writing description Archives - Writing Like a Dancer

A WRITING BLOG About Playing Around with a Story Line in Different Literary Genres and Different Literary Categories

Writing Leap #26

Hi Writers,

Specific details open up larger worlds.

Generalizations do not. And they are no fun to write or to read. They leave no room for free floating associations. Readers glide over them and forget them a second later.

Generic descriptions kill deeper responses to our writing.

A writing teacher once told me, “Don’t write, ‘She wore jeans.’ Write ‘She wore old cut-off jeans that were tight across her tush.” Now that’s a comment that has stayed with me for twenty years.

Specificity. Could this be the golden key that unlocks our imaginations and the imaginations of our readers?

Go ahead, writers. Have a good time with specificity in your fiction, your essays, your descriptions. What details in your world have struck you lately? From a book? A conversation? A film?

The Story Line is:

I Notice, Therefore I Am!

(Please pardon the ridiculous pun.)

Here’s mine.

Did you hear President Obama’s recent speech on racism? Politics aside, he used specifics that for me pierced like a laser.

He was crossing the street one night and passed a parked car with people inside. He heard the click of the locks as he walked by. He was a United States Senator at the time.

I imagine how that must feel and I am sick. I realize this would never happen to me.

He was followed in a store by some stranger, “keeping an eye on him.”

I imagine what this must feel like and I am sick.

He was in an elevator and saw the lady next to him hug her purse in tighter and look away.

I realize this will never happen to me. For several moments I “become” that man in the elevator and I feel sick.

Specificity. It’s the writer’s magic wand.

Happy Writing Everyone,

LINKING THE ARTS

A Poem

Have you ever noticed how poets use specificity instinctively?

William Carlos Williams

so much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens

You’re there, right?

A Painting

Appraisal, 1931 by Grant Wood

To me this painting is wonderful to look at not only for its artistic merits but for the clarity of the narrative. It’s so evocative of the American farm because of the artist’s attention to specifics. The furs, the hat pin, the jeweled bag, a city lady perhaps. In contrast to the wool cap and rough jacket of the farm boy holding his speckled hen. A few visual details and the whole story is there. The viewer is there too.

A WRITING BLOG About Playing Around with a Story Line in Different Literary Genres and Different Literary Characters

Writing Leap #24 Describing What You See

Hi there Writers,

You are the experiencer who gives your reader details of what you are seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling physically and feeling emotionally. Description creates a mood, a tone, so your reader drinks in what you do and gets lost there. That’s your gift as a writer to your reader.

Pick anything! How does it strike you? Write that. It’s the best practice for your fiction and non-fiction as well.

The Story Line is: CONTENTMENT

Here’s mine.

The Linden Tree

Remember what it felt like when you were a child and you found your own hiding place? A place where everything around it disappeared?

There is a very old linden tree that looms high among the maples and beech at our local nature center. The other day I leaned against its huge brown trunk and left the nature center for linden tree land.

It was droopy hot outside with a blinding sun. But under the thick branches that sprawled forty feet across and eighty feet high it was dark-green shady and as refreshing as a glen after the rain. Many of the branches hung down to within a few feet of the ground. This linden has been growing for over one hundred years and may even keep on going to one thousand. It was secluded under the tree. Private. It was magical.

Clusters of heart shaped, slightly lopsided leaves dangled off graceful stems. I took my sketchpad and drew the tiny sawtoothed edges and the little point at the tip. It’s the end of June and just past the time when the star-shaped flowers bloom and perfume the air with a mighty fragrance of honey and lemon peel. I missed that, darn it.

But hanging from the stems along with the round love leaves were long, very narrow yellow-green leaves, like wings, in clusters of two. Growing out of the center of the leaves were threadlike stems that split into a V, where two pea-sized white nutlets were thinking about dropping to the ground and starting new linden trees. Unless they decide to let the chipmunks and squirrels enjoy the seeds inside the nutlet for tea.

It was hard to leave.

LINKING THE ARTS

Painting: In the Shade of Linden Trees by Apollinaris M. Vasnetsov, 1907