There are two ways to describe detail in a setting:

1) Forest to trees: With this method, you start with the big and work down to the little. For example, your character sees a house. Notices it’s red brick. Has a white porch out front. Sitting on the porch is a flower pot filled with orange flowers. A hummingbird hovers over these.

2) Trees to forest: This method is exactly the opposite. The character sees the hummingbird first. Then the flowers, the pot, the porch, the house.

What you don’t want to do is jump from one method to the other. You don’t want to see the hummingbird, then the entire house, then the tiny flowers, then the porch. Why? Because your reader is trying to focus as you describe a scene. It’s like a movie camera panning in and out. The camera is supposed to start far away and pan in or start close and pan out. If the camera went IN OUT IN OUT really fast, the audience would be left dizzy and confused.

The next question to ask yourself is which method to use when. I find it generally depends on how the character is seeing the setting. If they’re slowly approaching from afar, they would definitely use forest to trees as that is how our eyes work. But if they’ve just woken up and are surveying the scene immediately in front of their eyes, they’re more likely to do trees to forest.

The last thing you need to ask yourself is about speed. Much like the panning camera, the speed at which you give detail dictates the speed at which the character is observing. So if your character is out for a leisurely stroll, they would probably spend a few minutes looking at the detail on someone’s porch, which means you probably want at least one sentence per thing they’re observing. On the other hand, if they’re flying by in a Z4, they’re likely to only see a quick blur which probably means only one sentence or a series of really short sentences.

TIP: If you’re not sure how much time to spend on detail, try reading your description while acting out the motion. If you can’t read it in the time it takes your character to perform the action, it’s too long. And if you’re done reading and they’re supposed to be standing there staring for another five minutes, it’s either too short or you need to transition to another scene.

I’ve been working on a revision that is doing my head in and I decided I needed to approach it from a different angle. I started to think about what really happens in a novel’s climax and what I came up with was this: it’s like the main character’s house of cards has fallen. Everything that can go wrong has gone wrong.  There is no visible light at the end of the tunnel. For example:

It’s the day of the big meeting–the one Jane has prepared for for months. The one that could mean a major promotion to X. Unfortunately, Jane sleeps through her alarm so she has to skip her shower. Her cat has puked on the outfit she prepared so she dresses in the only other clean outfit she can find. She rushes to her car, spilling coffee all over herself. She tries to start the car but it’s out of gas. She goes to the bus instead. The one that will get her to work 10 minutes before the meeting whizzes past, covering her in mud. The one that will get her there on time comes. By some miracle, it stops. When she gets on, she sees her ex-boyfriend sitting next to the only empty seat. He’s with his new girlfriend. And they’re engaged. Which sucks. It sucks even more when the bus breaks down and she has to sit with them for 20 minutes, listening to their plans for flowers at the wedding.

The first point of this lame excuse of an example is to show how everything goes wrong for the main character all at once. The second is to show you how I used this house of cards method to plot backwards. To do this, you first need to create a “worst day in their life” kind of scenario for your main character (such as the above). Once you have done this, you take each crumbling card (thing that goes wrong) and find a way to plant it before the midpoint of your novel. Using the example above, that would mean establishing things like:

1. Jane is a heavy sleeper. If it weren’t for her blaring alarm, she’d sleep until noon.
2. Jane’s cat has a habit of eating people food and then puking it up later.
3. Jane cannot function without a cup of coffee in the morning.
4. Jane hates her job but she’d love it if she could get promotion X.
5. Jane’s boss is very anal when it comes to watching her employee’s hours. She makes it clear to Jane that she can be replaced by someone who isn’t always late.
6. Jane is bad with money. If she doesn’t get a promotion, she will have to ask her parents for a loan.
7. Jane rarely does laundry.
8. Jane hates putting gas in her car.
9. Jane’s ex-boyfriend dumped her after 2 yrs because he didn’t want to settle down.
10. Jane hates flowers.

This might sound a little crazy (planning a novel backwards?) but I have to say, I tried it last night and it was the most helpful thing ever!

And now, as an added bonus for the day: you can use this same method to create a first chapter. Just write out the inciting incident you want, identify the cards that fall (or, in the case of the inciting incident, the cards that shake a little), and voila! You’ll have a list of the things that go into your opening chapter.