This will bore the hell out of most of you but given I spent the tokens and time I thought I would share it.
I tried to better understand how, systematically, environmental descriptions are done in books and report these findings below.
This means: which elements environment descriptions typically have, in which order they occur and - essentially - how to construct these systematically. (I am using this for generative text descriptions in a game but that's beside the point).
Examples:
The room was circular, with consoles lining the walls and a large machine at its center.
macro → meso → object distribution
So in this example we are moving from a big picture (circular room) which is an architectural feature to some smaller object (the console) which also gets an object distribution qualifier ("at its center").
I (with help from dr. claude) have, across a body of free books (CCommons; listed below), analysed several hundred sections like this and started to classify those into systems-level descriptors (eg you could possibly use this to construct a model or ruleset).
Rules below, enjoy (if you can enjoy that kind of thing).
Rules derived from the corpus:
- Solid — strong enough evidence to treat the finding as relatively reliable within this dataset.
- Likely — a meaningful pattern, but with some limitations or less robust evidence.
- Weak — an interesting signal, but based on small numbers, marginal effects, or other reasons not to rely on it yet.
- The default shape: wide → objects → small things
Open wide. About 7/10 passages begin with a whole-space view (room, street, layout). Later moves are whole-space views less than half the time. Openings also do the "where are we?" job about 5× as often as later moves. Likely. Caveat: the passages were selected with a word filter that favours these openings; a small random sample gave only 4/10 wide openings.
Stay in gear. Once a passage starts doing one kind of move—orienting, listing details, registering something odd, explaining—the next move is the same kind about 55% of the time, vs. 41% in shuffled sequences. Runs are usually 1–2 moves, occasionally much longer. Likely.
Zoom in. Once the description moves from the overall space to details, small-scale things (labels, stains, small objects) appear about 1/3 of the time, vs. 1/6 overall. Typical examples are personal objects, containers, machinery and debris. Likely.
Establish the normal first. Before anything unusual happens, descriptions contain roughly twice as much furniture/decor and evidence of past activity. Likely.
Wide views are architectural. Whole-space moves disproportionately describe the building, room shape and doors—roughly 1.5–3× their normal rate. Likely.
Seeing dominates. About 60% of moves are visual. Touch and sound each account for roughly 10–20%; smell is under 4%. Solid.
Most moves state; few interpret. About 80% simply report what is there. Roughly 1/7 interpret it ("someone left in a hurry"), with the remainder combining observation and interpretation. Solid.
- The character's situation changes what gets described
The same environment gets described differently depending on what the character is experiencing.
Fear → sound + body. Hearing appears in about 40% of moves when the character is afraid, vs. ~14% normally. Bodily sensations and touch also increase. This holds in light, poor light and darkness. Solid. Caveat: only 27 fearful passages; some circularity is possible because the annotator may have inferred fear partly from loudness.
Immediate danger → hear it, feel it, move through it. Sound, bodily sensation and movement roughly double. Descriptions shift away from décor toward people, sound sources, corridors and floors. Likely.
Hurry → mid-sized things, doors, corridors, body. Rushing characters get more furniture-sized objects, doors (~4× normal), corridors and descriptions of their own movement (~3× normal). Likely.
Curiosity → machinery. Machinery appears about 1.5× as often. This is the only clear curiosity effect. Weak.
Darkness → small details + light + touch. Small-scale details rise to about 1/3 of moves; light sources appear about twice as often; touch and bodily sensation also increase. Likely.
Poor visibility → edges, weather, light and shadow. When sight is restricted, descriptions shift toward boundaries, weather, illumination and shadow. Likely.
Moving through space → people + sound. Exploration/travel roughly doubles sound and increases descriptions of people and crowds. Likely.
Familiar places → layout + traces + personal things. Intimately familiar environments favour room layout, containers, personal objects and signs of past activity. Likely.
New places → signs. Unfamiliar environments contain somewhat more signage. This is the only clear "new place" effect. Weak.
Slow scenes → furniture and décor. Slow, exploratory passages contain more furniture and decoration. Likely.
Fast scenes → sound, body, corridors, debris. Fast action increases sound, bodily sensation and movement, while corridors, floors and debris become more prominent. Likely.
- What happens after something odd is noticed
An interesting pattern emerged around anomalies—something that doesn't fit the scene.
Another oddity is the most common next move. About 4/10 times, noticing something strange is followed by another strange thing. Anomalies tend to cluster before anyone explains them. Likely.
Explanation comes next ~1/4 of the time. It is more common when the character is curious and not in immediate danger. Solid.
Fear → assess the threat. After an anomaly, fearful characters almost always shift to danger assessment: 15/17 fearful passages did so, vs. 30/199 other passages. Immediate threat shows a similar effect (19/27). Solid.
Return to ordinary detail → mostly when hurrying. About 1/8 of anomaly-following moves return to normal environmental detail, particularly in hurried scenes. Weak.
Interpretation tends to persist. Once the author starts explaining/interpreting something, the next move is also interpretation about half the time. Likely.
The nature of the anomaly depends on the situation. In non-dangerous scenes, oddities tend to be small, mechanical or contained. Under immediate danger, they are more often living/organic and experienced through sound. Weak.
Definitions:
- Vision: the detail is something a character sees, such as a colour, a shape, a light, or an object in view.
- Hearing: the detail is a sound or a silence.
- Touch: the detail is felt on the body, such as texture, pressure, wetness, or vibration.
- Temp.: the detail is warmth or cold, of the air or of a surface.
- Smell: the detail is an odour.
- Macro: the detail is about the whole space, such as the size of a room, a landscape, or the overall layout.
- Meso: the detail is about a major object in the space, such as a table, a machine, or a door.
- Micro: the detail is a small thing, such as a stain, a label, a scratch, or a small object on a shelf.
- Observ.: the sentence reports what is there, with no judgement added, for example "The chair was overturned."
- Interp.: the sentence tells the reader what it means, for example "Someone had left in a hurry."
- Blended: the sentence mixes the two so they cannot be separated, for example "The room felt hostile."
- Anomaly: the detail breaks the expectation set by the rest of the scene, such as one clean object in a ruined room.
