The Art of Description: Architecture

Ah! I just discovered a new writing book that I want to share with you! Love, love, love this one! Actually, it’s not really new—it’s been quietly hiding in my bookcase these last few years, sandwiched between equally wonderful, but louder books like Sol Stein’s How to Grow a Novel and The Art of Fiction by Gardner.  It wasn’t until I literally hit a wall in my writing (I needed just the right word to describe the siding on a certain building) that I even remembered buying the book.

The Describer’s Dictionary by David Grambs is not intended to replace your thesaurus or dictionary but as the author says,  it's “for anybody needing quick access to just the right vocabulary for conveying in words some sort of picture. “ 

The book is divided into categories ranging from “Things” (shapes, patterns and edges; surfaces and textures; light and color, etc.) to “People” (skin and complexion; mouths, lips, and teeth; noses, ears, and jaws; voices; looks and tacit expressions, etc.) Other broad categories include: Buildings and Dwellings; Earth and Sky; and Animals. 

What I really love about this book is that Grambs doesn’t just give us lists of words, but actual excerpts  from literature, in which the technical terminology augments lovely, descriptive prose. These excerpts from the masters correspond to each separate category.  In the “Buildings and Dwellings” section alone Grambs offers seventy-one (!!) different examples from literature.   Here are just a few:

The Radley Place jutted into a sharp curve beyond our house.  Walking south, one faced its porch; the sidewalk turned and ran beside the lot.  The house was low, was once white with a deep front porch and green shutters, but had long ago darkened to the color of the slate-gray yard around it.  Rain-rotted shingles drooped over the eaves of the veranda; oak trees kept the sun away.

From To Kill a Mockingbird, by HARPER LEE

It sat on a shelf between our lane and the creek, a little higher than the rest of the bottomland,  Its board-and-batten sides and its shake roof were weathered silvery as an old rock.  To me it has an underwater look—that barnacled silveriness, the way three big live oaks twisted like seaweed above the roof, the still, stained, sunken light.

WALLACE STEGNER, All the Little Live Things

The architects of the Knox Building had wasted no time in trying to make it look taller than its twenty stories, with the result that it looked shorter.  They hadn’t bothered trying to make it handsome, either, and so it was ugly: slab-sided and flat-topped, with a narrow pea-green cornice that jutted like the lip of a driven stake.

RICHARD YATES, Revolutionary Road

Built of butter-yellow sandstone blocks hand-hewn in quarries five hundred miles eastward, the house had two stories and was constructed on austerely Georgian lines, with large, many-paned windows and a wide, iron-pillared veranda running all the way around its bottom story.

COLLEEN MCCULLOUGH, The Thornbirds

Through my glasses I saw the slope of a hill interspersed with rare trees and perfectly free from undergrowth.  A long decaying building on the summit was half buried in the high grass; the large holes in the peaked roof gaped black from afar; the jungle and the woods made a background.  There was no enclosure or fence of any kind; but there had been one apparently, for near the house half-a-dozen slim posts remained in a row, roughly trimmed, and with their upper ends ornamented with round carved balls.

JOSEPH CONRAD, Heart of Darkness

DAVID GRAMBS: The Describer’s Dictionary: A Treasury of Terms & Literary Quotations

HARPER LEE:   To Kill a Mockingbird

WALLACE STEGNER:   All the Little Live Things

RICHARD YATES:   Revolutionary Road

COLLEEN MCCULLOUGH:   The Thornbirds

JOSEPH CONRAD:   Heart of Darkness

Part VI: Authenticating Detail and Description

***This post is the sixth in a series of eight weekly exercises designed to take our short stories from rough draft to finished "masterpiece"(or as close as we can get ;-) with the help of the late John Gardner and a host of other well-known authors and teachers.  Click here for Part I ***

“Vivid detail is the life blood of fiction…” – John Gardner

I am so behind on my revisions for this story! This most recent pass-through (the one with a focus on dialogue and subtext)  took much longer to complete than I expected. Even though my story has just five or six partially dramatized scenes --and even fewer passages of dialogue--it took quite some time to hone that dialogue down to only the most meaningful and significant lines. Now it’s time to move on to the next revision pass: authenticating detail and description.

So what does our mentor, the late John Gardner, have to say about detail?

The details in this brief passage from Colm Tóibín’s short story “The Use of Reason” capture only a tiny aspect of who this mother is, but the few, carefully chosen words and details suggest so much more beneath the surface:

“Good authenticating details set a trap that captures a small piece, a tiny aspect, of what’s being described in a way that allows the reader to come to understand what’s being described for himself,” says Dave Koch, author of one of the clearest explanations I’ve read on the subject of authenticating detail. “[Readers] of literary fiction want to be able to figure things out for themselves; they want to do work. When a story allows you to do this sort of work—to come to your own decision, to come to your own conclusions—you participate in that story. And that sense of feeling like you participated, like your opinions and interpretations matter, is a big part of the pleasure you take from reading literary fiction.” Koch gives us five steps to follow to help make our readers feel like they know just enough about a character or place (or whatever it is you’re trying to describe).  To get the whole scoop including some good examples, read the rest of Dave’s article here, on the Gotham Writers’ Workshop site.  The five steps:

1. Make the decision to capture whatever it is you’re trying to describe. Set a trap.

2. Identify details you don’t need for this capturing. Ordinary details are your enemy.

3. Look to unusual details to capture the big picture. Unusual details let readers do work.

4. Lie, cheat, and steal. Do whatever you have to. You don’t necessarily capture the truth by being truthful.

5. Trust the reader. Don’t explain something after you’ve captured it. “Over-explaining takes all the power away from [the] authenticating detail. Avoid that by letting the reader figure things out for himself.”

Author, Monica Wood,  interviewed for The Glimmer Train Guide to Writing Fiction: Building Blocks (a wonderful resource for both inspiration and technique) talks about the importance of picking just the right detail when describing something-- a place or character, for instance:

I’m excited to discover that in addition to her novels and short stories Monica has written a number of books on the craft of writing, one of which is Description, a book in the popular “Elements of Fiction Writing” series.  I’m looking forward to checking that one out.

John Gardner: The Art of Fiction

Dave Koch: "Authenticating Detail" Gotham Writers' Workshop (article first appeared in "The Writer" magazine)

Monica Wood: interviewed for The Glimmer Train Guide to Writing Fiction: Building Blocks

Colm Tóibín: "The Use of Reason" in the collection Mothers and Sons

Write A Short Story:  

Part I: Introduction

Part II: Setting & Emotion  

Part III: Character Motivation & Change

Part IV: Story Shape

Part V: Dialogue

Part VI: Authenticating Detail & Description

Part VII: Tension & Reader Anticipation

Part VIII: Plot