There's a trend in writing now days that I find disagreeable. Some call it minimalist writing. I just call it boring. In this style of writing, description is at the bare minimum, if there's any description at all. Sights, sounds, smells, and everything else is left to the imagination of the reader. I've seen a number of reasons for writing this way, including but not limited to involving the reader more, description slows a story down, and even "that's just my style." However, I think many of the writers (not all, mind you, just a good number of them) that employ this minimalist way of writing are just afraid of description.

Description, the use of the senses and details, is a way to bring the reader into your story. Why minimize it? Why force the reader to work to enjoy your story? I prefer stories rich with description and detail. I don't want to "work" when reading a story; I just want to lean back and enjoy it, watching it unfold before me. I want to be drawn into the story, the setting, the characters; I don't want to develop them myself. And I shouldn't have to. It is a writer's job to provide everything the reader needs to be able to suspend disbelief and fall into the story. Reading already puts the imagination to work, there's no reason to force it to work any harder than trying to see the story as the author sees it. Besides, whose story is it anyway? The writer's. The writer is sharing something s/he imagined. To not bring all the richness that you as the author have envisioned for the story into your writing is to not be true to the story.

It is true that description can slow a story down, but not only are there ways to combat this, some stories should be a blend of quick and slow. A story that goes a breakneck speed from beginning to end will leave a reader breathless, and not always in a good way. Moments where the action pauses or slows are necessary to a story, particularly in novels, and a writer should not be afraid to let the pace drop a notch or two every once in awhile.

Almost any description can be written in active way: hair flows, froths, and curl; eyes twinkle and glance up; and so on. It is harder to avoid clichés this way, it seems they've all been used before, but part of the job of the writer is to reinvent, reimagine, and recreate. Descriptions can also be interwoven, a harder task if you're used to the block descriptions I grew up with, reducing the slow down generally associated with description. And mixing interweaving with smaller blocks of description can help keep the pace while allowing the author to give a fuller picture of the people, places, and things in his/her story.

A story without description is like a meal without seasoning. The salt, spices, and herbs each add their own subtle flavor. The same can be said of description. And just like some meals are heavily spiced and seasoned, so some stories will have more description than others. Each story should reflect the vision of its author, as well as his/her style, the genre of the story, and all the other little factors that go into making a story what it is. But a story without description ignores a fundamental characteristic of story telling and is as bland as a meal without any seasoning at all.

I am a "Description Queen" and proud of it. My stories reflect my vision of them. They are pieces of myself that I share with my readers. And that is the way it should be.

Yet one more category of word is being cut from the writer's arsenal: the -ing words, as in winding, bubbling, and so on. Once again we're being told a word is "bad" and shouldn’t be a part of our writing if at all possible. While I understand the need to watch the words we use as writers, this tendency to make entire categories of words no-no's is beyond me. Why would any writer want to reduce the number of tools they have at their disposal? Since when are words themselves bad? Without words, we could not write, and taking words away makes a job that's hard enough even harder.

The overuse of any word or category of words could indeed hurt more than help, but just because some people have overused them doesn't make these words something we all should avoid at all costs. Adverbs serve their purpose and occasionally a sentence needs that passive 'to be' construction. But instead of telling writers to use them in moderation or to make sure they convey what the author wishes to have conveyed, we are being told not to use them at all. Yet there are times when a word doesn't have an alternate choice that conveys not only the motion of the verb but also the description of that motion that would be included in the adverb. If we are to try to get our ideas across, shouldn't we use the adverb if we need it? Far too many would answer no to that question.

Words are the tools of the writer. When you start to take them away, you reduce what you have to work with to make your story shine. You cripple your ability to tell the story as it's meant to be told, as you see it. There are those who would have stories told in so few words that it's up to the reader to create the images that bring the story to life. As a reader who would just like to sit back and read and enjoy the images that the writer's conjure up, I find the trend of minimalizing makes it harder to find things I want to read. I want to enjoy the writer's vision. Yet, over and over again, I see authors who don't describe, don't detail, and use as few words as possible in the belief that it brings readers into the story telling process. Perhaps it does for some, but most the readers I know enjoy rich, vivid stories where they don't have to work quite so hard to visualize the people, the setting, and the events.

'To be' verbs were the first to get hit with this need to cut the words, followed soon after by adverbs. We're taught in school to vary the word 'said' with other words such as 'exclaimed', 'warned', 'shouted', and so on--a habit we find ourselves trying to unlearn as we grow up and start taking our writing seriously. And yet, other writers can get away with replacing said and become quite famous in the process. The literary types may look down their noses, but those writers are the ones making their money at actually writing their stories as they see them.

Lean and mean doesn't always make for good writing. Choosing not to use words that other writers claim should be cut does nothing except give a writer less to work with. Absolutes don’t work in art, and writing is most definitely an art. It's the art of conveying our stories, for entertainment, for learning, for enrichment, in the best way we can. To do that and do it well, we need to have every tool, every word, at our disposal. The best stories come from crafting the writing to fit the story itself, not by obeying some arbitrary rules. Write your stories in the way they need to be told.