Chapter 7 - How to Describe Things

As I start to write this chapter's introduction, I'm looking out a window dirty with splatters of past rain showers and bird droppings. The leaves on the tree outside, furthest from the warmth of the building, have turned red throughout. Soon, I think, those leaves fall, worming their way to the ground to rot and I wonder what makes for good descriptive prose?

In Writer's Mind © 1995, Richard Cohen writes that good descriptive text creates an image in the reader's mind and it presents solely the details that are necessary to create that image. He argues not to use a lot of adjectives, but to describe things in a straightforward fashion with a careful choice of words for effect and mood. The writer should ask herself, Does this description add to the thing being described? Does it detract from it or distract the reader?

Cohen suggests writing descriptive text as "factual reporting." Hemingway, Conrad, Lawrence, Tolstoy, and Stephen Crane all excel at this. They also tend to put one idea conveyed by factual description in each sentence; they don't run a lot of ideas into once sentence, muddying the waters of description.

Since imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, I propose to quote an especially vivid selection of descriptive writing from each of the books on the bookshelf for this chapter, and then imitate that writing to describe something on my own.

The books for this chapter on description are:

• Sportsman's Notebook, Ivan Turgenev
• Letters on Cezanne, Rainier Maria Rilke
• Tristes Tropiques, Claude Levi-Strauss
• Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
• Modern Painters, John Ruskin