description

Grateful Dead: Beyond Description (1973-1989)
$149.98
Follow up to "The Golden Road". I prefer the older Dead material, but all of my many dead show attendence began in 1976, so thats how my brain is wired. Rhino did a wonderful job once again of remastering, packaging and filling each CD to near full capacity. Both sets sit proudly on my bookshelf, providing me with both untold hours of musical enjoyment, and fond memories of Dead Shows gone bye. Thank you Rhino!

Description & Setting: Techniques and Exercises for Crafting a Believable World of People, Places, and Events (Write Great Fiction)
$16.99
This is a practical and useful reference. Using examples from excellent writers, providing good tips for new approaches, it also gives exercises to develop techniques that make for better writing, authentic writing, more enjoyable writing.

Descriptions Now v5.13.12
$199.00
This software was reccomended by a trainer at a HR seminar. The price was well within range and the information was easy to access and utilize

Elements of Writing Fiction - Description (Elements of Fiction Writing)
$12.99
Monica Wood takes on some of the classic proverbs of fiction-writing--like "show don't tell" and "never use adverbs"--and makes a convincing case for moderation.

She covers a range of styles from the minimalist to descriptions that run for a couple of paragraphs, all the way up to the "set piece" scene which gets its own discussion in chapter 3. You'll have to pick and choose based on your personal style--I myself can't imagine *ever* intentionally writing a set piece--but the information is there.

She also makes a point of showing how description combines and contrasts with the other parts of narrative, and offering her opinions (which seem pretty reasonable to me) as to when to show and when to tell.

Special topic: It seems like every book on writing goes on about Point of View, and unless you're a total beginner you probably know all of that stuff. But Chapter 5 goes into PoV in a depth that I've never seen before, with explicit recommendations for what types of stories work and don't work in various PoVs. She discusses not just the strengths and weaknesses of each possible choice of PoV but also gives specific suggestions on how to work with the weaknesses. She even has about two pages discussing second-person PoV, a topic that is usually dismissed with a "nobody does it".

Wood's book isn't entirely anti-establishment, but there is enough unorthodoxy in there to make this an interesting addition to my collection of writing books.