In my quest to improve my descriptive writing skills, I’ve been studying for days. My eyes are bleary and I’m quite stressed out, because I don’t like having multiple projects going full-tilt and me behind schedule, but I’m going to blog anyway.
I think I describe just fine. I can get away with using simple descriptors (my writing teachers call these cliches and overused bland descriptors): great, awesome, fine, beautiful, gorgeous, thrilled. This is Facebook language, you know when you run into folks you haven’t talked to in years. It’s easy, it does the job, it’s painless.
Move to a writing project and you quickly realize those words won’t do at all. So then you reach into the receptacle of your brain where you keep all the descriptors you’ve read in books or magazines. Those include rendered, magical, lyrical, transported, whirlwind, brilliant (ouch, that hurts), and so on. Soon you realize those words won’t quite do either. It’s a task you’re not sure you’re up to handling, this pulling words out of the crevasses of your brain (or a thesaurus and dictionary) and you clam up, thinking, I can’t do this, it’s too hard.
Nonsense.
It’s a matter of looking better. If you’re describing a beautiful flower, do you use your imagination or do you actually describe the flower? It’s a good trick to remember. Look at the flower and describe it, don’t use your imagination, which will bring out all those cliche words. Actually describe what your physical eye is seeing. The physical description will dredge up even more imagination and you’ll end up with stronger description.
The magic of description is taking the time to look carefully at what you’re describing. For me, it’s taking time to look closely at my recent entrepreneurial past (for a current book proposal) and to 1920s pre-Depression in Dunsmuir, California. Not my imagination, which will fill my descriptions with wrong conclusions, full of cliche and lost meaning, but actual description. The high mountain range of the Siskiyous, the curving road from Mount Shasta City, and the lost in the woods, but still there, hulk of a summer home for the enigmatic Hearst Family, hidden from view and closed to the public. But our family has pictures from the early 1900s when my great-grandmother worked there as a linen closet maid and she has left notes for us, how much the oversized dining room table that seated thirty people cost in the year 1916 (28,000 dollars). It is that kind of thing that works for a literary novel.
I guess I’ve learned something this week. Brilliant.
{ 2 comments }
The trick a brilliant (grinning) writer once told me to keep descriptions fresh is to look at an object from your character’s point of view (like that tailor visiting the Pope joke where he comes back impressed by the Pope’s measurements). Everyone sees the world bit differently.
Kimber, a-ha. Yep. I think you’ve got it!
Trish
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