An approach to descriptions

[skip.knox]

I've been re-reading Patrick Fermor specifically to figure out why I enjoy his writing so much, and I've discovered one technique. He writes vivid descriptions--of houses, landscapes, moments, interiors. One aspect of his descriptions is his specificity. He's not afraid to use architectural language, antiquated words, to name specific birds or trees, that sort of thing.

But the technique I've recently discovered is that he very often proceeds from the general to the specific. He will begin with the setting or landscape, describing mountains, forests, the sky, that sort of thing. He moves on to particular buildings, a field, the sound of animals. And he'll finish with the shape of shingles on a roof, or the nostrils of a water buffalo emerging from water. Sometimes this technique spreads across multiple paragraphs (he is a leisurely writer), but sometimes he manages it within a single sentence.

He doesn't do this all the time, but it's often enough that I think it was part of his writing arsenal. I've been finding places in my own writing where I can work this in. Oh, and btw, the way I discovered this was by copying passages out longhand. I had to go that slowly before I really noticed what he was doing.

 

[Heliotrope]

Can you please post a sample? I'd love to see it….

 

[Svrtnsse]

This makes sense.

It is, I think, about starting with the things you notice first and then moving on to the things you notice next as you look closer. This gives the description a natural flow and it eliminates the risk of the reader imagining something that's incorrect and which will get countered later.

Let's say you want to describe a house. You could say it's a squat little cottage built of stone and a wooden door. This tells us there's a house, but we don't know whether it's in a village, or in a forest or in the middle of a field. If you don't include that in the description (and if it's not clear from context), the reader will place the house somewhere on their own. It's really difficult to imagine a house without including some kind of surrounding.

Moving closer, we make out more details. For example, there's a bench next to the door and a candle burns in the little window. That's some nice detail added - except you wouldn't be burning a candle unless it's night. Again, if that wasn't clear from context, it should have been mentioned earlier that it's dark outside.

Adding the bench to the description does nothing to alter anything we shouldn't already have noticed, so it's fine to put that in. If we want to add in the candle though, we should probably go back a little and make sure the reader knows it's night.

---

Another way of looking at it is to think of the description as being layered. Each property of an object you describe belongs to a layer. You don't have to describe all properties of a layer before you peel it off and move on to the next layer, you can even skip some layers completely. What you can't do is describe a property (directly or indirectly) of a layer that's already been peeled off.

Whenever you peel off a layer you will have to acknowledge that any properties of that layer that you haven't mentioned are handled by the reader. They make up their own ideas about it. If you go back and change something in a peeled off layer, you risk going against the reader's imagination and you'll bring them out of the story.

That's another way of viewing the idea of starting with the big things and zooming in on the details.

 

[skip.knox]

Can you please post a sample? I'd love to see it….

Sure. Since I mentioned the buffalo, here's that passage. BTW, just for context, Fermor as a young man walked from London to Istanbul. This is from his account of that journey. I omit the broader descriptions and begin at mid-ground

... The women in the fields wore kerchiefs on their heads under hats of soft plaited straw as wide as cart-wheels; leaves like broken assegais plumed the tall maize; an occasional breeze ruffled the wheat; the vines, all sprayed with sulphate, climbed in tiers. Pale cattle with wide, straight horns grazed by the score and the fens and water-meadows that lay about the river were wallows for buffaloes; lustrous as seals, or caked in dried mud as armour against insects, they were sometimes only to be spotted in the slime and the swamps by bubbles or an emerging nostril. ...

And one more, just cuz, from another place further on.

... Waggons creaked under loads of apricots, yet the trees were still laden; they scattered the dust, wasps tunnelled them and wheels and footfalls flattened them to a yellow pulp; tall wooden vats bubbled among the dusty sunflowers, filling the yards with the sweet and heady smell of their fermentation; and soon, even at midday, the newly distilled spirit began to bowl the peasants over like a sniper, flinging the harvesters prostrate and prone in every fragment of shadow. They snored among sheaves and haycocks and a mantle of flies covered them while flocks crammed together under every spread of branches, and not a leaf moved. ...


Also notable in these passages is the sense of movement, almost as of a camera sweeping through the scene. The apricots move to the brandy made from them to the peasants making it to the branches that shade them.

 

[Heliotrope]

Thanks Skip, really beautiful.

When you mentioned you wrote some of the passages out it reminded me of a writing exercise from university. We also had to write out passages we admired, but then the next step was to take the passages and copy the sentence pattern, but substitute language and subject matter of our own. That would be a really fun exercise to do with these passages as well. Copy them out, but using words, images, and subject matter from our own stories.

I think I will try that again….

 

[skip.knox]

Whatever the method, I do think there's profit to be had in studying the masters (to invoke S. Dali's admonition); "masters" here defined as writers one admires. One, it forces one to evaluate why one admires them. Two, it affords an opportunity for emulation, which is the best sort of writing challenge, imo. Three, it lets me have three points to make, so I sound Deep.

 

[Heliotrope]

Sounding deep is a handy skill. Handier than actually being deep, which just come across as elitist.