I bit into my chocolate cupcake. The moist chocolately goodness melted into my mouth, caressing my tongue and filling my much needed hunger. I took another bite, the flavor exploding in my mouth. My eyes fluttered as I took in the wonderful taste that I held so dear. I moaned orgasmically, the taste running down as I swallow the chocolate morsal. My lips parted as I gasped, the pleasure shooting through my body.
Holy Cow! I'll have what she's having.
Today, I'm going to spend a brief moment to talk about food. Specifically, how many people seem to write their descriptions of food, and more than that, I'm using this as a way to talk about descriptions in general, and how people misuse them.
A frequent sign of weak writing is shown when people write overly enthusiastic descriptions of food. We eat food every day, sometimes three times a day. It's a pretty common occurrence actually. So you tell me, when was the last time you had an orgasm from eating food? When was the last time you described your mom's meatloaf as euphoric? Probably never.
Of course, we all know why authors do this, and it really doesn't have anything to do with how absolutely amazing the food is. It really has to do with authors being told by critiques that they need to add descriptions in their writing. Food is an exceptionally easy item to describe, because there are just so many "safe" adjectives to use to describe an innumerrable degree of food types, it's just easy to explain it in depth and come up with a large word count.
Don't even think this problem is unique to Wattpad. Many books, including the likes of '50 Shades of Gray', spend ridiculus amounts of time describing food as if they were being sponsered by the company. Sure, in some cases, it makes sense to try to display how fancy or decedent a place is, but in most cases, it is there to fluff out a chapter.
In the absolute worse cases, describing food comes off like a bad commercial. 'I place the delicious Oreo in my mouth, the cream melting in my mouth as I moan in pleasure.' I expect it to be followed by 'Buy your pack today, only $3.99!' This kind of stuff just comes off as weak writing. There is really no better way to put it.
Another reason people's food is described as so amazingly amazing fits in with the Mary Sue. The Mary Sue lives a perfect life with perfect friends and is loved by everyone. Why wouldn't her food taste better than anyone else's food? Why wouldn't her toes tingle with every bite of her fantastic Twinkie.
On the note of Twinkies, I think some people are trying to give their protagonist a quirk. Like Tallahassee from Zombieland, they want a character who loves this one food and obsesses about it for the entire movie. It worked for Zombieland... but if you didn't realize, Zombieland was a parody and was making fun of other movies. The character quirk made Tallahassee funny, but in a crazy inconsistent kind of way. Just because it worked in this very specific instance, doesn't mean it translates to most books very well.
Why am I going on about food? Well, besides the fact that every time someone puts food into their books and go on about how amazingly awesome it is, I can't help but laugh and snort and eye roll until I suffer from eye strain and have to go to the hospital (but it's okay, as long as I avoid future eye rolling), food also makes a good point about another epidemic in books, particularly wattpad books. That epidemic is writing useless descriptions.
A lot of books in Wattpad have been told they need more descriptions. It's like the most common thing that you might be missing as a new author. Books need to have details. You should know about the environment, the people, and the world. The more description you give a world, the more the reader can visualize what you want them to visualize, and the more interested they become as a result.
However, people desperate to add description to their stories but not knowing exactly how to do so causes a bit of a problem. Namely, they describe things that are completely useless to the plot. Yes, you should describe things more in depth, as long as you stick within reason. However, remember that the things that need detail and need to be described should actually be relevant to the plot.
I don't care about things that either everyone does or play no relevance to the story in general. The easiest example of this is the "getting ready in the morning" routine. How many authors have written a scene where their protagonist wakes up to an alarm. Then you describe them fixing their hair, brushing their teeth, showering, singing in the shower, going down the stairs, getting breakfast, and finally walking out the door to start the story. That is 1-2 pages of literally nothing happening, and way too many authors do it.
It fluffs out a word count great, but the last I checked, most people know how to wake up. I don't need to know how many times your character brushes their teeth. I'll take it on good faith they do so and don't have horrific halitosis throughout the story. It is pointless info, pointless description.
Now, you can present this same scene, but intersperse it with introspection. Your character is taking a shower, but they are also thinking about that boy in class, and struggling with questions about how she feels about him. As she brushes her teeth, she'd not brushing her teeth, she is contemplating picking Team McSexyPants over Team McDreamyBiceps. When there is a purpose of introspection interspersed across your actions... that can make a needlessly described scene considerably less painful.
However, this 'pitfall' can get even worse than this. You have painfully easy and every day actions being described in depth. These authors can't just use a computer and print out a report, they have to type carefully, move the mouse to the print button, click print, and then watch as the papers are slowly printed out. They can't cook eggs. They have to turn on the stove, crack an egg into a bowl, mix the egg, pour into a greased pan, lower the heat and fold the eggs with a spatula as they simmer, and finally plop them on a plate and add salt, all so that they can place the deliciously eggy morsal into their mouth, which explodes with a flavor of pure bliss.
*eye roll* OW, my freaking eyes!
So, suffice it to say, there is a place to describe, and a place to not describe. The longer you take to say something that can be said in a line, the more bloated and the more boring your writing becomes. This doesn't mean you can't describe scenes in detail. If you have a battle, you better darn well describe that battle. I want to see the blades falling, I want hear the characters struggling. 'They fought' doesn't do the scene justice.
However, when it's a routine action that everyone does and no one wants to hear being described in detail, you need to use your discretion here and realize when you should and shouldn't describe a scene. If it has to do with the plot, characters, and setting, and it actually plays an importance to how you perceive current or future scenes, then describe it, if it's a character you will never meet again or item that will never come up again five seconds after being mentioned, hold off the description. Also... stop having verbal sex with your food. Like seriously.