How to Write Vivid Descriptions
By: Chuck Sambuchino | August 22, 2015
“Whenever you go out to paint, try to forget what objects you have in front of you – a tree, a
house, a field or whatever. Merely think, here is a little squeeze of blue, here an oblong of pink,
here a streak of yellow, and paint it just as it looks to you, until it gives your own naïve
impression of the scene in front of you.” – Claude Monet
I first encountered this quote in Oliver Sacks’ book An Anthropologist On Mars. It is advice on
how to break free of cliché approaches to painting, but it applies almost just as well to writing.
The first step to vividly describing a place, person, or thing is to imagine it in your mind’s eye.
Alternately, if it actually exists you may prefer to look at it or a photograph directly. Either way,
you’ll start with some scene before you without dividing it into objects or attaching any words
to it. Just form a “naïve impression” of the colors, textures, shapes, feeling, of whatever it is
while refraining from your impulse to name them. Simply picture and observe.
The next step is to carefully select the right words to convey it. If the words that come to mind
don’t seem adequate, look in a dictionary, ask around, or do some research if necessary, but be
sure to keep searching until you have the closest match possible between experience and
language. While it’s okay to stop short of perfection, since words and thought inevitably fail to
capture perception anyways, keep revising until you can’t think of any way to improve your
description further. At this point, your gut instinct should be telling you it’s ready.
What I’ve said so far may sound obvious, but it’s surprising how easy it is to get these two
steps mixed up. Instead of allowing the meaning you want to express to decide the words,
you are seduced by alliteration, rhythm and other sonic features, or fail to escape from
customary phrasing, and allow language itself to decide what it is you want to say. But this
approach, as George Orwell cautions in his famous essay Politics And The English Language,
traps writers in trite, conformist modes of thinking, which drains their images of vividness.
So now that we have a basic method, let’s try to describe a lake at sunset: “The lake glittered in
the light of the setting sun.”
There is nothing wrong with this sentence. It might work well in many a story depending on the
context. But it doesn’t capture the particularity of the moment.
“As the tip of the sun was about to slip below the green hills stretching in layered curves along
the horizon, the lake caught its setting light, and glittering streaks of mauve and orange
squirmed across the black surface with the undulations of the waves like worms of celestial
fire.”
Our second example may be slightly overwrought. The simile at the end adds precision to the
image but may carry unwanted symbolic baggage, and we might find other ways to simplify it,
but at least it transports the reader’s awareness into the moment. This is not just any sunset on
any lake at any time, but the particular phase of a particular sunset on a particular lake. You can
see the effort made to envision a definitive scene and give it a commensurately definitive
expression.
You’ve probably noticed that the word count for the second example is much higher than the
first, so once you’ve become proficient at writing with naïveté, the next point to consider is
pacing.
You don’t want to describe everything in meticulous detail all the time as this can overwhelm
and potentially bore your reader. Even in my novel Cash Crash Jubilee, in which I set out to
describe every moment of my protagonist’s experience over the course of three days, I decided
to cut out and simplify many descriptions in the interest of moving the plot along. On the other
hand, excessively barebones writing with insufficient detail may get to the action quicker but
will deprive the story of originality and impact. This quote from Raymond Chandler,
commenting on the way readers react to detective fiction, illustrates this point:
“The things they remembered, that haunted them, was not, for example, that a man got killed,
but that in the moment of death he was trying to pick a paper clip up off the polished surface of
a desk, and it kept slipping away from him, so that there was a look of strain on his face and his
mouth was half opened in a kind of tormented grin, and the last thing in the world he thought
about was death.”
Remove the details of the paper clip and the look on the man’s face, and this murder is liable to
fade from the reader’s memory like a clear, blue sky. The key to writing memorably is
effectively balancing action and particularity. But the ideal balance varies from story to story—
with short stories tending to weight action more heavily than novels—and also depends on
personal style. In this sense, writing with naïvety is a tool to help you discover what proportion
works for you and the stories that only you can tell.
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