Description brings readers into the sensations of a particular time and place and state of being. Contemporary writers tend to keep descriptions compact, using words precisely to get across the sensory details and set the tone. Creative nonfiction is more prone to long descriptive passages than current fiction, to the point that this has become an identifying characteristic of the essay. The immediate visual settings of TV and film have made many people impatient with long, lyrical, winding descriptions, which can add to the perception that the essay is a more “intellectual” form than fiction. It takes a certain patience to slow one’s reading pace to concentrate on complex descriptive passages. One reason that novels and essays from the pre-World War I era can seem ponderous is those elaborate descriptions. They use those adverbs and adjectives that we assiduously eliminate from our work today. In that period, works that we might now call creative nonfiction were usually labeled fiction. A classic example of this is the French writer Marcel Proust’s series of novels, Remembrance of Things Past (1913-27). While most literary scholars assert that the books are fiction, they are written in the first person, reflect events and people in Proust’s life, and dwell at length on minute details and sensory impressions. Some sections were originally composed as essays, but upon publication were labeled fiction, since the marketing umbrella of creative nonfiction didn’t yet exist. Proust ultimately decided to call the book a novel because, he said, it was the form from which “it departs least.” Remembrance of Things Past is, 557 Chapter 4 Desc, as Proust’s translator Lydia Davis asserts, _ transformation in which Proust took his experiences He rane recombine lifes shaped” them. The result certainly coul : e e led a memoir, ¢ » ng very least, a nonfiction novel. Whether the reader wishes to see th work as fiction or nonfiction, his passages are wonderful example. . ol elaborate prose description: les of At the hour when I usually went downstairs to find out what the tie dinner would already have been started, and Francoise, commandin a, forces of nature, which were now her assistants, as in fairy plays where . the hire themselves out as cooks, would strike the coal, entrust the stean at" ral ie ; eam ys some potatoes to cook, and make the fire finish to perfection th I . 7 Is th: d © culing masterpieces first prepared in potters’ vessels that ranged from Breat va, S, casseroles, cauldrons, and fishkettles to terrines for game, molds for as and little jugs for cream, and included a complete collection of pans of eve shape and size. I would stop by the table, where the kitchen maid ind ine shelled them, to see the peas lined up and tallied like green marbles jn st game; but what delighted me were the asparagus, steeped in ultramaring and pink, whose tips, delicately painted with little strokes of mauve and azure, shade off imperceptibly down to their feet—still soiled though they are from the dirt of their garden bed—with an iridescence that is not of this earth, Ip seemed to me that these celestial hues revealed the delicious creatures who had merrily metamorphosed themselves into vegetables and who, through the disguise of their firm edible flesh, disclosed in these early tints of dawn, in these beginnings of rainbows, in this extinction of blue evenings, the Precious essence that I recognized again when, all night long following a dinner » which I had eaten them, they played in farces as crude and poetic as a fairy play by Shakespeare, at changing my chamber pot into a jar of perfume, Proust’s books capture not only a time and place now lost to us but a time and place that were also falling away for Proust. They are long, loving memories of a man who allowed himself the room to follow his visions to the end. While the descriptions are long, they don’t waste their impres- sions; the words have purpose, all serving the image at hand. Had he dwelled upon the publishability of these books as he was writing them, they would never have been written. Getting them in print was difficult; they were rejected at several houses on the basis that they were “different from what the public is used to reading.” Proust ultimately had to pay a publisher to print them. When the books became important, publishers who rejected them expressed their regret. A description can be pages long, like Proust’s, or a sentence of care- fully chosen words. It can provide a fully formed and elaborate concep- tion or present a bare glimpse. What the writer chooses to include and not include has everything to do with his individual manner of observa- tion and interpretation. Just as a director and cinematographer decide what is relevant enough to include in a frame, so the writer chooses what part of the sensory experience to show and what part to drop away. Each word reveals something not only about what is observed but also about> pescripton of a Place 87 the author. It is our interpretation of our way of seeing, involving an im- mersion in and translation of the observed experience. Description arises from the need to fully capture the situation. It comes naturally during the act of visualizing a scene or an individual. When description has to be added after an early draft, it’s usually because we've failed to fully show what it is son arises from the that we knew all along. As a writer grows more ‘Dey capture the adept, the descriptions often become more complex, reed a fa gaining multiple levels of meaning; they don’t neces- a sarily become longer. While there are notable excep- tions (see Proust, again), most writers don’t have the stamina to become truly immersed in long descriptions, and most readers don’t have the patience to read them. Most young writers cut their descrip- tions too short out of the fear that they'll “be boring” (or, worse, bore them- selves). As time passes and we read and watch in bursts between Internet clips, the art of the long description is dying away. E, L. Doctorow attributes the decline of exposition in writing to the rise of film, saying that this comes from “a kind of filmic exposition com- pact between writer and reader that everything will become clear eventu- ally.” Rather than having a long descriptive transition between scenes, writers now use what Doctorow calls “the instantaneous reposition in space and time: the cut.” Most readers expect to have those people, places, things inferred, not told to them. Thus much literary prose writing now moves from action to action. Our descriptions have to pack a lot of meaning into fewer words. These words have ramifications and can’t be wasted. This doesn’t mean that you can’t write with long descriptive pas- sages. It does mean that the description should move the story forward and cast meaning. There are always exceptions, but you'll need Proustian language abilities (and a terrific imagination) to pull it off. This doesn’t mean, though, that your first drafts should hold back. Don’t worry about being boring; although you know how someone or something looked/felt/sounded/smelled, the reader is unfamiliar with the particulars of your world. Without that slow line, you may never come to the jewel that is just right. The full description can also help us to see our ob- servation objectively, as if we are viewing it for the first time. In the process of picturing the event or person we may realize something that we didn’t know before. The act of writing about what we see changes the way we see. We're including here examples of various kinds of passages in the hopes of showing some of the descriptive range and possibilities. Description of a Place While we tend to think of place descriptions as being a part of nature or travel narratives, the reality is that we are always in a place, and it’s Pretty much impossible to set any kind of scene without at some pointa Ot | ' certainly place can be descr; lr ‘i ae co Sao .. well, our sla Minj, mally, but since this is a chap! ony ‘ into a bit of detail: jrcus is high and low, and trombones. The edgy tiger ras A circus is hig ta | ¢ her trainer st the end, as if they had been frieng charges, but then eanly: tricks his chum, dunks him treacherously ina band —- “ind glut or the crowd, but then the high-wire walker Steals i eyes © whistle blows. The ringmaster, though he g he boss. is -aricusly 2 star: the seddest puss gets the biggest laugh; and a innocence is rauricny ithove leggy girls who strut their stuff alongside . whiteface Bozo so that ded has his own: reasons to snicker). The clowns teach mont memorably tha: if you trust anybody he will betray you. piccclos This scene, from Edward Hoagland’s “Circus Music” (found on page 442), uses specific detail to evoke a circus—an | It brings together all of the familiar circus tropes, but uses language 7 is dis. tinctly Hoagland’s own. These words would probably never ind their way into anyone else’s work in quite the same combination ( Whiteface Bozo,” “clown meanly tricks his chum,” etc.). He slips in a few ominous notes: the mean trick, the thunder-stealer, the betrayal. While this scene of the circus is a common one, universally understood to most North Americans, its portrayal is not; it plays on the familiar and the strange simultaneously. Another approach to place description is in Gerald Early’s essay “‘] Only Like It Better When the Pain Comes’: More Notes toward a Cultural Definition of Prizefighting,” found on page 320. It comes as part of a memoir interlude. In the neighborhood where I grew up there was a block called Firhill Street. Every black American ghetto must have one of these streets, where the houses are so dilapidated, so absolutely ruined that the bricks bulge out in a manner that suggest a kind of sterile Pregnancy. Even the inanimate objects seem swollen with grief. Many of the houses, as I remember, were boarded up with wood or sheets of metal, and yellow Paper signs would be posted on the front doors which read: THIS PROPERTY IS DECLARED UNFIT FOR HUMAN HABITATION. Of course, people continued to live in these build- ings and no one thought anything at all about it, In this description, Early is focusing on one neighborhood, his own; yet he takes it a step further by saying that this neighborhood is like any other “ghetto.” The lines that follow are used to describe both his own and all tough neighborhoods. The metaphoric language in this section is striking and unusual, taking what might be a generic description into an- other realm. Most of us don’t think of bricks bulging in “a kind of sterile pregnancy” or find objects to be “swollen with grief” —yet we can visu- alize this now that he’s pointed it out; it is recognizable in its uniqueness.Pe pescription of an Ordinary Thing or Activity . ion of an Ordinary Thing or Activity pescr Description certainly doesn’t have to be about pretty or entertaining things and phenomena. It can concern mundane objects and processes placed in the piece because they need to be there and perhaps because the writer just found them fascinating. Anything is worthy of description, if the writer feels the need. The smallest detail and most insignificant event can be made beautiful or intriguing; it is all in how we see and the way that we show. Here is a lyrical description by the writer Lia Purpura, from her essay “Recurrences/Concurrences”: Frost on the bathroom window this morning burgeons and twines in winged fleur-de-lis. Astonishing frost on this, the same morning I discover my mother’s old cigarette case: the same, precise blooms but in silver-etched motion. How the mind of frost, the form reaches out, draws its heirs close; from anywhere, cracked riverbeds and leaf-veins in sun. From a few blocks away, wrought- iron fish on the Roland park schoolyard fence. From childhood, Dead Man’s Finger, Codium fragile, common seaweed, washed up on any Long Island beach. And this afternoon, sitting down to work, a plastic bag catches in a bare tree and stays. I can see it from up here, from my second floor window. Up here, i's Baltimore, The middle of winter, But I know this thing, puffed full of air, the four corners taut, is a swollen egg case, a skate’s or a ray’s: Mermaid’s Purse we'd find at low tide, shining and black and tangled on shore. In this, Purpura uses apparently simple and familiar imprints and things—frost, a bag—and uses them to travel to other things in other places and times (to the fence down the street, the seaweed on a childhood beach, the egg casing). While an essay may be about the real, we are certainly never held to the real immediate present, just as our minds will naturally travel back- ward and forward in any moment of daydream, any time of day. A descrip- tion that begins with a pattern of frost branches into multiple patterns. A plastic bag becomes a treasured egg case. Any “thing” is a connection of something and someplace beyond what it seems to merely be. In a different kind of example, Kate Simon in her memoir Bronx Primitive describes the needlework done by Jewish seamstresses at the turn of the twentieth century: We girls had small embroidery hoops, a few hanks of colored thread, and a stamped bit of cloth to work on. In for the sociability rather than the craft, a number of us settled for fast cross-stitching. When confronted with a leaf or flower, some would make a loop, catch it with a stitch at the end, and there it was, a petal. Those of us who, like myself, came from houses of dexterous, admired hands filled in leaves and petals laboriously and with satisfaction as the spaces became shape and color, the cloth stippled with French knots and its edges tastefully tassled.fa SHARE 4 1 Desc, While needlework ae 2 long 7 ane Fen pa PROS Smog i ivity to describe not ot 7 unity, ee eee of the product is brief, yet pretty and clear, She sf belabor us with visions of florets, but instead simply feveals the appearan of a petal, created from a series of loops that become “shape and color.» ch also hints at her own particular home with women whose work she eled. A description doesn’t have to be elaborate to be vibrant and to cary information about the writer and her times. Description of a Person Nearly all essays have, at some point, a description ofa Person, even if that person is the narrator. Capturing someone in a description that is both accurate and inventive is not easy—we’ve read so many of them that it’s hard to get the cliches out of our heads, The responsibility of writing about a person who may well read the piece adds another level of stress “lS nearly certain thatthe to what is already a challenge. (On the other hand, _Pé!S0N being written about yiy it’s nearly certain that the person being written "0t a0cept that they are anting about will not accept that they are anything like _ like the description." the description, so it’s best not to obsess about it.) § ——--—————__ It’s helpful to read a lot, so that you can spot just what is overused in description. Going on at length about someone’s eyes while using various synonyms for the word blue is not going to be very interesting. It’s also a good idea to avoid adjectives and adverbs unless you are experienced enough as a writer to keep them under control. The description should be distinctive and as unique as possible to the unique person at hand. In this passage from the book The Invention of Solitude, Paul Auster presents a vivid description of his father. This is a very short section from a very long description: When I was twelve or thirteen, with a couple of my friends, he said to me, at a loss, and wanted desperately to go somewhere Icalled him at work to get his permission, and not knowing how to put it, “You're just a bunch of greenhorns,” and .. . for years afterward, my friends and I (one of them now dead, of a heroin overdose) would repeat those words as a piece of folklore, a nostalgic joke, The size of his hands. Their calluses, Eating the skin off the top of hot chocolate, Tea with lemon, The pairs of black, horn-rimmed glasses scattered through the house: on chen counters, on table tops, at the edge of the bathroom sink—always open, lying there like some strange, unclassified form of animal. Watching him play tennis.pescription of a Person 61 “The way his knees sometimes buckled when he walked, His face. His resemblance to Abraham Lincoln, and how people always remarked on it. His fearlessness with dogs, His face. And again, his face. ‘Tropical fish. The tone is distant, matter-of-fact. While it is a tribute to a loved one, it is hardly gushing and embellished. It is through the unusual de- tails and their juxtaposition that we get a sense of who this man was and what the narrator noticed of him. The details are everyday, but oddly evocative; the thought of a man, long dead, eating the skin from the hot chocolate reminds us of people we have known. The emotion is subtle, coming from what the narrator shows; he has no need to be demonstra- tive, and it would actually be out of character if he were. Auster comes back, three times, to the face, but doesn’t go on about it. There is some- thing poignant in the simplicity of this; to say more would take it over the top. Contrast Auster’s contemporary description with one written by Virginia Woolf more than sixty years ago. Mrs. Grey sat on a hard chair in the corner looking—but at what? Appar- ently at nothing. She did not change the focus of her eyes when visitors came in. Her eyes had ceased to focus themselves; it may be that they had lost the power. They were aged eyes, blue, unspectacled. They could see, bat without looking. She had never used her eyes on anything minute and difficult; merely upon faces, and dishes and fields. And now at the age of ninety-two they saw nothing but a zigzag of pain wriggling across the door, pain that twisted her legs as it wriggled; jerked her body to and fro like a marionette. Her body was wrapped round the pain as a damp sheet is folded over a wire. The wire was spasmodically jerked by a cruel invisi- ble hand. She flung out a foot, a hand. Then it stopped. She sat still for a moment. In “Old Mrs. Grey,” Woolf uses simple and careful language to describe what could be a maudlin scene of pathetic decrepitude. Because it is relatively simple (especially for the time it was written), and because it inventively plays upon the electrical spasms of the woman’s body, the piece is moving. Woolf also doesn’t linger in a melodramatic way on the spasm; she shows it, then quickly leaves it again. Although the form of this piece is different from Auster’s, the two pieces are effective because they imply, rather than spell out, the emotion driving the description. A description of a person is often used as a striking beginning to a book or essay. It can bring us immediately into a situation by raising our curiosity about the person who will serve as the driving character. The person may be the narrator herself, viewing her life from a distance, or62 Chapter 4 , Deer tside the self who will become the center of o, beginning of Therese Svoboda’s Black lato eS lite someone ou! What follows is the " c Clark Kent (2008), a retelling of her uncle’s war experiences; My uncle is Superman. With black Clark Kent glasses, Brapeltuitsizeg lots of biliantined thick dark hait, anda solid jaw, six-four and ayy, ty, as all get-out, he’s the perfect match for Kryptonite. He even keeps a = Some himself as a high school Adonis, veins bulging. Now, in 2004, after Ro of millions in farming, restaurants, and real estate, instead of swooping fie ing rescuing people from burning buildings, he volunteers for Meals a Nang just what Superman would take on in his advanced years. I suspect this 5 eel man schtick also has something to do with Nietzsche’s “will to power.» UDer. all, Grandma had more than a whiff of German in her Czech fierceness i t the best better reads the ornately written note I find in her purse aher . funeral. My uncle was her baby, he bore a golden sheen that lit his life - ler him special, a man with muscle. > Made A few years ago he tried to convince me that his eighteen months in the ce would make a terrific movie, or at least a great book. “I was there durin, t occupation of Japan, right after World War Two,” he said. “They found, le we were less barbaric than they were taught. It’s quite a story.” ut rolled my eyes. Superman had gone too far. When we write about people whom we admire, we can easily make the mistake of drawing them as flawless, saintly, ultimately dull. In this Svoboda admits right up front that she sees her uncle as a superior being as Superman—and he apparently truly is strong and steady. Yet she also describes this Superman image as being her uncle’s self-perception and apparently, her grandmother’s (as he was her “baby” with a “golden sheen”). Svoboda admits that his confidence may arise from the “will to power,” a Germanic drive to achieve and control, which in historical terms is not exactly a positive. And then, when the adored uncle at. tempts to get her to write his life story, she rolls her eyes. Superman be- comes, well, another guy trying to wheedle a writer out of a few years of her life. This beginning is risky because it sets up an expectation in the reader’s mind that this is an extraordinary man with an extraordinary story; because of this, the writer has to truly have a story worth telling and the ability to tell it well. We will read on to find out, and if the writer gives us something to hold on to, we continue beyond, as we do with Svoboda’s book. When writing a descriptive passage, we can reveal things to the reader that we may not have fully realized about ourselves and the sit- uation. When we write about the people close to us, we may not at first know the meanings of what we describe. We write to see and better understand these people and ourselves, and we write to better understand what took place. In the act of describing that person, we provide a frame and context that never before existed. The Superma?= FL D eseription That Moves the Action 63 does indeed become human, and the story that was a diffuse series of events takes on a new circumscribed existence. A person in a memoir has the opportunity to live on, and in that way we hold on to others just a little bit longer; a lost and forgotten event can be reimagined and re-experienced. Description That Moves the Action Most essays at some point use description to push forward the action, in- crease the tension, and help the reader identify with the scene. In this paragraph from Laurence Gonzales’s “Firefighters,” the narrator and a firefighter enter a burning house: Before I knew it, I was going up a stairway. I recognized that stairway. I had lived with one just like it when I was a little boy, narrow, with a round wooden handrail, only this one was like the bottom of a back yard charcoal barbecue grill: It was glowing. We were encased in our protective clothing, but I wondered what a little boy in his pajamas and socks would do here: Everywhere I looked, everything, the walls, the floor, the ceiling, the wood- work, was glowing embers. Coiled snakes of smoke issued forth as if the wood had rotted before our eyes and maggots filled its blackened flesh. I was hit by wave after wave of heat that knocked the breath out of me, and when I gulped to catch my breath, I inhaled something noxious. It was not air; it was some superheated admixture of poisons. In all my lessons during the nights and days with the firefighters, there was nothing that could have prepared me for this. I felt that P'd been dropped onto the surface of Mercury, and we were burning in a methane sea. By quickly relating the stairway in the burning house to the one in his childhood home, Gonzales reminds us of fire’s vulnerable victims. He ce- ments this vision when he refers to backyard barbecues and pajamas. He also connects us to a memory (the stair rail, the grill) and an imagining (the boy). This reminds us of the narrator’s own possible peril; it becomes more difficult for the reader to separate from the narrator and to see this as just another fire on TV. We identify. The description quickly covers significant ground, much as the fire spreads. Smoke is referred to in one brief line. Gonzales wants us to notice what threatened him most: the smell of the poisonous gases. As happens in moments of crisis, everything narrows to this point. What the narrator smells is more important than what he sees. The author could have spent pages showing everything he remembered seeing and hearing, and those might well have made some interesting pages. But if he had done this, “Firefighters” would have been a different story. Instead, he keeps a fast pace and focuses on what he believes to be the most essential elemen The fire, which involves several floors of a building, is discussed in o1 two pages.Chapter 4 D 64 esc Own Sake pescription for Its Our final examp i ing we usually expect fron 1 le is the sort of thing a f ive . : a ‘ y! i ation f nature. his excerpt Is from Crip. tive passage: a I tical evocs ) fs Mai Kincaid’s My Garden (Book): . ‘omes on suddenly and moves along swiftly, on sure is flung before my eyes with such intensiy d harshness, in varying cee te months bei 7 ing, a punishment, to look out and see the ergenia, pink > ihe ‘sleeding heart, pink and white; the stiff pink flower ae umbrella plant (Peltiphyllum peltatum, a plant eee to me by Joe and Wayne Winterrowd), followed by large leaves i eld up by ong, fe stems; the pink and blue, white and mauve of the pulmonarias (‘Mrs, Moor’ Janet Fisk,’ ‘Sissinghurst White’); the emerging green tips of the hog, missile-like in shape, slow in progress as the snails who so like to nibble ap their tender shoots; the flowering apple trees. The month of May ¢ day pleasure after ple after the barrenness an\ In this, the description exists for its own sake. The season ang the flowers—and the narrator's reaction to them—are what matters, The pace is leisurely and the phrasing lyrical, befitting a garden. She feels no particular need to rush through her description to get to the action—the description, with its sense of the season’s evolution and its effect upon the narrator, is the story. The eer comes in the writer’s reaction to the blooming flowers: she initially views the contrast between the harsh- a 0 describe Is to offer an ness of winter and the life of spring as a punish- interpretive epresentation of ay ment. After this hint of tension, she then moves aspect of experience," into a long, lyrical descriptive sentence in which ~ phrases are linked by semicolons. The language has a rhythmic sway, each specific word contributing to the musical effect. She is trying to cre- ate a sentence as beautiful as the garden. This sort of lyrical Passage is a stylistic convention of nature writing, with the startling loveliness of place reflected in the rhythms and tones of each sentence. Because no mode of representation—film, photo, sound, word—can exactly reproduce lived experience, the goal of description is hardly to re-create reality in anything approaching its fullness. To describe, then, is to offer an interpretive representation of an aspect of experience. What we choose—and, especially, what we don’t choose—is what turns a record of scattered impressions into an artistic form. Creative Nonfiction Referenced in This Chapter Auster, Paul. The Invention of Soli iguin, litude. Ne : i : Gonzales, Lawrence, “Firefighters: On Fire” tone vette Payee University of Arkansas Press, 1994, ” In Hero’s Apprentice. Fayetteville:> ae pos about Writing an ature 65 sid Jamaica. My Garden (Book). New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1999. , : Parcel. Swann’s Way. Translated by Lydia Davi provsts“ropher Prendergast. New York: Vine coe eae purrs, Lia OM Looking: Essays, Louisville KY: Sarabande Books, 2006 Kate. Bronx Primitive: Portraits in a Childhood. New York: Harper 8¢ Row, 1983. 7 soboda, Therese. Black Glasses like Clark Kent: A G's Yor pan. Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 2008. ee Kini works about Writing and Literature bovis Lyi, “ntodution to Sams Wa.” In Swan's Way, by Mace Proust, translated by Lydia Davis, edited by Christopher Pre ae oaks ikea 00) y Christopher Prendergast. Doctorow, EL. “Quick Cuts: The Novel Follows Fl into a World of Fewer Words.” In Writers on Writing: Collected Essays from the New York Times, introduction by John Darnton. New York: Henry Holt & Company, 2001.