Weekly encouragement, coaching, and prompts for writers
As writers we are world narrators. Writing about the physical world, real or imaginary, is harder than it may appear. Description is a deceptively challenging skill to hone. But hone it we must! If we want our readers to believe in our created worlds they must be able to clearly visualize them.
A journalist writes the world from factual evidence, or so we would hope. A memoirist writes the world from personal history. A novelist creates a fictional world based on the basic blueprints of the real one. A science fiction or fantasy writer creates imaginary worlds made up of bits and pieces of the real world shaped to appear alien, yet relatable enough to matter to us.
Think of writers like J.R.R. Tolkien and J.K. Rowling who captivated millions with their imagined worlds. Those worlds were built on physical descriptions of things we could recognize, if not from personal experience, then from collective human experience. There were seemingly ordinary things like train stations, shabby roadside inns, long wooden tables with noisy children lining both sides. There were also far from ordinary things, wise and evil wizards, fairy queens, and quirky Hobbits! Yet even these were perfectly believable because J.J.R. and J.K. made them real through the use of expert description.
I’m highlighting all of this because I think we don’t give physical description in writing enough credit for its impact. Even in a screenplay, which is based almost entirely on dialogue, directors receive a paragraph of physical description to set each scene. How do we bring readers into our created scenes stealthily so that our descriptions don’t stand out like big sandwich boards on the sidewalk?
We do it by attentively and thoroughly experiencing our own daily environments first, so that we can describe them, or fictional places similar to them, with greater finesse. There is a Zen to the skill of description that begins with being fully present to the physical world around us, so that we can see and experience it clearly.
This can be a challenge because we are creatures of routine and the mind takes familiar things for granted. This saves us mental energy, but also makes us less likely to pay attention. That’s why we love to travel. Foreign places impact us more profoundly because we have to pay attention in order to understand them. In a way, our readers are traveling when they step into our writing, so we owe it to them to create engaging places that give them rewarding travel experiences! That means we need to pay close attention even to the familiar in order to see it with fresh eyes and write about it with fresh words.
So, let’s get physical! (Listening to the song by Olivia Newton John is definitely optional.) Here’s this week’s prompt. Pick an object in your personal space, something you see everyday. Spend a few minutes observing the object. What is its general shape? What contours does it have? How big or small is it? Of what stuff is it made? What color(s) does it have? Write down what you see.
Now include all of your senses, and write down what you experience. Touch the object, feel its surfaces. Smell it. Does the way it smells remind you of something else? How does it taste? If you’d rather not lick that alpaca throw pillow, just imagine how it might taste. How does it sound? If it’s completely silent to you, might it be making a sound outside of the capacity of human hearing? What might that sound be like?
Once you have lots of descriptive written details about your object, go even deeper. Dive beneath the surface. When and where did you acquire this object and why? Do you own it purely for its function, or does it have emotional value to you? Would you balk at the thought of selling it?
Make this exercise more than just a quick charcoal sketch. Be bold and brilliantly thorough. Bring out the oil pastels! I’m speaking metaphorically, of course. Then again, the rich colors of oil pastels might be just the ticket!
Keep in mind that as writers we may not, and probably won’t, include all of the details in our first drafts in the final piece of writing (unless our name is Charles Dickens). However, if we don’t know the details intimately, we won’t be able to make the world we are creating with words feel absolutely real to our readers.
See “About The Author” below, more information at www.jazzpoeteve.com.
Photo credit: Still shot from Olivia Newton John’s video, “Let’s Get Physical.”
