One writing choice that I feel like I am struggling with currently has been the decision whether to provide just enough description to allow the reader to fill in the world with their own interpretations of my words or provide such an extensive description that every aspect of the world has been decided for them. While these two options represent somewhat opposing sides, I hope to explore my reasonings for why I made the decisions in the past will help me discover which way works best for me. I have another nefarious purpose for this post, too, as I have been reading student descriptive essays lately that often show me that students do not have the same love of verbosity that I do, and while this fact is nothing new to me, there becomes a point at which the loss of description damages the text you are trying to construct instead of strengthening it. Maybe I can find the balanced center for description that should benefit us all by writing out some of my thoughts here and underline the importance this skill can bring to one’s own pieces of writing.
I raised this concern after a writing group that I exchange manuscripts with exposed these trends in two separate pieces of writing that I shared with them that spanned around twelve or thirteen years. Although both of the manuscripts that I shared have plenty of problems—some of which are very exciting to work through once I have become aware of them—from my authorial perspective one of the main differences I saw was a lack of description in my older manuscript and a superfluous amount of description in my more recent ones. Even though I envision both of the worlds in these manuscripts with nearly equal clarity in my mind, what I wrote on the page differed drastically. This entry will mainly be working through the three options for description in longer texts—minimal description, medium description, and extensive description—as I try to arrive at a decision myself as to which one serves the reader and writer better. I will use this opportunity to bring in related lessons that I see emerge in my own writing instruction.
My first thought relates to some of the academic writing I teach. Two of the major forms we have students practice near the beginning of our first-year composition classes are the strategies of description and illustration. While the concepts of these structures are simple enough, sometimes they seem so simple that students forget to apply them fully. In the case of description, for example, students expect that they should use more grandiose words in order to elevate their descriptions to another level when they should instead focus more on whether they are including a vast array of types of descriptions about different senses that should all serve a central goal. While a better vocabulary can help one meet the needs of describing more senses more accurately, it will not correct a situation where a writer is not describing enough or focusing on the wrong items to include. So often when we describe or illustrate a scene for someone, we assume that we do a good enough job that others will picture the scene exactly as we perceive it in our own minds. Even I am guilty of thinking this way when I worry too much about recording my thoughts as words. A lack of clarity is not helpful for anyone in any writing situation, no matter if a writer is writing fiction or nonfiction. For essays we often discuss creating a dominant impression that guides the writer as they choose specific words to build their description to elicit a particular reaction. Sometimes students choose the dominant impression without actually describing it. Compare the following examples that describe the same picture below.
Example 1: A cluttered desk fills most of the view of the room, a busy wall with several colorful images of a forest around a window where sunlight illuminates a black chair over gray carpet and tiles.
This description is not altogether bad, but it misses many of the details that give this image a deeper meaning. Sometimes descriptions are more than just descriptions. Compare Example 1 to the description below.
Example 2: Stacks of ungraded student papers sit across not one desk but two, the newer, rickety one completely subsumed beneath the piles of papers and the items keeping them from blowing away—lukewarm grape juice boxes, an elegant mask from the recent prom, Post-It notes waiting to be filled. The books arranged at the edge of the older wooden desk lean against other barriers as they wait to see if they will fall or be read once again. The chair may be empty in the afternoon light, but the slight scent of honey and spice lingers from the bag of chips there. Even the shag rug under the rolling chair sits askew like the remains of the school year.
Is this second description perfect? No. Yet the details show that a greater world exists in the mind of the writer, and the reader will keep reading to see how much of that world the writer gives them. This sample avoids a common problem of overabundance that happens when writers are reminded of the five senses, thinking that they must describe all of those senses every time they wish to portray a scene. There are many cases, for example, where describing taste would be inappropriate or strange, although that thought sometimes does not occur to beginning writers who desire a complete picture of an experience—and I have read many student descriptions of items as varied as leather, oil, and bricks, even though I hope those students have never tasted those things in real life. Descriptions are enjoyable to write unless you look at the task as checking off certain criteria in order to reach a certain conclusion; in those cases the details become scratches across your mind.
If a writer looks at writing in that manner, then they risk not describing their setting enough, but how does a writer arrive at too much description? It is not always as simple as describing a sense that someone should not describe. Writers intermingle descriptions and illustrations throughout texts, so they cannot be excised surgically like other elements. As a chronic overdescriber, I rarely notice when I am doing it as I am writing, and I sometimes justify those descriptions when I revise because I need there to be clarity for myself as much as my reader. Where I and others sometimes get lost is that I lose sight of what I need to be describing and thus try to describe everything—the entire world—in as much detail as I can muster. Too much description waters down the narrative, diluting what should actually matter to the reader. Describing the physical environment too much in a character-driven story if it does not actually affect those characters in any meaningful way may distract the reader from those sequences where you describe the character or characters in question, the events that propel the story forward, or other devices necessary for the story to succeed. A solid recommendation no matter the type of story or type of writing a writer constructs might be to choose an element or a series of elements to describe in the greatest depth possible and allow the reader enough detail for the other characteristics that they do not feel cheated of understanding. Like so many other strategies for writing, the middle path allows the writer to maintain a consistency that can cause the specific facets of their style to shine.
An example that I read recently that fits many of these criteria was Natalie Goldberg’s Three Simple Lines: A Writer’s Pilgrimage into the Heart and Homeland of Haiku. Part travelogue and part writing exploration, Goldberg explored how deceptively simple haikus seem to be as she referenced her own work to compose them with greater strength. Even though I doubt this was a factor she chose to focus on, I noticed that as she described her journeys through different districts in Japan she drew particular attention to the seats she took as she visited restaurants, temples, and a variety of other environments. You might say that this idea progresses naturally from a Buddhist practice like sitting zazen, which she catalogues in this book, but I instead noticed the detail she inserted about something I hardly ever remark upon. Indeed, as I remembered that I got the idea for this entry after sitting in a chair in a convention center for eight hours, I found that I could not quite recall much about that chair at all. What color was the cushion? Was the framing metal or plastic? Was it on the heavy side or rather light? While I have guesses for some of these answers, I realized instead that I overlooked something that would have been integral to my understanding of my experience, a detail that might help someone feel a similar emotion without having to undergo the same struggles.
Therein hides the power that description holds for our writing. Unique description reveals not only something about the setting or scene we needed to know, but it also reveals something about ourselves in the process, too. We can apply this understanding both as the writer composing the description and the reader reading another writer’s prose. The only way to ensure we forge that connection is to make sure we give enough of ourselves to the reader, enough words that we can only lead them to places we want them to go. We owe it to our readers to be exact in our words if not in the possible interpretations we want them to make of those phrasings, and that middle path will serve us and our readers best.
How would you describe some of the photos below?
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