CHAPTER 5
DESCRIPTION: TO PICTURE IN WORDS

BY CHRIS LOMBARDI

About twelve years ago, my best friend was reading a draft of a story I’d written about a woman recently returned from years in a far-off country, grieving the lover she had left behind. In one scene Ruth, the protagonist, is insomniac and considers calling her lover four time zones away. Or rather, she gets up at two a.m. and stares at the telephone, an old, black instrument with a battered dial, even though it’s the late 1980s:

The light from the street made the phone a ghost.

My friend, reading this, looked up from the page and cried out: “Where do you get such descriptions? You never notice anything!”

And she’s right. When walking down the street together, she was always the one to point things out, while I remained absorbed in my thoughts. But it seems that even back then I noticed details from my peripheral vision and filed them for later use. I learned, in the back of my brain somewhere, the heft of a hammer in the palm, the way a set of keys feels like home. Somewhere I noticed the weird shadows cast by city lights that turned familiar objects eerie. When I was imagining Ruth contemplating the telephone, she (and I) saw a ghost.

My first teacher of fiction was the novelist and much-heralded writing teacher John Gardner, who taught that any good writer is creating, with words on paper, “a vivid and continuous dream.” By vivid he meant a dream that feels as sharp and focused as real life. By continuous he meant a dream that remains vivid, not allowing the reader’s mind to wander out of the fictional world.

When I think of description, I think of film, which is quite similar to a dream state. Think about it. You enter a darkened theater and for a couple of hours you are enveloped by an alternate reality that leaves you blinking as you emerge. With the movie, it’s the filmmaking that keeps you engrossed. With fiction, more than anything else perhaps, it’s the description that envelops you because really everything in a work of fiction, except for the dialogue, is a description of some sort. When writing this description you want to make sure the reader experiences the story as vividly and continuously as if he or she is watching a spellbinding film. You don’t want the story fading out in the middle like an old Super 8 home movie shown on a bad projector. You want to ensure that your movie is written in full color, even if the colors are gentle, muted, not blazing at all.

Webster’s New World Dictionary offers two definitions for the verb describe:

1.to tell or write about; give a detailed account of

2. to picture in words

To give a detailed account. To picture in words. That particular Webster’s scribe is a poet.

For the purposes of storytelling, description is anything that creates a picture in a reader’s mind. If the descriptions are good enough, the reader will forget about the rain outside his window, the fact that her chair is a little uncomfortable, the fact that the rent is due. The reader will be swept along by the words, believing every moment of the story, as if it’s a dream or a movie, or as if it were actually happening.

THE FIVE SENSES

You write and read with your brain, but you live your life most defìnably in your body. To convey that experience, you need the physicality of it. Your morning trek to work consists of a series of aggravations, or so my writing students have told me repeatedly. But at bottom, it consists of your feet on the carpet, the feel of your jacket on your skin, the noise of the street, and so on. That’s how we learn the world.

To bring a reader into your fictional world, you need to offer data for all the senses. You want to make your readers see the rain’s shadow, taste the bitterness of bad soup, feel the roughness of unshaved skin, smell the spoiled pizza after an all-night party, hear the tires screech during the accident. Note that I’ve referred to all five senses. Don’t be tempted to focus only on sight, as many beginning writers do. It may be the sound after the party that your character really remembers. You may find that the feel of the fabric of a character’s dress tells more about her upbringing than her hairstyle does.

In Anna Quindlen’s spellbinding novel Black and Blue, the protagonist—a battered woman fleeing her attacker—meets her first new friend in a suburban Florida town:

She was wearing pink linen shorts and a matching blouse, white sunglasses, and pink nail polish. She sounded like an actress playing Blanche du Bois in summer stock, and looked and smelled as if she’d groomed herself as painstakingly for that morning as I had the morning I got married. A drawl and Diorissimo, or something that smelled a whole lot like it.

We get a strong sense of this character because we are experiencing her through our senses, in this case sight (her clothing), sound (the way she talks), and smell (her perfume).

You need these kinds of sensory details to support more general statements or abstract descriptive phrases. You may write poetic, sweeping statements, in sentences whose music makes the reader smile. But giving too many of those without sensory detail is kind of like serving the aperitif without the meal. I might get drunk, but I’ll fall asleep during the movie.

William Faulkner, in his story “Barn Burning,” begins with smell and expands to include other senses:

The store in which the Justice of the Peace’s court was sitting smelled of cheese. The boy, crouched on his nail keg at the back of the crowded room, knew he smelled cheese and more: from where he sat he could see the ranked shelves close-packed with the solid, squat, dynamic shapes of tin cans whose labels his stomach read, not from the lettering which meant nothing to his mind but from the scarlet devils and the silver curve of fish—this, the cheese which he believed he smelled and the hermetic meat which his intestines believed he smelled coming in intermittent gusts momentary and brief beneath the other constant one, the smell and sense just a little of fear because mostly of despair and grief, the old fierce pull of blood.

Here Faulkner weaves in smell, sight, taste (even if vicarious), and the physical sensations attached to emotion—all pretty compact within this rather robust passage.

Or how about this brief passage from Amy Tan’s “Rules of the Game” that utilizes all five senses:

We lived on Waverly Place, in a warm, clean, two-bedroom flat that sat above a small Chinese bakery, specializing in steamed pastries and dim sum. In the early morning, when the alley was still quiet, I could smell fragrant red beans as they were cooked down to a pasty sweetness. By daybreak, our flat was heavy with the odor of fried sesame balls and sweet curried chicken crescents. From my bed, I would listen as my father got ready for work, then locked the door behind him, one-two-three clicks.

We see, hear, smell, feel, and even taste this world. We are physically there. The most powerful method for luring readers into the fictional world is through sensory experience.

YOUR TURN:
Pick a character and imagine he or she has gone spelunking (cave exploring) with a group of friends. Unfortunately, your character has become separated from the group and now he or she is groping through a pitch-dark passage (without a flashlight), searching for either a way out or the missing companions. Write a passage bringing this scene to life through sensory description. Since vision is limited, you’ll have to rely on hearing, smell, touch, and taste. Let the reader physically experience this place through these senses.

SPECIFICITY

Your descriptions can’t just offer sensory details, though; the details also have to be specific. The cumulative effect of specific sensory details is verisimilitude—the sense that these events have really happened.

Many years ago a high school writer friend of mine, who’s now a professor, asked about my use of his intense gray eyes. “What does that mean?” he asked. I’ve never forgotten it. Vagueness is often our first impulse when we’re getting something down. When I wrote intense gray eyes, what did I mean? I meant, first, that the eyes were slate gray, and second, that they glittered a little, like he had extra tear ducts. But that is not what I conveyed with my vague description.

Specificity also prevents a sort of writer’s laziness. She was a beautiful blonde. That’s vague enough not to give us a picture at all, and it smells like it was easy to write. Give us specific details about this blond beauty, like so:

Her nose was dusted ever so lightly with freckles, as softly colored as the skin below.

Paint a picture with your words. For example, Jeannette Winterson offers this sweeping description in her novel The Passion, a fable of eighteenth-century Venice:

There are exiles too. Men and women driven out of their gleaming palaces that open so elegantly to shining canals.

It sounds powerful, with adjectives like gleaming and shining suggesting the glamour of what’s been lost. But we’re not actually in the picture until the author follows it up with:

One woman who kept a fleet of boats and a string of cats and dealt in spices is here now, in the silent city. I cannot tell how old she may be, her hair is green with slime from the walls of the nook she lives in. She feeds on vegetable matter that snags against the stones when the tide is sluggish. She has no teeth. She has no need of teeth. She still wears the curtains that she dragged from her drawing-room window as she left.

Note the stones, the green hair, the lack of teeth, the curtains. With these specific details, Winterson brings this mythical woman alive as a macabre figure in her near-noir romance. Specifics can make the reader believe anything, including that an aristocrat fleeing the French Revolution ended up feeding in Venice’s canals while she played in its casinos. Or that all Venetian boatmen, like Villanelle, the book’s narrator, have webbed feet. The specific details weave a world, and the reader is willing to stay in it—to watch Villanelle fall in love with an aristocrat’s wife, and later to watch her pair up with one of Napoleon’s cooks.

Specific descriptions make true more homespun locations as well. Louis B. Jones’s Ordinary Money shows the reader its location in working-class northern California by simply directing the reader there:

There is a stop sign at the 7-Eleven, and you go left onto Robin Song Lane, then right onto Sparrow Court, and Wayne and Laura Paschke’s house is the third on the left, the same model as the neighbor’s, but painted an out-of-date sherbert green, with a big chicken-wire thing on the side, left there by the previous tenant—and the hard lawn and the oil-stained driveway which always provide a landlord with a reason for keeping the damage deposit.

The author is so specific in conjuring this place that it’s almost impossible not to believe it truly exists.

If, say, a character drives a car, consider telling us what kind of car. Earl, the car thief in Richard Ford’s “Rock Springs,” drives a cranberry-colored Mercedes. Not only can we picture that particular car, but it also tells us a few things about Earl and his taste in stolen vehicles.

Think of yourself as a collector—of sensations, of objects, of names. Especially names. Don’t be like one of my favorite poets, John Berryman, who famously said: “I don’t know one damned butterfly from another.” I’m as guilty as many in this; urban chick that I am, the names of trees and such send me scurrying to books. But I go to those books to learn the names of trees and colors and everything else because I know those names will notch up the clarity of my fiction.

You should do this too. Name exact colors, for example—not that you should rattle off every gradation in the Crayola 64 box, but learn and use the names of some: ocher, cornflower, or even something like “pale pink shading to white.” Name fabrics, tastes, musical instruments. Even brand names can be useful, though if overused they come off as a cheap thrill, and distract the reader. (Of course, Bret Easton Ellis disagrees with me, as readers of his novel American Psycho can attest. But there the brand names support the theme of American greed.)

And sometimes a list of names itself becomes accomplished description. Students of Homer call them “heroic catalogs,” after those breathless recitations of a hero’s armor, a goddess’s boudoir, an army’s food supply, that march through Homer’s Iliad.

Watch how Barbara Kingsolver, in The Poisonwood Bible, paints the Congo with little more than this list:

All God’s creatures have names, whether they slither across our path or show up for sale at our front stoop: bushbuck, mongoose, tarantula, cobra, the red-and-black monkey called ngonndo, geckos scurrying up the walls. Nile perch and nkyende and electric eel dragged from the river. Akala, nkento, a-ana: man, woman, and child. And everything that grows: frangipani, jacaranda, mangwansi beans, sugarcane, breadfruit, bird of paradise.

YOUR TURN:
Think of a place well known to you from your youth—a street, park, school … Write a passage where you describe this place with great specificity. What color were the bricks? Was the slide straight or curving? How far was the pond from the house? If you can’t remember key details, fill them in with your imagination. For a bonus round, do the same for a person you knew from this place.

THE BEST WORDS

What is description made of? Words, of course. If you’re bringing the movie in your head to the page, words are the strands of light that determine the colors, and shadows, and clear shapes.

Mark Twain once noted that the difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. Always challenge yourself to find the best possible word to convey the picture in your mind. Quite often the perfect word comes to you instinctually and, no, you shouldn’t agonize over every word as you fly through a first draft. But at some point, find the words that best sustain the magical illusion of your story.

Let’s return to this line from The Passion:

One woman who kept a fleet of boats and a string of cats and dealt in spices is here now, in the silent city.

Everything is pretty straightforward in that sentence except for the phrase a string of cats. Why did the author choose string? She could have used any number of other words—collection, group, family, pack, litter, entourage, coterie, to name just a few. But obviously she felt there was a particular meaning in the word string that made it feel just right. Perhaps she liked the sense of the cats following in single file or the sense that the cats were somehow attached to the woman. Regardless of whether the author found this word instantly or spent half a day worrying over it, the word string makes a strong and specific impact.

How big is your vocabulary? Though you don’t want to show off by using elaborate words all the time, you should always seek to widen your choice of word possibilities. Keep a dictionary around. An old, old language, English has absorbed words from Latin, French, Spanish, Asian languages, and many others, giving us a range of choices that rivals the spectrum of the rainbow. If you’re at a loss for a word, the dictionary and its cousin, the thesaurus, could be your best friends.

Just watch out for adjectives and adverbs. Like sirens, they can lure you into the perilous waters of weak description.

When many people think description, they often think adjectives and adverbs. As you know, adjectives describe nouns, as in her light hair, and adverbs describe verbs, as in she walked lightly. Think of the pattern of speech: The word I’d use to describe Alan is fulsome. But the truth is that adjectives and adverbs can be very lazy words. They deceive you into thinking they’re doing their job when really they’re not doing much at all. Remember my intense gray eyes. That’s two adjectives pretending to really describe those eyes. But they haven’t done much at all—a hint of sensory, a hint of specificity, but nothing that brings those eyes, or their owner, to life.

And a sentence with too many adjectives and adverbs is like an unpicked apple tree, the boughs sagging from the weight. Like so:

She walked gracefully into the spacious room, swiftly removing a letter from her designer-label purse and regarding us all with her intense gray eyes.

Despite all those adjectives and adverbs, we’re getting little more than the bare facts. This tree needs picking.

If you look carefully at good description, you’ll notice that writers are often quite sparing in their use of adjectives and adverbs. In “Cathedral,” the narrator relates his first impression of the blind man’s eyes:

At first glance, his eyes looked like anyone else’s eyes. But if you looked close, there was something different about them. Too much white in the iris, for one thing, and the pupils seemed to move around in the sockets without his knowing it or being able to stop it. Creepy. As I stared at his face, I saw the left pupil turn in toward his nose while the other made an effort to keep in one place. But it was only an effort, for that eye was on the roam without his knowing it or wanting it to be.

How many adjectives do you pick out of that passage? Three: different, creepy, and left (white is being used as a noun). And Carver isn’t depending on those adjectives to do the real work.

However, when used sparingly and well, adjectives and adverbs can be quite effective. Let’s return once more to that sentence (with the cats) from The Passion:

One woman who kept a fleet of boats and a string of cats and dealt in spices is here now, in the silent city.

This sentence contains one well-placed adjective—silent—and it works magnificently, adding a perfect and necessary final touch to this sentence.

Adjectives and adverbs are helper words, what the grammarians call “modifiers.” They help refine the impression cast by your true building blocks: nouns and verbs. At a writers’ conference a few years ago, a supposedly clever expression was circulating: Are your verbs working hard enough? Granted, the expression isn’t all that clever, but it points to a truth. The stronger your nouns and verbs are, the better they can support your carefully chosen modifiers.

Look at this passage from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. As one of Gatsby’s famous parties begins:

Suddenly one of these gypsies in trembling opal seizes a cocktail out of the air, dumps it down for courage, and moving her hands like Frisco dances out alone on the canvas platform.

Look carefully at this sentence. It features only two adjectives (or three, if you count alone), but its nouns and verbs carry maximum impact. Not a woman but one of these gypsies, not takes but seizes. Notice how the strong verb phrases alleviate the need for modifiers, as in dumps it down for courage and moving her hands like Frisco. (The last phrase refers to a jazz dancer of the 1920s.) I’m fascinated by the fact that I can draw such sparing use of modifiers from one of our more florid writers.

For a more contemporary example, let’s look at the following portrait of the narrator’s mother from Melanie Rae Thon’s story “Nobody’s Daughters”:

Past noon, Adele still fogged. I knew everything from the sound of her voice, too low, knew she must be on night shift again: nursing home or bar, bringing bedpans or beers—it didn’t matter which. I saw the stumps of cigarettes in the ashtray beside her bed. I saw her red hair matted flat, creases on her cheek, the way she’d slept. I smelled her, smelted the smoke in her clothes, the smoke on her breath.

You’ll find very few modifiers in here. But notice the strength of the nouns: stumps of cigarettes, creases on her cheek. And notice such strong verbs as fogged and matted. The nouns and verbs paint a picture.

As previously noted, strong verbs can even alleviate the need for adverbs. For example, she walked lightly can be effectively transformed into she glided or she floated, each more evocative than the version leaning on the adverb.

Look at this example from Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things:

By early June the southwest monsoon breaks and there are three months of wind and water with short spells of sharp, glittering sunshine that thrilled children snatch to play with. The countryside turns an immodest green. Boundaries blur as tapioca fences take root and bloom. Brick walls turn mossgreen. Pepper vines snake up electric poles. Wild creepers burst through laterite banks and spill across the flooded roads. Boats ply in the bazaars. And small fish appear in the puddles that fill the PWD potholes on the highways.

Note how vibrant this place is made through such dynamic verbs as: breaks, snatch, blur, root, bloom, snake, burst, spill, ply. No adverbs needed. Though a few adjectives are sprinkled in, they are invariably linked to strong nouns that don’t get overshadowed by them.

I’m not telling you to avoid adjectives and adverbs entirely. But first focus on the best possible nouns and verbs, then find the modifiers that enhance these words, adding subtle touches to the foundation.

YOUR TURN:
Pick a person you know. Fictionalize the name, which will also give you license to alter other characteristics, if you so desire. Now describe this person as vividly as you can. Here’s the catch: you cannot use a single adjective or adverb. This will force you to use strong nouns and verbs and employ some of the other techniques you’ve picked up in this chapter. Though challenging, you will probably end up with a very well-drawn picture of this person.

TRICKS OF THE TRADE

Now that we’ve covered some of the brass tacks of good description, it’s time to look at some ways to further expand your palette of descriptive options.

First, learn to embrace figurative language, a fancy expression for figures of speech, as in similes and metaphors. These are scary-sounding words out of an English class, but they’re really shorthand for the way we think, the way we process information and emotions.

A simile is defined (by the American Heritage Dictionary) as “A figure of speech in which two essentially unlike things are compared, the comparison being made explicit typically by the use of the introductory ‘like’ or ‘as’…” A metaphor (according to Chambers’s Twentieth Century Dictionary) is “a figure of speech by which a thing is spoken of as being that which it only resembles, as when a ferocious man is called a ‘tiger.’”

We use these every day. When you tell a friend, I was like a house on fire! or He’s such a wet blanket! you’re doing it—taking an image or idea from the universe of common memory and yoking it to a person or experience. Of course, the examples I’ve given are hackneyed—that’s one reason why they work well on the phone or on the street. Everyone understands them.

But in fiction, your task is to use similes and metaphors that are too fresh, too surprising, to be something you’ve heard on the phone. Why should you bother? Because figures of speech are a stealthy way of reaching into your reader’s subconscious. You’re pulling up visual images, remembered experiences, bits of their own dreams, and showing them anew. Your descriptions now have double the power.

Here are two arresting similes from Mary Gaitskill’s “A Romantic Weekend”:

She felt like an object unraveling in every direction.

His gaze penetrated her so thoroughly, it was as though he had thrust his hand into her chest and begun feeling her ribs one by one.

In Calvin Baker’s novel Naming the New World, a metaphor appears when a man sees the rising sun as

a beautiful almond with honey edges.

Now, you would never say on a street corner, Wow, look at that sunrise! A beautiful almond. Yeah, with honey edges. But this jazzy metaphor used in description feels just right, especially as it takes a little bow toward the Deep South, where the novel takes place.

My partner, a poet, told me when we met, “I hate similes; I like metaphors better.” I agree that metaphors feel more powerful, but I think similes are a far suppler instrument. You can do anything with them—stick them in dialogue, give them to a first-person narrator, embed them in news headlines or gossip. Metaphors lend themselves to a heavier narrative style, which may or may not work for your story, depending on its tone. And an extended metaphor can dominate a story entirely, as when the protagonist of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis finds himself transformed in his bed into a giant insect. That’s when you find yourself at the level of allegory where a whole story stands for something else.

Are you one of those people whose writing prompts comments like That’s very poetic or Wow, it’s almost poetry? If so, count yourself among the lucky few who already know a few things about lyricism. By lyricism, I mean prose that plays with sound and rhythm in the way that poetry does.

Feel the lyricism in the final line of James Joyce’s “The Dead”:

His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

How do you know if you’ve got any lyricism? It helps to read your work aloud and hear the ebb and flow of the rhythm and hear how the words slide and sing. You’ll also hear where things start to clunk.

What does all this lyrical effect do for fiction? Just like figures of speech, lyricism sinks your story deeper inside the subconscious of the reader. If music says things words can’t express, text that feels like music also carries those nonverbal meanings, immersing the reader in the experience in a rather primal way. And just because I say lyrical, this doesn’t mean you must use long, elaborate sentences.

Ernest Hemingway knew how to make beautiful music of simple words and short sentences, as in the following descriptive passage from “True at First Light”:

Then I looked through the trees at the Mountain showing very big and near this morning with the new snow shining in the first sunlight.

Notice the almost iconic power of the image, rendered through the chantlike rhythm.

In “Cathedral,” the narrator, who doesn’t even like poetry, manages a simple lyricism when he asks the reader to

Imagine a woman who could never see herself as she was seen in the eyes of her loved one. A woman who could go on day after day and never receive the smallest compliment from her beloved. A woman whose husband could never read the expression on her face, be it misery or something better. Someone who could wear make-up or not—what difference to him?

To further deepen your descriptions, consider onomatopoeia, achieved when words sound like what they are. I just did it earlier, when I mentioned prose going clunk. If people in your stories murmur, if crowds buzz, if the tea kettle hisses, you’re employing onomatopoeia.

In this passage from Barry Hannah’s “Testimony of a Pilot,” check out the effectiveness of the onomatopoeia whistling at the very end:

It was a grand cannon, set up on a stack of bricks at the back of my dad’s property, which was the free place to play. When it shot, it would back up violently with thick smoke and you could hear the flashlight battery whistling off.

Also consider alliteration, where two or more words have a common initial sound. Alliterations comes naturally to us; it’s a game we’ve played since we were three. Meet Bobby Bumblebee! Alliteration can be overused, but when used judiciously it introduces a wonderful grace note to a description.

Notice how alliteration helps conjure the sense of quietly falling snow in that passage from “The Dead”:

His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

When done well, these creative elements can blend together in an effortless flow. Note Bharati Mukherjee’s description, in Leave It to Me, of the place where her narrator was born:

I have no clear memory of my birthplace, only of the whiteness of its sun, the harshness of its hills, the raspy moan of its desert winds, the desperate suddenness of its twilight: these I see like the pattern of veins on the insides of my eyelids.

In addition to alliteration (“harshness of its hills”), note how Mukherjee also uses simile (those veins) and onomatopoeia (“raspy moan”). Her rhythm’s not bad, either. Try reading that paragraph aloud. Hear the music.

Finally, I’m going to pass on one of my own trade secrets, a way of conjuring fresh images that’s often got me out of a description jam: use an image or adjective usually associated with one sense unexpectedly with another. It’s a poet’s trick, known as synesthesia. John Keats used it here:

Taste the music of the vision pale …

A couple that I’ve used in my own work:

the sound that washed your senses his dark chocolate voice

Try it. At the very least, synesthesia is fun to play with; at best, your description will jump to life in a startling way.

YOUR TURN:
Take one of the previous exercises from this chapter and revise it by leaning on such devices as simile, metaphor, lyricism, alliteration, onomatopoeia, and perhaps even synesthesia. Run wild, using as many of these devices as you can. The results may be a bit overripe, but you will have cultivated your inner poet.

TELLING DETAILS

You’ve picked up a lot of techniques to energize and excite your descriptions. You may be tempted to run free with them, alliterating here and bursting with high-flung metaphors there, layering on smells and tastes and sounds, until your readers feel gorged with sensations.

But it’s important, ultimately, to choose your descriptive details. As readers, we know what it’s like to slog through a thicket of description—to lose track of a story in the avalanche of detail about the lush tropical stream, the cold Manhattan apartment, the overview of a village at the top of a mountain. All I wanted to know, you want to say to the author, is what she looks like, and you gave me three rambling pages describing her every detail.

There’s a fine line between lush description and the kind that chokes the reader. Such description is easy to fall into when you’re describing a place you think may be foreign to your readers, or even working to get the details of someone’s clothing or gestures. Be particularly careful of language that’s so beautiful you notice it just for that. Always ask yourself: Does the description interrupt the flow of the story?

Anton Chekhov, one of the pioneers of the contemporary short story, gave us the classic definition of what a story does: “the casual telling of a nuclear experience in an ordinary life, rendered with immediate and telling detail.” What did he mean by the telling detail?

A telling detail does what it says: it tells the essence of what it’s describing. Telling details are the Scotch tape holding up Susie’s hemline in the back, the tiny piece of ice that never seemed to melt in the bottom of Mom’s martini, the street sign on the corner that still says, to this day, school crossing, though the school is long gone. A telling detail can speak volumes in a very short amount of time. They help you achieve a golden mean—enough description to paint the picture, but not so much as to weigh it down.

Look at the opening of Anna Quindlen’s Black and Blue:

That butterscotch-syrup voice that made goose bumps rise on my arms when I was young, that turned all of my skin warm and alive with a sibilant S, the drawling vowels, its shocking fricatives. It always sounded like a whisper, the way he talked, the intimacy of it, the way the words seemed to go into your guts, your head, your heart

The telling detail of the character being described is his voice. The author gets the most out of her description of the voice by using synesthesia (“butterscotch-syrup” to evoke the voice’s smoothness and sweetness), simile (“like a whisper”), and a precise catalog of detail: “sibilant S, the drawling vowels, its shocking fricatives.” For the character’s response to the voice we get a quick hit that tells all—“made goose bumps rise on my arms when I was young” and “the words seemed to go into your guts, your head, your heart.”

Soon enough this man will be described visually, his actions named. But the voice is how he is introduced and his voice is what we’ll remember. Just as many people, if they remember nothing else about The Great Gatsby, remember that Jay Gatsby felt the voice of his beloved, Daisy, was “full of money.”

In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, the eyes of Sethe, the protagonist, are certainly a telling detail. (Handled so much better than my intense gray eyes.) Here is how Sethe’s eyes are seen by her old friend Paul D:

irises the same color of her skin, which, in that still face, made him think of mercifully punched-out eyes.

Later, another character sees Sethe’s eyes this way:

Since the whites in them had disappeared and since they were as black as her skin, she looked blind …

Such telling details stick with us and define the place, character, or atmosphere. And they stay in the reader’s mind with an almost hypnotic force.

You may not know which of your details, at first, are the telling ones. It’s only when all of them have made it out of your head and onto the page, only when you’ve gotten to the end of your first or second draft, that you’ll notice which have borne repeating. What does your protagonist remember about his childhood home years later? What feature of Vietnam’s spectacular sunsets represents the whole, years later? I ended up having to answer the latter question in one of my novels, when too much detail about Asia threatened to choke. What remains now are colors associated with tastes, “watermelon colors,” “rose ice cream skies,” repeated through three Asian countries and my character’s dreams. The combination of color and taste and sunsets seemed to be the telling detail that most reflected the emotional response to the place. You’ll know when you’ve found the telling detail: it’s the detail that sticks with you the most.

Until you find that telling detail, however, be generous. As the story in your head starts to move and your hands follow it, try to write it all down, everything that comes to you, especially any sensory detail.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve looked at a student’s work and asked for more detail about this or that—a place, a person—only to be told,

“I didn’t want to overdo it.” Novice writers, just getting their chops, need to worry more about saying enough. You’re so familiar with the scene in your head that you may think just a few words are needed to bring it alive. And it’s possible that you’re right—but it’s unlikely that you know, right away, which few words those are. Get it all on the page first, and then cut back as needed. Even if your preferred style is on the minimalist side, if you like Raymond Carver more than Arundhati Roy, I encourage you to be generous on the page.

A brilliant young writer, whom I knew in graduate school, favors a stripped-down, economical delivery. His stories, from draft to draft, undergo constant unfolding and compression, compression and unfolding. One draft may be four pages, the next eleven, the next five, and so on, as he fills out the scene and then pares the excess.

For right now, give it all you’ve got. Eventually you’ll find the right time to pick and choose the most telling details.

YOUR TURN:
Return to the previous exercise, where you let your poetic impulses run wild. Pick a telling detail—one particular thing that most embodies the thing you described. Revise the passage, this time focusing only on that one telling detail. And while you’re in there, this time try to keep the description from being too long or overwrought. You should end up with a description that is both economical and effective.

DESCRIPTION TRAPS

I’ve spent this whole chapter encouraging you to utilize many different descriptive methods, to bring your movie ever more vividly and continuously to the reader’s mind. Now I need to point my usher’s flashlight at some examples of what you don’t want to do with description. Bad description stops readers cold, yanking them from the spell of your story, the last thing you want to do.

First and foremost, avoid clichés. I know there’s nothing new under the sun. But anything you can do to loosen the grip of overly familiar language is a plus:

Bone-chilling cold

He smiled daggers

Her cascading hair

Sleeping like the dead

Turning on one’s heel

Feet planted firm on the ground

Such expressions have been used so many times that they’re meaningless now. They leave the reader unengaged, painting almost nothing in the mind’s eye.

A student in my class a few summers ago was a sweet and voluble retiree with white hair and a big laugh. I was surprised, therefore, when he stood up to protest during my lecture on description. “What if she really did have ‘legs that don’t quit’?” he demanded. He raised his chin and looked at me, his lips pursed, either a defiant schoolboy or a guy calling for his lawyer.

I told him that the phrase had meaning to him because of the layers of movies, books, and TV shows that used the phrase. And that the same things that made the phrase work for him have dimmed it for the purposes of improving and strengthening any story he might tell.

Also watch out for being imprecise or even sloppy with your description. Take this example:

He felt like a punching bag without air.

We’ll give some credit here for using a simile. But not much. Punching bags don’t have air, and anyone who knows this will immediately stop believing in this story and this writer. Make it a balloon without air or a punching bag without stuffing and we’re back inside the fictional illusion.

How about this one:

She tossed her head at me.

Here we assume the writer means something like she tossed her hair or she tilted her head, rather than that she actually took off her head and tossed it. But with writing this sloppy, it’s hard to be sure.

Also problematic are mixed metaphors. You can’t have Joanne metaphorically swimming against a tide in one sentence and climbing a tall mountain a few lines later, or, worse, in the same sentence. The reader doesn’t know if she’s on land or water, and the power of either image is lost. If you want your mother to be a fish, fine, just don’t turn her into an elephant three chapters later.

Sometimes, of course, we just need to get the story down, that first mad time, and we put down bad description—clichés, imprecise phrases, and such. That’s quite all right. Think of those phrases as markers, as blah blah blah written down. You can then tinker in your revision phase, replacing the bad descriptions with specific, precise, and interesting language. It’s part of the fun of revision, even if you find yourself going ouch! when you notice the cliché or ridiculously mixed metaphor.

DESCRIPTION OF INNER LIFE

Most of what we’ve been discussing has dealt with the externals: what places and people look like, how they sound, how they make themselves available to the senses. All of which is central to how we use description. But description is also used to portray the inner life of characters—their thoughts and emotions.

Essentially, the same rules of description apply to emotions and thoughts as to anything else. For example, you could write:

Susanna was angry that Max didn’t understand.

This sentence does the job, I suppose, but it actually conveys very little. Angry is an idea, an abstract concept, a pointer to an emotion. Emotions are physical. They’re expressed and felt in sensation or action or both. As with any kind of description, emotions are rendered more vividly when dealt with specifically, through the senses.

If you want Susanna to be angry, there are many good ways to get this across. Perhaps her chest feels tight and hollow or she can’t breathe or her jaw tightened or she speaks in a gutteral voice. Any of these things will convey her emotion more descriptively than simply saying she was angry. For example:

The second Max said the words, Susanna felt her skin flush hot. Rage closed her throat.

The poet T. S. Eliot said, when discussing Shakespeare’s Hamlet:

The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an “objective correlative”; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.

Eliot is asking you, in other words, to make the reader feel the same emotion as the person you’re describing, by naming enough familiar details to evoke empathy.

Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s narrator in her novel Disturbances in the Field doesn’t write:

I was depressed after Althea was born.

Instead she writes:

When she sucked at my breasts she was sucking the life out of me, and when she was done I swayed on my feet… I was cut off from the subtleties of common language and, like a non-native speaker, from idioms.

We are made to actually feel the emotion alongside her.

On a related note, the emotions and thoughts of characters may actually color all of the description in a work of fiction. As you learned in chapter 4, often the narration is filtered through the consciousness of a character, or perhaps several characters. Bear in mind that anything from a character’s viewpoint will be somewhat subjective, and that this subjectivity will affect the way something is described.

John Gardner liked to have his students write a description of a barn from the point of view of a man who had just murdered someone. The idea was that the description of the barn would somehow take on the man’s feelings or thoughts about the murder. Perhaps the claustrophobia of the enclosed barn would remind him of his emotions while killing, or perhaps the red color of the barn’s door would remind him of blood. To some degree, this effect should occur anytime you’re writing through the filter of a character’s consciousness.

For example, Mary Gordon’s novel Men and Angels is told partly from the point of view of a young, disturbed live-in baby-sitter named Laura, who becomes infatuated with her employer’s best friend. Here’s what she thinks of him:

She knew Adrian really liked her. He said she was a good listener. He was the handsomest man she had ever seen, with his thick gray curly hair, his open shirts, his shoulders. But really she wanted to be in the room with him without Anne there. If she went on and listened to Adrian, looked into his eyes when he told her things, praised whatever he said, someday he would like her more than he liked Anne.

Is Adrian really handsome? Maybe, maybe not. But he is to this character. Will Adrian someday like her? Perhaps not, but Laura thinks so. This third-person narrator is giving us Laura’s perceptions, not objective fact.

In Frederic Tuten’s Tallien: A Romance, a first-person narrator reflects on his father, the charismatic union organizer:

Nobleman that he was, riding down the fields of wrath, his terrible swift sword cutting a swath of fat pinky-ringed capitalists, defunct leases and eviction notices still clutched in their pudgy fists, Rex, the radical prince of the Confederacy, under whose ceaseless guard none would suffer except his periodically abandoned family, unpaid bills rolling up like waves against the door, his decade-old son staring up at the light bulbs, waiting for them, like stars blinking off into cold cinders, to go dead for failure of payment. . .

This man’s memories of his father are certainly tinged with rage, and the depiction may or may not be objectively true.

YOUR TURN:
Describe a character who is going about the mundane job of cleaning his or her home. Write from the POV of this character (either first, second, or third person), which means the character’s consciousness will inform the description. Here’s the twist: the character has just recently fallen in love, and you should let this emotion color the description without being directly stated. Then rewrite the passage, but this time the character has just had a painful romantic breakup. You’ll see how different the world looks depending on how people feel.

With his groundbreaking Ulysses, James Joyce attempted to merge his descriptions as completely as possible with the minds of his characters. In the following passage, notice how the description follows a young woman’s free flow of thought, where a sight of the sea unleashes barely related memories of chalk drawings and church incense:

She gazed out towards the distant sea. It was like the paintings that man used to do on the pavement with the coloured chalks and such a pity too leaving them there to be all blotted out, the evening and the clouds coming out and the Bailey light on the Howth and to hear the music like that and the perfume of those incense they burned in the church like a kindof waft.

There really is no limit as to how deep inward description may reach.