October Newsletter

By Jessica Page Morrell

The Power of Description

A few years ago I attended a show of Van Gogh's paintings in Los Angeles. It was a rare gathering of his work, and as the throng of admirers streamed past the paintings, the colors as vivid as dreamscapes, we could track his personal and artistic evolution and tragically, his disintegration. His last painting, "Wheatfield with Crows" will always be seared into my memory. It was his last painting before he killed himself and on the canvas, a gloomy, gathering sky is scattered with a nightmare flock of crows and a wheat field is rent with a road down its center.

It is a haunting painting and I remember pausing in front of it and noticing that each brush stroke seemed to shriek in agony. Each tiny detail was weighted with meaning.

There are many techniques in writing, but perhaps description is where each writer breathes his or her personality or essence onto the page. And it is perhaps where your level of skill is most revealed.

Effective description can transform bland writing into a vivid, holistic world like the brushstrokes of a painting. In On Writing, Stephen King says, "Description is what makes a sensory participant in the story. Good description is a learned skill, one of the prime reasons why you cannot succeed unless you read a lot and write a lot. It's not just a question of how-to, you see; it's also a question of how much to. Reading will help you with the how. You can only learn by doing."

But as King advises, and most editors notice while reading the first few pages of a manuscript, there is often too little or too much description. "Thin description leaves the reader feeling bewildered and nearsighted. Overdescription buries him in details and images. The trick is to find a happy medium."

But where lies that happy medium? Perhaps the answer lies in focusing on the chief "job" of description which is to stir a reader's emotions. Of course description has other tasks to accomplish in writing, but this one is vital. Description can suggest mood and atmosphere in a scene. It can suggest a character's motives and the content of his or her heart; it can whisper an ominous note to foreshadow a coming event.

But as a technique, description doesn't stand alone, it is entwined with other elements. Nor is it something we merely insert to pump up a scene. Most of all, the details are carefully chosen, accurate, and potent.

And description is always sensory. Just as we live in this teeming world through our senses, so we breathe life into words by translating the senses onto the page. It's always rooted in the physical world, and this rootedness lends it power and an illusion of reality.

Like Van Gogh's paintings, we strive to create word paintings, and whenever possible, these images should be brimming with life and in motion even when you're describing a stationary object. Language, metaphor and imagery are often the key, and the results are a vivid blend that breathes life into the story.

I've always thought that there is not a true separation between art forms. As writers we are always making our work visual and sensory, just as painters are telling a story and expressing emotions with splashes of color and finely honed lines. Or sculptors are suggesting a story through a subject's shape, density and posture.

Art all comes from the same place in the brain and heart, stirs from the same yearnings of expression. We all have stories to tell, words to share. It is a rare person who has nothing to say about the years he or she has spent on the planet.

But of course, as writers, words are the tools we use and these words must be selected with care. We choose them for their weight and clarity. A writer once said, "The line of words is a miner's pick, a woodcarver's gauge, a surgeon's probe. You wield it, and it digs a path for you to follow."

I can think of no better tool than these humble black strokes stark against the white page.

It's all in the Details: Tips for using descriptive details in your writing:

Start with the obvious: When the essay/article/story first forms in your imagination, pay attention to the initial images that come to you.
Next, pay attention to the images that evoke emotions; make you feel sad, angry, confused. Can you translate these feelings via details? Will the same details stir a reader's emotions also?
Ask yourself if you left out the detail would the story be confusing. Is it distracting?
Will the detail stir the reader's emotions?
Remember the best writers tell (describe) a little and demonstrate (by action) a lot.
Does the detail make the story deeper, credible, real and grounded?
In general, use restraint with details, inserting only small bits at a time not long paragraphs or lengthy descriptions. Remember that description is static unless put in motion, and therefore stops the action.
Don't include a detail because it happened in real life-just because something happened doesn't make it necessarily important.
Does the detail reveal information, offer explanations, suggest tension, conflict, establish mood or tone?
Are the details consistent with the tone and voice?
Are you stopping often to describe a character's thoughts and feelings?
Whenever possible put descriptions in motion & sprinkle brief details throughout action.

Inspiration:

"Description is not so much an element of fiction as its very essence; it is the creation of mental images that allow readers to fully experience a story. When you write a story, you offer an account of a chain of events, the characters that inhabit those events, and the places in which those events occur. How you describe those events, characters and places affects your reader's perceptions." Monica Wood

"At dawn, if it was low tide on the flats, I would awaken to the chatter of gulls. On a bad morning, I used to feel as if I had died and the birds were feeding on my heart. Later, after I dozed for a while, the tide would come up over the sand as swiftly as a shadow descends on the hills when sun lowers behind the ridge, and before long the first swells would pound on the bulkhead of the deck below my bedroom window, the shock rising in one fine fragment of time from the sea wall to the innermost passages of my flesh. Boom! the waves would go against the wall, and I could have been alone on a freighter on a dark sea." --Tough Guys Don't Dance, Norman Mailer