Make Your Fiction Breathe: Deepening Your Novel with Mark Doty’s Art of Description

Such a boring title! I know! I know! I'm so sorry.

Photo by Patrick Schneider on Unsplash

I’ve been working on a couple authors’ novels and I’ve been noticing that they both are leaning away from any setting or description and it’s making the story feel flat in those section.

What’s happening in a chapter is this:

1. Big block of interior monologue

2. A dialogue piece to start the true scene

3. Dialogue continues.

4. Dialogue continues.

5. All the dialogue beats are things like: She grimaced. He stood. She lifted an eyebrow.

So, what’s happening is a couple of things:

1. There are no grounding elements. The reader doesn’t know where the characters’ bodies are in the scene. The reader can’t move and breathe and feel the space.

2. There is no setting.

3. There is no mood/ambience because there is no setting.

When that happens, the writing often feels flat or shallow. It’s like there’s no richness going on and now (as I’m writing this in 2025) it starts to have the feel of AI.

So, in this blog post, we’re going to look at this through the lens of Mark Doty, a poet, who wrote the Art of Description.

"It sounds like a simple thing, to say what you see," Mark Doty writes. "But try to find words for the shades of a mottled sassafras leaf, or the reflectivity of a bay on an August morning, or the very beginnings of desire stirring in the gaze of someone looking right into your eyes. . . .”

Photo by Ksenia Makagonova on Unsplash

Flat. Shallow. Distant. These are the words we dread seeing in feedback on our novels. But even when we’ve crafted strong plots and clever dialogue, something can still feel emotionally weightless, right? That something missing is often a lack of texture—a lack of attention to the real, sensory, emotional world of the characters.

Doty, in his book The Art of Description, reminds us that description isn’t just ornament—it’s a vital mode of perception.

Doty writes, “What we call description is not neutral. It is a set of strategies for making the world palpable.”

As novelists, we can steal Doty’s strategies to make our prose not just competent, but alive.

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