After that bombshell of a title, at least someone's going to be curious about this thread, so I'll try not to disappoint.

So, starting off, as you may notice if you, [i]cher lecteur[/i], have decided to delve into my profile before reading this topic, you may notice that I haven't been all that active here, that is to say, not active at all. This is due to numerous reasons, but I shall leave it at two; life and love, two things that humanity has been desperate to define for most if not all of its existence, though I'm not going to rant about that today, as it'd get rather hard to comprehend at some point and I may start randomly using terms in French because that's what happens when I rant about deep things.

Ahem, anyway, returning to the subject at hand, during my absence, aside from falling in love, as a new pastime, I began reading realist novels, which have quite easily become one of my favorite literary forms; spending my free hours reading the words of excellent French authors such as Guy de Maupassant (of whom I especially enjoyed [u]Boule de Suif[/u], highly recommended), Gustave Flaubert (whose [u]Un cœur simple[/u] may be one of the greatest pieces of literature I have ever read and whose [u]L'Éducation sentimentale[/u] has also been highly enjoyable) and, at the moment, Honoré de Balzac, an author who by his writing such as [u]Le Père Goriot[/u], has given me the goal of one day reading all of the published, finished works in his [u]La Comédie humaine[/u] and, for the future, I recently ordered the Japanese author Haruki Murakami's newest work [u]Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage[/u], yet another realist work, but hailing from a whole other side of the world, which has me very excited.

Well, in short, I've been busy.

However, I didn't start this topic so I could brag about the things I've been reading, instead, I wanted to talk about how these novels brought to my attention a possible mistake I had making for a VERY long time in my writing, without a doubt since the very beginning when I wrote about dragons when I was seven years old. You see, a central theme to realism, at least in its manifestation in French writing is description. Allow me to show you a short line from Wikipedia on realism and its sister-form, naturalism.

[quote=Wikipedia]
Realism (or naturalism) in the arts is the attempt to represent subject matter truthfully, without artificiality and avoiding artistic conventions, implausible, exotic and supernatural elements.
[/quote]

Needless to say, without description, realist writers cannot succeed in accomplishing their goal of depicting everyday life and the things that go on in it without resorting to lots and lots of pretty pictures. It goes without saying that descriptions are essential in any realist work, or any writing at all. But do they go any further than that? Allow me to share a few words from my own French teacher, in a lesson we had about a week or two ago (on this note, if I refer to 'French', I basically mean the class anyone in English countries call 'English', that is to say, literary studies, poetry, et cetera, [i]not[/i] French language studies as a second language. Hello from rainy Normandy, by the way~)

[quote=Monsieur Stiegler]
Whether these descriptions are found in the incipit of a work or the heart of the action, they subliminally tell the story to come. As such, a discerning reader can deduce the course of the story.[/quote]

With this in mind, we now know that the descriptions in realist works foreshadow the story, whether it be by describing a lawyer's study in a way that it seems infernal (as in [u]Le Colonel Chabert[/u], of Honoré de Balzac), by describing a Corsican town as symmetrical but depicting a rivalry (the town of Pietranera in [u]Colomba[/u] by Prosper Mérimée) or by describing the room of a character whose name means "happiness" as dark with a single light (from the aforementioned [u]Un cœur simple[/u] by Flaubert). In all of the works I've read in these last few weeks and months, there has never been a description without meaning and therein lays the problem I believe was making with my own writing.

As an example, when I described a room, it was only to describe a room and make it more visible to the reader, not to give a meaning to it, making it superficial and almost unnecessary that I describe said room. What was the point? Was I writing just for the sake of writing? Was it just to fill up space and make myself believe I was writing "advanced" stuff? When I decided that my character would wear a black dress, did it have a meaning?

To answer all of those questions; there is a point and there isn't, yes I was, yep and nope, it didn't. About there being a point, well, for the sake of roleplaying, there definitely was, as it did help other players write their own situation and the character's thoughts, but at the same time, by pointlessly describing, I was dooming them to the same fate. When they picked up the scene, they too would be describing a pointless room, which is blue because blue is pretty, had a chair because it needed a chair and had a single, large window because those things are just awesome. After putting a lot of thought into it, I came to the conclusion that pointless description and exhibition was something I had to stop doing, even in roleplaying. If I was going to describe a room now, would it still be blue, considering the story, my character and my possible role as a GM? Maybe, maybe not!

So, here's where you come in. What is your thoughts on descriptions in writing and roleplaying? How and why do you do it and do you concern yourself with there being a point or not? I eagerly look forward to hearing your thoughts and I hope I didn't bore you with these blocks of text! Above all, I hope you enjoyed reading this! ;D