A Conversation With Susan Isaacs on Description in Fiction (Killer Writers)
“Susan, after reading your new novel, Bad, Bad Seymour Brown, we could talk about many things, but description caught my eye. And description is one of the most difficult topics. Too much. Too little. How do you know?”
(Read more from the Killer Writers interview series.)
“When I first began writing fiction, I saw most of it—description—in my head because I began with the old write about what you know. I was reading an unhealthy amount of mysteries, and I knew my investigator was going to be a Long Island housewife. At that point, all I had to decide was who to kill. I had just had some gum surgery, so a dentist came to mind. I had a little office next to our laundry room. We had a loud spin cycle, which was kind of distracting. But that was how I wrote my descriptions, by seeing them in my head.”
Susan Isaacs (Photo credit: Linda Nutter)
“That’s limiting, though, isn’t it? You’re writing through personal experience. But I guess that’s all you have when you first start.”
“What happens when you start writing, you go inside to a different parallel universe and describe what you see. It’s not the same as even watching a movie; you’re watching them.”
“And so you amend that with, say, onsite research?”
“Today, the Internet is a blessing.”
“You can certainly expand your world.”
“You type in ‘forty-five-year-old men, American, whatever, red hair.’ You get hundreds of pictures of redheaded men in their 40s. This helps me envision the style, the facial structure, it gives me a handle. The same thing with the professor character in Bad, Bad, Seymour Brown. She’s bought herself a nice Victorian house right outside of New Brunswick. During COVID, I had the leisure to look at real estate in New Brunswick online and I found the house that I knew she should live in.”
“So how do you know when you’re entertaining the reader or boring the reader? What’s the litmus?”
“You don’t know at the beginning. When I come back and start editing, I always cut.”
“So in the first draft, just write it out.”
“Yes. Then when I come back, I debate: Do I need this? Does this further the feeling the reader gets in a room? Does it further the character of the person who put up the framed pictures of movie stars in her bathroom? Does it help establish anything that’s necessary to the book? If it does not, it goes. It may be the best description ever written, but it ain’t going to be mine. Also, it’s what the character sees through their eyes. If I’m writing two main characters and one is a newspaper reporter from New York and the other is an FBI agent who has been born and raised in Wyoming, their backgrounds are going to be completely different. They’re going to notice different things. And if the agent is going after someone involved in domestic terrorism, he is not going to be noticing the curtains, unless he thinks the person is hiding behind them. Corrie in Bad, Bad Seymour Brown is an expert in the martial art of Krav Maga. If she’s about to flip someone, she’s going to notice whether the feel of the person’s arm is sweaty, or hairy, or thinner, or more muscular than she thought, but she’s not going to notice that the guy is wearing an Apple Watch. If you set a shooting range in the Bronx, you better be sure there is one, because you don’t want someone saying, ‘There’s no range like that in the Bronx.’ So I go to Field and Stream, the NRA website. I do research to get it in my head. Coming originally from Brooklyn, I don’t know that many people who shoot, but I do know some people who do, and I certainly have met enough people in law enforcement, so I can call them up and say, ‘What kind of a gun would a woman with relatively small hands use if she’s interested in accuracy, or what would she carry? And is it called a gun, and what’s the difference between a gun and a revolver?’”
“Research.”
“You get them talking about guns. You listen to the language. You record them if they’re willing. You get a sense of how they feel about target practice. We’re blessed with having great public libraries, too. For Bad, Bad Seymour Brown, I called the library and said, ‘I’m really interested in Manhattan Beach, Brighton Beach area, but not from now, but from 20 years ago.’ And the librarian, who was so nice and helpful, gave me a wonderful list and three websites where I could access local newspapers from long ago that had been digitalized. I was able to see that neighborhood as it was at the time the crime was committed.”
“And describe it.”
“I want to immerse myself. I want to feel that I know the neighborhood.”
“So how long does all this research take?”
“You don’t need three weeks to do it. You can get a pretty good idea in 45 minutes. So in leafing through, you see what the issues are, what the ethnicity is, what people are saying in the neighborhood. And I did a lot of that. I also get their vocabulary. I get what they are wearing. And suddenly it’s part of me. It gives you a sense of who is there. And the more expert you can become, the more comfortable you are in that world.”
“And the better you can write about it because, as you said at the very beginning, you go back to writing what you know. Research brings that.”
“But you have to write. And this article is directed towards writers. You see movies about writers and they’re agonizing, ‘the words won’t come.’ And that can be true. Or it could just be, ‘I have to go to work today.’ I think part of it is to view writing as a job, and your job—forget getting paid—isn’t going to get done unless you go to work regularly, and you set up a schedule that works for you. I’m still on the same schedule I practiced when my daughter, who now has a Ph.D. and two kids of her own, was in preschool, the same exact schedule. I’ve been doing it for years. I can’t say anyone can write; they can’t. But you don’t know whether you can or not. You have no idea. It took me a long time to get up the courage because who am I? I didn’t go to Harvard. I went to the good city college, Queens College, like my main character Corrie. I live on Long Island and actually one of my first rejections of my first novel Compromising Positions was someone saying, ‘Nobody wants to read about a Long Island housewife.’ I decided to write, and I sensed that the only way I could do it was by doing it, by sitting down. My younger kid, who was then three, was off to preschool for three hours a day and I had to have the discipline. That was it. I decided there was no medical emergency that required fresh laundry and there was no need, even in blueberry season, to make a pie during these three hours. I just had to do this.”
“May I ask what that schedule is?”
“At nine o’clock I’m at my computer. Between twelve and one, I quit. I used to set an alarm to get her off the school bus, but I don’t have to do that anymore, but around twelve or one, I take a break. I go outside. I’ll do normal people things: play in the garden, pick up dirt, read a book, whatever I’m going to do, shop for shoes. But then, in the afternoon, when said child was taking a nap, I would go over this stuff.”
“Marking what works and removing what doesn’t. Looking through the eyes of each of the characters as to what is important. Tightening up that particularly perilous or wonderful description.”
“And I still print it out to mark it up. I’m still of that school. It’s whatever works for you. It’s completely idiosyncratic. My recipe for chicken soup is not going to be the same as yours. No two people make it alike.”
“And no two characters.”
“But that’s what makes you human.”
“And your characters, as well.”
Check out Susan Isaacs’ Bad, Bad Seymour Brown here:
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Susan Isaacs is the author of 14 novels, including Bad, Bad Seymour Brown, Takes One to Know One, As Husbands Go, Long Time No See, Any Place I Hang My Hat and Compromising Positions. A recipient of the Writers for Writers Award and the John Steinbeck Award, Isaacs is a former chairman of the board of Poets & Writers, and a past president of Mystery Writers of America. Her fiction has been translated into 30 languages. She lives on Long Island with her husband. https://www.susanisaacs.com/