Description - so easy and so hard

A Few Tips on Details

Here are different kinds of details...

• Sensory details– which appeals to the sense of sight, smell, touch, hearing, taste. Example: It smelt like rotting food in a garbage can…It looked as if someone had taken a baseball bat, swung it widely, trashing the place….It tasted like stale, mouldy bread.  Here are some famous examples of smell: Proust’s lime-flower tea and madeleines; Colette’s flowers, which carried her back to childhood gardens and her mother, Sido; Virginia Woolf’s parade of city smells; Joyce’s memory of baby urine and oilcloth, holiness, and sin; Kipling’s rain-damp acacia, which reminded him of home and the complex smells of military life; Dostoyevsky’s ‘Petersburg stench’; Coleridge’s notebooks…
• Concrete and specific details, not general and abstract. Example: Peter Wright, a student in grade 12, wrote a prose poem about social networking on Twitter.
• Authentic details. Your details ought to be original. A good way to start is by freewriting and learning how to think “outside of the box.” In other words, you need to learn to create thinking skills, such as changing perspective, asking why, brainstorming, seeking out alternative ways of describing something.
• Precise details, getting it “just right.” Use a dictionary and thesaurus.
• Don’t be literal. Instead use figurative devices, such as simile, metaphor, symbol, allusion, personification

What to Avoid

You should avoid using the following types of detail:

• Trite details (boring; not fresh or original)
• Clichés (Language that has been overused in speech and writing)
• Abstractions, which appeal to the intellect, not the senses. Use concrete and specific details instead. Example: Don’t say he was kind. Say "He smiled, opened the oak door, allowed me to enter the church first."
• Vague details. You must be precise and specific.

Tell	Show
Kate was tired.	Kate rubbed her eyes and willed herself to keep them open.
It was early spring.	New buds were pushing through the frost.
Charlie was blind.	Charlie wore dark glasses and was accompanied by a seeing-eye dog.
Sheena is a punk rocker.	Sheena has three piercings in her face and wears her hair in a purple mohawk.
James was the captain.	“At ease,” James called out before relaxing into the Captain’s chair.

One of the most important attributes of a good piece of creative writing is that it includes vivid description, such as sensory details, concrete and specific descriptions, and figurative language such as simile and metaphor.

 Take a look at this description of a house …

Oak Tree Cottage had been uninhabited for more than a decade now. The once-white walls had turned the same dirty green as the pond out front, and the paint around the windows had either flaked or already been taken by the wind. Many of the terracotta roof tiles were missing, too – presumably smashed on the bricks below, though it was impossible to tell with the path ankle-deep in last season’s leaves.

Now compare it to this description, which moves a little…

Oak Tree Cottage had been uninhabited for more than a decade now. The once-white walls had turned the same dirty green as the pond out front, and the paint around the windows that hadn’t already gone was hanging off in flakes that swayed this way and that in the strengthening wind. Many of the terracotta roof tiles were missing, too – presumably smashed on the bricks below, though it was impossible to tell with the path ankle-deep in last season’s swirling leaves.

Better, right?

Not that there’s anything particularly wrong with the first description. Static descriptive writing can still be vivid and catch the reader’s eye.

Showing details in motion, though, can truly cause a “word picture” to come to life.

WORKED EXAMPLE

I want to finish by running through an example – a description of a kitchen in a house – which highlights the most important points. As I’ve said, the trick here is to…

1. not provide too many details

2. use only the best details.

I’ll restrict myself to mentioning just five things about this fictional kitchen. (It’s up to you, dear reader, to complete the picture for yourself.)

1 It has a stone floor.

2 There is a table in the middle.

3 The sink is full of last night’s pots and pans.

4 A clock is ticking.

5 The room smells of home baking.