THE AIR COOL AND PUNGENT WITH DYING THINGS

Welcome to this first post of the new year! Let’s get started:

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Word Painting: A Guide to Writing More Descriptively by Rebecca McClanahan, Writer’s Digest Books, 1999

Chapter 2: The Eye of the Beholder (Part 1)

“Description begins in the beholder’s eye, and it requires attention. If we look closely enough and stay in the moment long enough, we may be granted new eyes. Or ears.”

Above all, observation is essential to writing description.

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Description can be of the physical world or the world of the inner eye. Either way, read the best literature rich in detail so you’ll recognize effective description when it appears in your own work.

Part of the value to me of this blog is I prepare by noting good description and turns of phrases from the novels I read. It forces me to pay attention.

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Here’s an exercise in observation: Choose an ordinary object in your home, place it on a bare table, and set a timer for ten minutes. Stare at the object. Pick it up. Smell it.

When the ten minutes are up, write a description in concrete terms. If the object conjures up memories associated with it, write those down as well.

I’m learning to write more descriptively. Usually my first draft lacks description and emotional content, but I’m getting better at it.

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You can also write from the eye of the imagination, using a picture in your mind to describe objects, people, and events. These may be memories as well.

I can picture something (like an alien that looks like a molting flamingo) but it’s hard for me to describe it.

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The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, Scholastic Press, 2008

The cameras haven’t lied about its grandeur. If anything, they have not quite captured the magnificence of the glistening buildings in a rainbow of hues that tower into the air, the shiny cars that roll down the wide paved streets, the oddly dressed people with bizarre hair and painted faces who have never missed a meal. All the colors seem artificial, the pinks too deep, the greens too bright, the yellows painful to the eyes, like the flat round disks of hard candy we can never afford to buy at the tiny sweet shop in District 12.

To someone from a coal-dusted, gritty town, the Capital is Oz.

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It was a Sunday in October, the air cool and pungent with dying things. I’d spend the morning competing with the squirrels for nuts and the slightly warmer afternoon wading in shallow ponds harvesting katniss. The only meat I’d shot was a squirrel that had practically run over my toes in its quest for acorns.

The use of “dying things” instead of describing the fall foliage evokes an emotional response as well as an imaginative smell.

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“You’ve got about as much charm as a dead slug.”

What a compliment.

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Please join me on Friday for more from these sources. Thanks for stopping by.