posted
If any of you remember me, I am back to writting. I had a very slow summer, but managed to finish the rough draft of my book. (How's my favorite POV Nazi, Survivor doing ?)
Anyway, for some frustrating reason, my characters keep ending up in rooms.
"The room was..." "She was in a ... room."
I can't help but SCREAM whenever I see the word "room." How can I discribe the settings, without using such words?
posted
The first thing that comes to mind is that no room is just a room. In houses you have bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchens, halls, dens, attics, etc. In other buildings you might find offices, bars, lobbies, libraries, and lounges, to name a few. Move from the generic to the specific.
posted
I haven't read your draft, but I admit I have a hard time believing this is a real problem. Does it still bug you on a cold re-read? Remember what OSC said about "said".
If you really do have a problem, then re-consider your plot. Why are your characters frequently surprized to wind up in rooms? As a general rule, the protagonist should be chloroformed and transported to a mysterious place no more than twice per chapter ;-).
If we know they're about to be in a room (e.g. we see them what in) then you can just drop that line of description. It's usually (though not always) advisable to keep your description limited to what's actually needed.
Finally, if you really just want to replace the word room, go ahead. Get a theasaurus if you have to. The best synonyms are those which tell us something more (e.g. "office" or "workshop" tell us the purpose of a room).
posted
Yes, use a name for the room. The when you go to describe it--you can skip the word room as well. A rug covered one wall--the same color as the floor. No need to say A rug covered one wall of the room.
Like many words they can be left out when they get too much attention.
posted
Maybe rather than saying "room", focus on a specific detail in the room that indicates the room type.
"She sat under the reading lamp with a curtain flapping gently with a chill breeze. She rose from the couch and shut the window." = living room, reading room
"He traveled up the stairway covering his nose against the odor of dank mold. The dusty bottles he retrieved rested clammy in his hand." = cellar, wine cellar.
A reader's imagination will likely fill in the appropriate room type.
[This message has been edited by revmachine21 (edited September 15, 2003).]
[This message has been edited by revmachine21 (edited September 15, 2003).]
All this advice sounds quite good, but I have to wonder exactly how often you are using "room" to have reached the point where you cannot help but scream when you see it.
posted
Phanto, just out of curiosity, are you changing settings frequently? It sounds like you are. If you use the same room for many scenes then you don't have to describe it more than once and you don't need the word "room" so often.
posted
I found I had an obsession with doors and hallways for a while. People going through doors, opening doors, looking at strange things on the door. No one needed to hear about doors and the hallways they led to as much as I had managed to talk about them.
Some I fixed by using synonyms. A few could as stay, since there was not reason to get rid of all uses of "door" and "hallway" if there were only going to be a few. The vast majority I just got rid of because I realized I really didn’t need them. I could imply through the action and non-door based description that people went through doors, opened doors, etc. Doing that helped relieve a great deal of clunkiness.
I would think you could work something similar with your "room" issue. It might not be quite as straight forward, if you have someone wondering from room-to-room, but I assume you’ve gotten that broken up quite a bit with other action (A list of room descriptions could grow tiresome to a reader, if nothing else is happening) that could be used to illuminate the feel of the space without going into "room" overload.
posted
Okay, so you don't get to say "den" and "bathroom" and so forth a lot when you're walking around in a castle.
Still, there are many different words that can apply to the "rooms" in a castle, some of which are very useful. For instance, there are dungeouns and cellars, as opposed to chambers and suites, and the ever present halls (as opposed to a great hall), passages (secret and otherwise), and so forth. Part of your problem may simply be that you're stuck with an unrealistic idea of how a castle is laid out. You don't walk "room to room" in a castle, a room doesn't usually connect directly to another room. Think of the layout of a hotel for a moment. The basic rooms connect to corridors, so that relative strangers don't have to walk through your royal suite to get to their guardhouse from the armory (from the barracks, from the collective privy/drop). When a group of rooms are all connected together, they usually have specific functions. The higher class suites might have an atrium that connects to the main hall, with several rooms ajoining, a bedchamber (with a big wardrobe), a study, a balcony (hey, it could happen) and so on (well, in the royal suites, maybe).
Study up on different kinds of castles and decide in which type your story takes place. Learn all the different types of rooms and how they are put together. I think that you will quickly find that the first thing that you do to describe rooms is to say what kind of room it is, and you will almost never resort to just saying "room".
posted
A lot of the castle ruins I went to in Germany didn't have hallways at all--one room in fact (on the main floor) opened into every other room, but they each had a name.
Keeping room--large room attached to the kitchen with fireplace and palce to sit eat etc for the lowerclass of the castle.
So, do some research on actual old castles and see how they were laid out.
She swung open the door and stepped hesitantly through. The setting sun from red glass windows blinded her and she turned her head towards the back wall. The wall was lined with gold-leafed books and there she spied the Book of the Dead; lurking behind rolled sheepskin manuscripts.
posted
So why is your story so compartmentalized? Are these various rooms of the castle each a fascinating setting that the reader will love? If not, then why use so many?
Just because they exist doesn't mean you have to visit all of them. Contrast the original TV show Star Trek with the movie Titanic. Both take place aboard big ships with lots and lots of rooms. Star Trek managed to convey the feeling of a big ship with only 5-6 rooms and a hallway. Titanic showed us every sqaure inch of the ship just because it was cool. Did James Cameron need to have Jack and Rose run through the boiler room and cargo hold? No. He did it because giant boilers belching flame and antique French luxury cars are cool.
If all these rooms are distinctive enough to amuse and delight your readers then by all means describe them. But if you are just showing off your carefully designed and researched castle, methinks you best consolidate the action into a few of the more interesting and important rooms.
Suppose a knight needs to go from a scene in the library to a scene in the kitchen. If you describe every room and hallway through which he passes you are probably being too wordy. Unless he is chasing or being chased by someone, it's just movement from room to room. That isn't a scene. Readers want to read the scenes where the conflict and tension are, not the movement that takes them from scene to scene.
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