Sportsman's Notebook, by Ivan Turgenev

In a selection from Sportsman’s Notebook entitled “Kassyan Of Fair Springs,” Turgenev demonstrates aspects of good narrative description. He creates an image in the reader’s mind and, using a careful selection of adjectives, creates a mood describing a fresh, perhaps cool, gently-laying scene. Although he doesn’t put solely one idea into each sentence, each idea has its separate clause, especially the last sentence of shoots and stumps, funguses, strawberry plants, and mushrooms:

Over the clear sky the high thin clouds were hardly stirred, yellowish-white, like snow lying late in spring, flat and drawn out like rolled-up sails. Slowly but perceptibly their fringed edges, soft and fluffy as cotton-wool, changed at every moment; they were melting away, even these clouds, and no shadow fell from them. I strolled about the clearing for a long while with Kassyan. Young shoots, which had not yet had time to grow more than a yard high, surrounded the low blackened stumps with their smooth slender stems; and spongy funguses with grey edges—the same of which they make tinder—clung to these; strawberry plants flung their rosy tendrils over them; mushrooms squatted close in groups.

In preparing to write my imitation, I looked much more closely at Turgenev’s writing. He starts high above, describing the entire sky, and ends with a close detail of groups of mushrooms. He also used the sky and clouds to set the tone: high thin clouds, soft and fluffy, slowly changing. The description of things on the ground gives the impression of turning one’s head to look at one object then another. I attempted to incorporate this into my writing:

Overhead, blue-grey clouds clump tightly together while wide patches of black clouds, higher up, threaten intense rain. The clouds twist the sun’s evening light, causing the air to fill with a yellowish half-light: the grass looks yellow, the red of the hibiscus is muted, and the pale flowers of angel trumpet flowers seem transparent. I walk about the yard for a time while Ollie plays in the grass. A fall crocus is sending out its first slight leaves, grooved with grey down the center, and a small, white shoot, covered by a green cap, is just poking out of the base; the summer’s flowers, desiccated and brown, twist through the crocus’s delicate leaves; green blades of grass, sharply upright, running into this flowerbed from the lawn all summer, are spiking throughout; a small maple’s feathery leaves, slowly burning with orange from the cooling weather, gently covers all.