Controlling Their Minds: The Art of Describing

I have two sons. Both are fantastic and interesting, and they both love to tell stories. They differ, however, in that one tends to offer too much information, and the other not enough. My eldest will start to tell me something funny his friend did at school, and then he'll tell me all about the kid's home-life, something funny he said two years ago, what his dad does for work, and then my son will tell me about the classroom, who else was there, their predilections, the teacher's mood, what he ate for lunch, and ten minutes later, I'll snap and say, "You're getting lost in the details! In twenty words or less, tell me what happened." He'll then think about it, and offer up a more concise and interesting version of the story.

My other son will launch full speed into a story, forgetting to tell me who was involved or when it happened. After a few sentences, I have to say, "Start over. I have no idea what you're talking about."

It might seem out of place to mention all of this here, in the chapter on "describing," but I've come to realize that my sons' flubs really don't stem from their ability to tell a story, but in deciding what to describe and how to describe it.

When I read my students' papers, I find myself having similar feelings and I write things like, "you're getting lost in the details" or "I have no idea what's going on here."

Like everything else in writing, there is a lot of decision making when it comes to descriptions. Whether you're describing a person, a place, a thing, or an event, you're engaging, as Stephen King says, in the act of telepathy. You're using little symbols—black letters on a white page—to project an image into your reader's mind.

That's pretty cool.

If you don't believe me, think of my two boys. One has a round face, thick brown hair, and is always smiling. He laughs at everything, and if you say something that might be construed as potty humor, he'll whisper, "Nice," and give you a fist bump. My other son has messy blonde hair, a thin face, and light freckles. He has what my wife calls a "lanky, skater-boy physique."

Even though you've never seen my sons, you can probably get a mental image of them—enough so that if I told you a story about them, they would be like little movie characters in your mind.

It doesn't matter if what you visualize varies from what my sons actually look like—what matters is that you now have a concrete mental image. That's telepathy! I put that image in your mind, and that's what you do every time you describe something to your readers.

The trick to describing things is to decide how many details to add so that your reader gets an accurate and adequate mental image, but without including so many details that they get bored or confused. It's an art.

I like to divide descriptions into two categories: Concrete and Interpretive. Concrete descriptions are also known as sensory details. They are the descriptions that can be perceived through sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell. The most common senses inexperienced writers draw upon are sight and sound. Experienced writers, on the other hand, tend to find a way to work most or all of the sense into their descriptions.

Interpretive descriptions are those that are inferred but can't be verified solely through the senses. For example, if you're writing about a concert you attended, and in describing the lead singer, you say, "The microphone probably smelled like old beer and cigarettes," that's an interpretive detail. The reader knows it's interpretive because you said, "Probably." If you actually walked up to the stage and gave the microphone a whiff, then you could include that as a concrete detail, since you no longer are guessing or interpreting what it smells like.

Take for example this picture of a man at a party. Since it is a photograph, if I asked you to list the concrete details (the sensory details), you would only have your eyes to depend on. You might mention:

• • plaid bow-tie

  • plastic-rim glasses

  • white shirt

  • dark sports coat

  • Caucasian male

  • mid-thirties

  • thinning hairline

  • frowning

  • nicely decorated room

If he were here in person (and not just in a photograph), you could also note what he sounds like and what his cologne smells like.

Now, if I asked you to come up with interpretive descriptions, you would have to fill in the blanks, so to speak, with descriptions like:

• • he looks bored

  • he doesn't seem to want to have his picture taken

  • he is possibly in a restaurant or a reception hall

  • he looks like he could be on his third dessert

  • he will probably be asleep in twenty minutes

  • he probably is avoiding his wife

  • he looks easy-going but will likely snap at a kid or two before the evening is over

  • he looks like he wants a nap

You can't know these things for sure, but interpretive descriptions can go a long way in building a mental image for your reader.

If I were now to put some of those concrete and interpretive details together, I could say something like this:

"A well-dressed, thirty-something man sits at a table in a brightly-lit reception hall. His sports-coat and plastic-rim glasses make him seem professional, serious even, but his bow-tie and Muppet-like frown reveal him to be a giant goofball. He is finishing off what might be his third dessert, and I'm sure in a half hour, after he's yelled at a few noisy kids, he'll be asleep, while the waitress quietly takes away his plate and his wife wonders where he is."

In this description, it is clear to the reader which details are concrete—what I'm actually seeing—and which ones are interpretive. I didn't make up details for the sake of the story. I didn't give him a name or a back story or pretend like I knew where he was or what music was playing in the background. All I had to go off of was the photograph—what I could actually see and safely interpret. If I wanted to delve further into the land of make believe, that would be okay, as long as I make it clear to the reader that they are interpretive details by using phrases like, "he looks like," or, "he might," or, "he probably," and so on.

Full disclosure: This is a picture of my twin brother at my niece's wedding reception several years ago. He did, in fact, fall asleep shortly after I snapped the shot, but no kids were yelled at.

Sample Descriptions:

Example #1

Half a mile behind the tree-line, I stumbled upon an old dump I hadn’t seen since I was a child. A tall heap of rust and glass and bed springs. A stove door. I tucked the hatchet into my waistband and picked up a brown bottle, like something from an old apothecary. It contained a single cigarette butt. I picked up another--green with a crack at the base. Soon, I had a dozen bottles tucked into my pockets and another dozen cradled in my arms.

Example #2

My brother is the social butterfly my wife wishes I was. When I visit him, his phone is always ringing. And he answers it. His doorbell is always ringing. And he answers it. He talks with these people. He laughs with them. He shares their inside jokes. He asks them about themselves, about their families, about their lives. And then they hang up. They leave. And my brother looks recharged. Happy. And I’m exhausted just watching the exchange. “I need to go to the bathroom,” I say, and I disappear for twenty-five minutes, playing Words with Friends on my phone, playing against my brother who sits on the other side of the house. I text him a picture of me sitting on the commode.

Example #3

In a recent essay for school, my nine-year-old son described our cabin as being inside a giant, dead volcano. “Only you don’t know you’re in a volcano,” he said. “Unless someone tells you, like my grandpa.” And he’s right. The quarter of a mile or so that my father is now ambling to get to the little house is on the northwest corner of forty acres of swamp and pine trees in Island Park, Idaho, just west of Yellowstone. At least once a year, my father takes us for a ride—sometimes in his truck, sometimes by motorcycle—to the top of the hill that runs alongside our cabin. From there, you can see the caldera, or dead volcano, that is Island Park. Essentially, it’s a flat slab of land encircled by a low mountain. You can see silvery threads of rivers snaking across the land, a network of gravel and dirt logging roads, and a two-lane highway cutting a perfect line South to North as folks hurl their way from Utah to Montana.

The caldera, my father explains, used to be Yellowstone. But as the plate tectonics move, the hot spot under Yellowstone stays fixed: a giant flume or chimney of lava seeping up from the Earth’s mantle. Every hundred-or-so thousand years, the hot spot builds up and BOOM! a giant hole is blown out of the ground. Geologists have tracked these holes. The oldest is in the deserts of northern Nevada, and from there they pock their way northeast across southern Idaho until they end at the hot-spot’s current residence: Yellowstone—which, geologists speculate, is overdue for another explosion. Island Park was its last explosive victim, the remains of which have become this fishing and hunting Mecca of eastern Idaho, full of lakes and rivers and forests and open meadows cluttered with lava-rock boulders. And just within the tree line that runs along one of these meadows is our cabin. It was built in the 30s as part of a homestead act—one that never really caught on, since the high altitude and rocky soil doesn’t offer much in the way of agricultural potential.

Example #4

I brought my newly-purchased Remington 12-guage to the cabin. As my four nephews and two sons stood shoulder to shoulder with their BB guns shooting at a ten-inch action figure perched on the fence, I slid in beside them with my shotgun—already cocked, so the tell-tale racking of the shell wouldn’t give me away—and in one thunderous moment, the action figure was in a thousand pieces, the six boys were on the ground covering their ears, and I was laughing like a madman. When the laughter and squeals and Holy-Craps were over, my nephew, Carter, asked what kind of BB gun that was, to which I responded, “A big one.” They wanted me to fire it again, but I was already regretting ever pulling the gun out. The smell of gunpowder hung heavy in the breezeless air, and in an instant the atmosphere felt different. The sun had shifted from a warm, diffused glow to a stark, unpleasant angle, hot and glaring. The normal forest sounds—the crickets and toads and the zip of black flies and the angry chirp of a nearby squirrel—had disappeared, leaving in their wake only the hum of sunlight on grass.

With a pathetic boink, my son shot a BB at the remaining leg of the action figure, still wedged in the fence pole, but then the boys set their guns aside and wandered off, no longer impressed by their power, some to take naps, and some to just sit cross-legged in the shade and pick at the grass for the remainder of the afternoon.

Example #5

When I was in my twenties, we boarded-up the old outhouse and built a new one, designed by my cousin, a civil engineer. We call it the Grand Palace. Rather than snaking our way through several hundred yards of woods, now we just walk across the open courtyard to the Grand Palace. It’s built on a huge concrete vault which sticks ten feet up from the ground, so the outhouse can only be reached by climbing a set of stairs. It has a vestibule where, I suppose, folks can wait their turn without getting rained on. And inside the spacious room, perched high above the toilet, is a brass chandelier, and on either end, high enough to maintain privacy, are large windows, allowing the occupant to watch the Lodge-pole Pines sway in the breeze.

Example #6

Despite it being a cold, uneventful weekday in April, there are three of us in the dispatch center for the remainder of the night: James, a balding father of five with another on the way (“You know what causes that?” I say, and he replies, “Beer.”), who suffers from sleep apnea and who spends his shift sipping room-temperature Mountain Dew from a Christmas mug, and Laura, the middle-aged wife of a local police chief. She aspires to be great, but she will probably never even be mistaken for competent. We have all told her, some more kindly than others, that dispatch just isn’t for everyone, but she confides in me that everyone is out to get her, “and I’m not about to give them the satisfaction!”

Example #7

The dispatch center doesn’t look that different than any other modern office: a small, square room with a bullet-proof window that looks over a fenced-in parking lot, four open cubicles cluttered with computer towers and monitors and printers; shelves lined with three-ring binders and map books and policy manuals and magazines; and a spinning table in the center of the room, also known as the community table (“Don’t leave your lunch here,” my supervisor warned me, “unless you’re planning on sharing.”), always strewn with bowls of Jolly Ranchers and Hershey’s Kisses—though the Kisses never last. There are usually stacks of plates and cookie sheets which are empty by the time the night crew arrives, topped only with crumpled napkins and the crumbs of brownies or zucchini bread brought in by officers.

Example #8

Cerrito was not in the resort part of town. It was on the southern outskirts: a valley lined with cement and brick houses. It wasn't the third-world huts and squalor to the north, nor was it the huge estates in the next neighborhood over (Punta Mogotes), or the high-rise condos of downtown. Most of the folks in Cerrito worked at the docks gutting fish. It wasn't a career to be envied, but when the fish were in abundance, there was a lot of money to be made. Folks would make their way to the docks at three or four am with their own satchel of sharpened knives, and wait for the giant Japanese and Russian fishing boats to dock. It was first-come, first-serve. Often, folks would wait in the cold for hours, only to be turned away due to a lack of fish. Sometimes, this would go on for weeks, and I would hear about it to no end from every person we passed on the streets.

Near the docks, there was an overabundance of old Italian men. Rows of stores and restaurants lined the streets, all of which were steeply inclined, like San Francisco, and the old men would sit in front of these buildings on benches with their fedoras and wool sports coats and wooden canes. I would yell an Italian greeting, and they would cheerfully holler back, sometimes in Italian, sometimes in Spanish. I admit I was a little scared of them, perhaps from all the mafia movies I had seen as a teenager. Who were these men perched on these benches? Mussolini's henchmen? The less-fortunate but just-as-ruthless uncles and brothers of Sicilian mobsters?

At the top of the steepest street was a white chapel with a terracotta roof. It was surrounded by a tall, iron fence, with red-brick columns every ten feet, and a thick grove of palm trees and ferns between the stone walkways. I would pause at the front gate, looking down the main avenue to the ports below with the fishing ships bobbing in the water, and from there Cerrito stretching up the opposite hill, her windows golden in the sun.

Example #9

I intercept Elliot, my three-year-old daughter, at the door to make sure she’s wearing her pink helmet and brown boots and a sweater. She thanks me and kisses me and tells me she loves me, but two minutes later when I peek outside, her boots and sweater and helmet are strewn across the front yard and she’s nowhere to be found. Tommy, our neighbor, has to tell me she’s at “the dirt place”—a vacant lot down the block—which doesn’t necessarily alarm me because I know her brother is with her, except that I notice he's actually playing in Tommy's back yard.