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keep remembering that first sentence I hated so much. Don t
stroll, leisurely, into the park.
LESSON TEN
The Psychology of Description
ust about every beginning writer knows the agony of the
following scenario. You labored hard over a story. You re
Jfinally satisfied with it and give it to a friend, spouse,
whomever. Fingers crossed, you wait for a response. It never comes
soon enough, but when it does, the dialogue is something like this:
Writer: So what do you think?
Reader (squirming): I m not a professional at this. What do I
know?
Writer: But you read stories all the time.What s your opinion of
this one?
Reader (squirming harder): I don t . . . It just didn t . . . It felt
kind of . . .
Writer: Felt kind of what?
Reader (gesturing helplessly to find the right word):Thin.
Writer:Thin?
Reader:Yeah. You know.Thin.
Writer: No, I don t know.
Reader: It felt kind of . . .
Writer: Kind of . . . ?
Reader: Flat.
Writer: Flat?
Reader: One-dimensional.
Writer:You mean the characters?
Reader: No, the characters were interesting. But the whole
story just felt . . .
Writer:Yes?
Reader:Thin.
114 THE SUCCESSFUL NOVELIST
Around and around we go. Thin. Flat. One-dimensional. These
words are common reactions, a code of sorts, exasperating to deci-
pher, but here s a clue to their meaning I once heard a fiction-
writing teacher tell his students to imagine that their stories were
movies on a television screen above their desks and that all they
needed to do was describe what was on the screen. I was horrified.
Why was his advice wrong? Because describing a story as if it
were on an imaginary television screen emphasizes the sense of
sight.To the degree that your prose is sight-based, it will be flat,
thin, and one-dimensional. All on the surface. Like the television.
Seems obvious when you think about it.And yet description based
solely on sight is a mistake that just about every beginning writer
makes. Fortunately, it s also a mistake that s easily corrected.
Earlier, I mentioned John Barth s Lost in the Funhouse. In that
innovative story which is also a kind of essay on fiction writing,
Barth notes that, when describing something, it s important to
keep the senses operating. A visual detail should be intersected
with one from the other senses, auditory, for instance, so that the
reader will be engaged in the scene. This procedure may be
compared to the way surveyors and navigators determine their
positions by two or more compass bearings, a process known as
triangulation, Barth wrote.
Every time I dramatize a scene, I remind myself of that prin-
ciple. In fact, seizing on the three parts that are implied in the
process of triangulation, I always make a point of crossing a detail
of sight with not one but at least two other senses. If I can, I take
the sight detail for granted and leave it out.
A good exercise involves deliberately doing without it, as
occurs in the following passage from E. M. Forster s A Passage to
India. A group of people, including a character named Mrs.
Moore, enter a cave.
Crammed with villagers and servants, the circular chamber began
to smell. She lost Aziz and Adela in the dark, didn t know who
touched her, couldn t breathe, and some vile naked thing struck
The Psychology of Description 115
her face and settled on her mouth like a pad. She tried to regain
the entrance tunnel, but an influx of villagers swept her back. She
hit her head. For an instant she went mad, hitting and gasping like
a fanatic. For not only did the crush and stench alarm her; there
was also a terrifying echo.
Sound, touch, smell, and, by implication, taste (the naked thing
on her mouth). Combining these numerous senses creates a multi-
dimensional effect. Forster s purpose isn t to make the reader see
the story. It s to make the reader feel in the story. Appealing to
several senses goes a long way toward accomplishing that.
Imagine a scene in which a prisoner enters a cell and crosses to
his bunk. He sat on the blanket. Not much going on.Let s enliven
it. Should we give the blanket a color? Red? Not in a prison. Blue?
Maybe.A faint blue. But I think most readers have already supplied
a color. Only one seems appropriate for a prison. Gray. Don t we
take that color for granted? Is it even worth mentioning? He sat
on the gray blanket. Still not much going on. Let s apply the trian-
gulation theory. Sound, touch, smell, and taste. Since the prisoner
isn t likely to start chewing on the blanket, taste can be eliminated.
A detail of smell might be appropriate. He sat on the blanket. It
reeked of sweat. That s palpable. It draws me into the scene. Or
how about adding a detail that in one word suggests both sound
and touch? He sat on the scratchy blanket. It reeked of sweat. The
scene has become immediate, not thin and flat.
One of the writers most famous for description is Hemingway.
(I mention him a lot because my master s thesis was on his style
he s hard-wired into my thoughts.) It s useful to understand how
he accomplished his effects. First, his apprenticeship as a reporter
for The Kansas City Star taught him the value of uncluttered
sentences.That newspaper s style sheet emphasized, Use vigorous
English . . . Be positive . . .Avoid the use of adjectives.
But although Hemingway practiced these rules while writing
articles, he seems not to have used them in his early fiction, for
when he moved to Paris and showed some unpublished stories to
116 THE SUCCESSFUL NOVELIST
Gertrude Stein, she felt that they were filled with a great deal of
not particularly good description. She told him to throw every-
thing away and start over.
Fate threw it away for him. Months later, while reporting on a
peace conference in Switzerland, Hemingway showed some
unpublished stories to a fellow journalist, whose reaction was so
enthusiastic that Hemingway wrote a letter about it to his first
wife, Hadley, in Paris. Excited, she wanted the journalist to see
even more of her husband s work, so she packed a suitcase with all
of Hemingway s manuscripts: an unfinished novel,eighteen stories,
and thirty poems, complete with carbons.At the Paris train station,
she bought a ticket to Switzerland and put her luggage in a train
compartment. Later she briefly left the compartment. When she
came back, she discovered that the suitcase containing the manu-
scripts had been stolen. Its contents were never recovered.
Hemingway s immediate reaction was to rush to Paris and
search his apartment, desperate to believe that only the originals
and not the copies also had been put in the suitcase.When he real-
ized that everything in fact was gone, when he thought of the pain
that would come with the new start advised by Stein, he was so
discouraged that he decided to abandon his dream of becoming a
fiction writer. But the urge kept insisting until finally he returned
to work, with the difference that this time he went about it in an
organized fashion, with the verbal discipline that The Kansas City
Star s style sheet recommended.
Hemingway s new organized approach was based on learning
basics before he tried to write a novel. He practiced individual
sentences, trying to make them as clear and dynamic as possible.
To establish viewpoint, he began each with a version of I have
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