent, maybe how their hands move as they talk. After that, it's all dialogue. I let them talk and talk, and wait for that to create something.

For me as a writer, I guess I like to lead the reader down a certain route, but make them do the work in terms of creating a physical image in their heads. I tend to feel that if the reader has done more of that work, whether they realise it or not, they will be more invested in those characters.

But not everyone sees it that way, and looking around at the fiction on my shelf there is a wide variety. Some authors want to give you every little detail as they create their character, to take someone that's fully formed in their head already and implant him/her in yours. I see this approach more with thrillers and action stories, books where descriptions overall are more important, maybe this follows through in the authors mind. For instance, I read some of the Gabriel Hunt books recently, and they tend far more toward physical descriptions, right down to cleft jaws, but they are also books that have to describe weapons and long actions scenes, so it's more about consistency.

In crime I often see more of a middle ground. Lawrence Block, for instance, would often give us a physical description of each of the supporting cast in the Matt Scudder books, but rarely gave us anything of Scudder himself.

I've been reading HURT MACHINE by Reed Farrel Coleman, and he's given us very little of Moe Prager over the years, though again the supporting cast are very well etched. We chatted with Reed on our podcast a while back -you'll find the episode in the itunes archive- and he told us this was deliberate. He has a firm idea of Moe in his head, and who would play him in a movie, but it's for the reader to form their own impression.

As we've worked through the copy edit, I've moved more toward that "middle ground" of description, where I'm giving you more for the supporting cast, but still leaving enough of a black hole that you as the reader have to do the rest of the work and, hopefully, get more invested as a result.

But how about you, as writers and readers, how much or how little description do you like on your page?