Description

An Element of Fiction

Here is another big one: how to render the universe (both external and internal) in words. In some ways, this is the very core of storytelling.

Again, this is a subject that many a writer and teacher has pondered over the years, and some decided to share their musings.

I believe that the most important advice on this subject comes from Jorge Luis Borges when he says, “Describe nothing you can’t honestly imagine.”

Someone else who should know what he’s talking about is Gustave Flaubert who could and did agonize for hours and days about the right word to describe something, “To describe a blazing fire or a tree in a plain, we must remain before that fire or tree until they no longer resemble for us any other tree or any other fire. There are not in the entire world two grains of sand, two hands or noses that are absolutely the same.”

Flannery O’Connor tells us, “You have to learn to paint with words. Have the old man there first so that the reader can’t escape him.”

The brilliant Anton Chekhov has this to say, “In my opinion, a true description of Nature should be very brief and have the character of relevance. Commonplace descriptions such as “the setting sun bathing in the waves of the darkening sea, poured its purple gold, etc.” — “the swallows flying over the surface of the water twittered merrily” — such commonplaces one ought to abandon. In descriptions of Nature one ought to seize upon the little particulars, grouping them in such a way that, in reading them when you shut your eyes, you get the picture. For instance, you will get the full effect of a moonlit night if you write that on the milldam, a little glowing star point flashed from the neck of a broken bottle, and the round black shadow of a dog or a wolf emerged and ran, etc.”

Another wonderful short-story writer, Mavis Gallant, observes, “The distinction between journalism and fiction is the difference between without and within. Journalism recounts as exactly and economically as possible the weather in the street; fiction takes no notice of that particular weather but brings to life a distillation of all weathers, a climate of the mind. Which is not to say it need not be exact and economical. It is precision of a different order.”

Garry Winogrand muses that, “Nothing is quite so mysterious as a thing well-described.”

The way Stephen King puts it, “Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.

“Description is what makes the reader a sensory participant in the story.

“Description begins with visualization of what it is you want the reader to experience. It ends with you translating what you see in your mind into words on the page. It’s far from easy.

“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 answer how much, and only reams of writing will help you with the how. You can learn only by doing.

“If you want to be a successful writer, you must be able to describe it, and in a way that will cause your reader to prickle with recognition.

“It’s also important to know what to describe and what can be left alone while you get on with your main job, which is telling the story.”

“The key to good description begins with clear seeing and ends with clear writing, the kind of writing that employs fresh images and simple vocabulary.”

As for the ever-observant John Gardner, “Discovering the meaning and communicating the meaning are for the writer one single act. One does not simply describe a barn, then. One describes a barn as seen by someone in some particular mood, because only in that way can the barn — or the writer’s experience of barns combined with whatever lies deepest in his feelings — be tricked into mumbling its secrets.”

“For a magnificent example of action writing,” says Ursula K. Le Guin, “look at any of the sea battles in Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin novels. Everything the reader needs to know is included, but nothing more. At each moment we know exactly where we are and what’s happening. The language is transparent. The sensory details are intense, brief, precise.”

As for the pragmatic, and sometimes cynical, Ayn Rand, “Do not mention any landmark unless you describe it for the benefit of the uninitiated; otherwise, it is merely a label stuck on your luggage to impress your friends.

“To the extent to which they [descriptions] are good, they are done by the Romantic method — i.e., by means of carefully selected, well-observed concretes that capture the essentials of a scene.

“I describe my characters at their first appearance. Since I want the reader to perceive the scene as if he were there, I indicate as soon as possible what the characters look like.

“I decide how long a description should be by the nature of the buildup — by how much significance the context has prepared the reader to attach to a character.

“When I introduce minor characters, I usually give them a single line naming something that is characteristic of the type, like ‘a woman who had large diamond earrings’ or ‘a portly man who wore a green muffler.’ By implying that one brief characteristic is all that is noteworthy about the person, I establish his unimportance. These lesser types you must not pause on for long.

“Never pause on descriptions, whether of characters or locales or anything else, unless you have given the reader reason to be interested.

“If you are ever tempted to describe something ghastly, ask yourself what your purpose is. If it is to suggest horror, one or two generalized lines will do. It is sufficient to say that someone stumbles upon a half-decomposed corpse; to describe that corpse in every horrible detail is horror for horror’s sake. All you will achieve is that your book, no matter what the rest of it consists of, will always connote in the reader’s mind that particular touch of horror.”

S.I. Hayakawa observes, “Facts themselves, especially at lower levels of abstraction, can be affective without the use of special literary devices to make them more so.

“A skilful writer is often, therefore, one who is especially expert at selecting the facts that are sure to move his readers in the desired ways. We are more likely to be convinced by such descriptive and factual writing than by a series of explicit judgments, because the writer does not ask us to take his word for it that the accident was ‘ghastly.’ Such a conclusion becomes, in a sense, our own discovery rather than his.” S.I. Hayakawa

And let’s end off with another pithy advice from Stephen King, “Skills in description, dialogue, and character development all boil down to seeing or hearing clearly and then transcribing what you see or hear with equal clarity.”

© Wolfstuff