Descriptions in fiction

Describing characters and scenes in fiction is the heartland - it's where you draw your readers in - but it's one of the trickiest things to do.
The big beginner's mistake is to ladle on description by the potload:

The tax inspector, Grindle, was a small, dark-skinned man with a huge nose on which perched a tiny pair of rimless glasses. His wavy grey hair failed to conceal enormous ears that flapped on either side of his head like a warning system for a nuclear winter.

He wore a tweed suit, the kind of suit you'd imagine worn by the first Ministers in the Free State parliament, devoted to buying Irish produce and heroically bearing the heinous scratching of their inner thighs by the hardy produce of mountainy looms.

His shoes had the mellow shine produced by daily saddle-soaping of the undyed pigskin; somehow Ferber imagined that he could see remnants of the soap caught in the patterned holes on the brogues' toes. 

He had the scent of a subtle, expensive but not too expensive aftershave balm. 

Even his briefcase glowed.

When he spoke, it was with a preliminary throat-clearing. "Mr Ferber?" he said, in a voice that rubbed its hands with every syllable.

About halfway through the second line of this stuff - all useful stuff, by the way - the reader is already mentally moistening a thumb, ready to turn the page, while the unconscious mind is jumping up and down pulling at the reader's sleeve and screaming, "WHERE'S THE STORY????"
And this is the important thing for every writer to remember. That's the question that every line must answer: where's the story, and what's going to happen next.
This kind of massive infodump doesn't move the story along at all.
Another basic mistake in the wodge above: whatever you do, be cautious of adjectives of size. Every time you use big, small, large, wide, minuscule, loud, soft, and all their evil friends, remember that the concept you reach for first may not be the strongest one.
If you want to get across the fact that Mr Grindle is small, for instance, the most powerful way to do it is through action:

Ferber looked down at Grindle. Grindle stepped back and looked him up and down, as if to say that anyone over six foot was a lumbering boor.

This brings us to subtext; every statement ever made has at least two meanings: the overt one, and the one that carries the action. Here, you've got Ferber trying not to irritate Grindle by towering over him, and Grindle making a power play. And you've described the size of both, and given an impression of neat little Grindle and big awkward Ferber.
Dialogue is a shocking temptation for fiction writers. It's a nice easy way to carry the action, and you can go on for pages at a time. If you don't want readers, that is.
The thing to remember about dialogue is that less is more. A good - short - dialogue is like a close-up, where the reader's vision moves right in to see the characters with every open pore in clear view.

Grindle pulled a gun. "Gimme the cheque," he rasped. 

"The cheque?" said Ferber.

"Yeah, the cheque. I've got a private jet booked for the Bahamas," he snarled. "And I'm running late."

"But... but..." protested Ferber.

Writers often think they're raising the stakes by having conflict rise through a run of dialogue. Usually not. Usually, dialogue works best when it's short, terse, characteristic (Grindle should talk like a tax man, Ferber like whatever he is, without exaggerating it too much).
It's important in the commentary ("he said", "she whispered") to avoid allowing these phrases to take over the dialogue. If you find they are becoming intrusive, it's usually a sign that your line of dialogue is too long.
Young writers have been taught a passionate hatred of adverbs. There used to be a happy game called Tom Swift, which consisted of fitting horridly apposite adverbs to a statement:

"Gotta run," said Tom swiftly.
"I could eat a cow," said Tom hungrily.
"Is that a violin?" asked Tom musically.

...and so on, mocking an early 20th-century usage. Nowadays adverbs are regarded with such delicate horror that apparently some (probably second-class) agents simply do a global search of any submitted manuscript for words ending in 'ly', and if they come into thousands, the agent takes the manuscript in finger and thumb, drops it delicately, carefully, distastefully into an envelope and immediately writes a rejection letter redolent of horrified refusal like a country virgin of 40 who's met the Devil at the crossroads outside the graveyard.
(Which reminds me of such a story in which the Devil made a shocking suggestion involving oral pleasures to such a virgin, who was on her way to Midnight Mass; "Oh no, I couldn't," she said, "I'm receiving.")

Truth or Fiction by Jennifer Johnston

Headline Review

Not girly?
Jennifer Johnston writes tiny, perfect books, as delicate as wisps of silk chiffon booby-trapped with Semtex.
Ah so? Explosive secrets, then?
Book reviewer Caroline Wallace’s boss in the Telegraph sends her to Dublin (from her greyish life in London) to interview aged writer Desmond Fitzmaurice - everyone thinks he’s dead years ago, but he’s not.
Alive and kicking?
He promises her “lots of sex and some violence” in his diaries, which he holds under lock and key. Unlikely, she thinks, looking at the creaky old gent living in Sorrento Terrace over the strand at Dalkey.
And is there?
Oh, there is. There’s also lovely wry humour. When Caroline meets Desmond he strikes her as a bit of an egotist, waited on by wife, ex-wife, cleaning lady, sons and daughter. By the end of the book, she thinks he’s a monster.
Monstre sacré?
Less sacred, more selfish. He’s like the sun around whom a solar system of infuriated female planets whirls. All his relationships are biting, with a dash of spite, like a pink gin dripping with Angostura bitters.
Any of this autobiographical?
Scarcely! Though the details of Fitzmaurice’s life share a likeness with the author’s father, playwright Denis Johnston, who was, like our hero, a war corr in WWII, and did, like him, divorce a beloved actress wife to marry another. But I can’t see him murdering anyone.
It’s mainly about murder?
No, it’s mainly about the horrors of growing old, and very funny with it. Desmond F is so antique he’s practically auctionable, but he’s still determined to chip his way back into the world of fame and fortune. He’s a ruthless old beast.
A good buy?
Good buy to all that. The editing, unfortunately, is a little lax, with ‘their’ for ‘there’, ‘affect’ for ‘effect’, and the like. It spoils the, er, effect.
Article by the author's son about the book's background

Last Train from Liguria by Christine Dwyer Hickey

Atlantic

So you’re raving about it?
…writing as deep and warm and soft as a kiss, a story as stark as a knife, you have to read it, it’s going to be 2009’s big Irish novel. Buy three copies at least, because this is the kind of book you press on your friends, and you’ll want to keep one for yourself.
Gripping from the start?
Actually, no. It starts with a depressing scene from the 1920s when a drunk wakes up having apparently murdered his sister, and goes on the run.
Charming
At first you’ll keep reading because of the beauty of the writing, which has the kind of immediacy where you actually think you’re the characters. Which is amazing, because they’re very different from each other - reserved, wise Bella in the 1930s, her messed-up granddaughter Anna in the 1990s, whose one-night stand is one of the funniest scenes I’ve read.
So what’s the story, morning glory?
Bella goes to work as a private tutor to Alec, the son of a beautiful German Jewish woman and a dying Italian aristocrat. ‘Edward King’ - the putative murderer of the first scene - is his music teacher. Over the years they become loving surrogate parents to Alec, whose mother remarries and basically forgets him. Then the anti-Jewish laws come into effect in Italy, and they have to try to smuggle him out before the Nazis get him.
I don’t really like those Holocaust novels
Me neither - there’s often a kind of lip-licking excitement about them. But this is different - you get to love Alec, and the reserved Bella and secretive Edward, and the odd lives they live.
I didn’t know Italy deported Jews?
Me neither, either. But they did - and Alec’s stepfather pays lots of money to priests and nuns to get him out, using his teachers to smuggle him and his baby half-sister, in a terrifying flight. I promise you, this is the best book of the year. It’s extraordinary.
Publisher's site