Descriptive Writing

Yesterday we focused on describing places. One person said she wasn't good at it, and wanted more practice. She always found herself concentrating on people and dialogue instead.

First I had everyone remember a place that had made an impact on them at some time in their lives, think themselves back into that situation and describe the place. I told them to include sounds and smells as well as what they could see. I shared something I learned many years ago from Faith Richmond, author of a memoir called Remembrance: when describing a scene from your childhood, imagine yourself that small again, and picture the table edge high above your head or whatever. That is, see the scene from the child's perspective, remembering how that looked. It's amazing how much more recall you get by doing that! One such detail will lead to a whole flood of others.

Then I had people look out the nearest window and describe what they saw through it. (This brought groans from some.)

As always, the same topic – and even the same view – produced a variety of responses. The woman who focuses on people still did that in her remembered scene and thought she'd failed the exercise. But she included some very descriptive background touches, which set the scene beautifully for the action taking place; it was just that she herself hadn't realised that! I didn't have a person in mine at all except for the narrative 'I' and wondered if I'd been boring, but several people sighed with delight at what I read them. 'Bloody poet,' muttered one (but she was grinning). A woman who also attends the same meditation group as me wrote almost ethereal descriptions full of lyricism. Our resident dry humourist still managed to sound that way despite herself. A new member revealed the sensibilities of a poet although she hasn't thought of herself that way. One person praised the beauty of the garden outside the window; another considered it neglected and ugly.

'I think it's who we are,' said the people person to the humorist, after they'd cracked us all up with their equally unsentimental views of the garden.

Afterwards I instructed everyone to take their own pieces out of the equation and then I asked, were there any pieces that didn't succeed in making pictures in our heads, were there any that didn't hold our interest? No, there were not. It became clear that we can all look at something and write a description of it, and that we'll all do it differently and that's fine.

The remark was correct – it IS 'who we are' that informs our writing. We are going to reveal ourselves in our writing no matter what we do; it can't be avoided. And that's the very thing that makes our writing interesting.

I shared two last secrets with them:

1) With descriptions of people, it's effective to focus on only one or two striking features and leave the rest to the reader's imagination – a crooked nose, for instance, or a constant, fretful movement of the hands. As Fay Weldon advised in Letters to Alice, a light dusting of freckles across her nose tells people a girl is pretty without you having to say so. It is the same with descriptions of place – single out only one or two things to mention; you don't have to give every tiny detail.

2) In my own reading, long descriptive passages are the bits I skip – no matter how beautifully written those descriptions may be. When I confessed that, there was a chorus of agreement. Which leads us right back to 1).

- Rosemary (Facilitator)