Like I noted the last time, when I discussed ways of making plots fresher and more worthwhile, we can be in too much of a hurry to tell the story that we neglect or forget the fact that good storytelling always does more than just give us what happened. Readers want to see and feel the scene, to recreate the particular and seemingly unique sensation of, say, sitting on the balcony of a villa in Northern Italy on a late October afternoon or taking the ferry across the river on a starlit night in Camalaniugan, Cagayan – or, on the less pleasant side of things, of nearly drowning in a flash flood or watching your father die.
Fiction works mainly through the imagination (rather than through abstract reason, which is the province of the essay), and the imagination – as fanciful as it may seem – demands concrete and specific detail, in the way that Shakespeare required the poet to "give to airy nothing a habitation and a name."
It isn’t enough to say that a character is "attractive" or that an event was "memorable", or to talk about "the loss of freedom and the absence of justice" and "the pernicious effects of poverty." The fictionist has to render these ideas in physical form, in fresh but convincing situations that will suggest or provoke reactions like "wonderful" or "depressing" without actually using these words. (In this sense, good writing is about not writing.)
Poor or sloppy description depends too much on adjectives and adverbs to summarize a scene or an emotion, as in the statement "She reacted angrily to his petty and silly remarks," which doesn’t really say much, or "It was a tense moment, full of drama, and he was very nervous and emotional." Because of laziness or plain ineptitude, the writer allows generalizations and clichés such as "He was as busy as a bee" and "He was in love with her head over heels" to take the place of patient, engaging, and detailed descriptions.
The good writer takes the trouble of visualizing the scene, the characters, and the situation, and of then finding the precise words to render the complete picture – what theater people call the mise en scene, the environment of the dramatic action – just as a painter or cinematographer would.
I don’t mind telling my students that, of all the elements of fiction, I enjoy description the most. I get immersed in the sights, the smells, and the textures of a place that may exist only in my mind, but exists no less than this very room I’m writing in now; indeed the fictive scene will be more memorable than this room, because it has a stronger reason for being than mere convenience. Very often, I let the scene guide the story.
More than 20 years ago, I wrote a story titled "Heartland," and I distinctly remember the thrill of just writing, in longhand on yellow legal pad paper, the first paragraph – a thrill intensified by having no idea what was going to happen next. Most of my stories start out this way – without a plot, without even a character, just a place and a sense of a story lurking somewhere in the corners of that picture, waiting to be drawn out. This was how "Heartland" began:
"The dawn broke weakly, like a soldier of a defeated army rising at reveille, for nothing. The sun was a yellow smudge in the kettle-gray sky. It shimmered, shivered, and dissolved quickly in the wetness that crept over the encampment and everything in it; and the air, rich with vapor, carried the morning crisply into every tent – horses’ dung; the grass, crushed where the caissons had rolled over it; alcohol and ether; festering sores, cordite, and burnt greenwood."
That led me to a war and a doctor at war. (You can read the rest of the story in Oldtimer and Other Stories, recently reprinted by the University of the Philippines Press.)
Description is more than idle detail. The best descriptions do much more than create mental pictures of places, people, and things; they actually, subliminally, reinforce the theme of the story and advance the plot. Descriptions of opening scenes are particularly crucial.
Let me give you some examples, drawn from some of my personal favorites. (I know, don’t remind me, these were mostly written by dead white men, but they’re all the texts I have on my hard disk at the moment.)
Take "Araby" by James Joyce: "North Richmond Street, being blind, was a quiet street except at the hour when the Christian Brothers’ School set the boys free. An uninhabited house of two storeys stood at the blind end, detached from its neighbors in a square ground. The other houses of the street, conscious of decent lives within them, gazed at one another with brown imperturbable faces."
This opening paragraph has just a tad more authorial commentary in it than I usually like (not surprising for a story written a century ago) – note the "conscious of decent lives within them" – but more significant is how Joyce lays out the theme of blindness, of a failure to perceive the truth, which is what the story eventually deals with.
About 30 years later, Ernest Hemingway would open "Hills Like White Elephants" with "The hills across the valley of the Ebro were long and white. On this side there was no shade and no trees and the station was between two lines of rails in the sun. Close against the side of the station there was the warm shadow of the building and a curtain, made of strings of bamboo beads, hung across the open door into the bar, to keep out flies. The American and the girl with him sat at a table in the shade, outside the building. It was very hot and the express from Barcelona would come in forty minutes. It stopped at this junction for two minutes and went on to Madrid."
It’s typical Hemingway in its spareness – and the rest of the story remains as stark – but the choice of a station "between two lines of rails in the sun" with Madrid one way and Barcelona the other is a strategic choice, because it emphasizes both the isolation of the characters and the way they’re caught in the middle of things.
John Steinbeck achieves a similar purpose in "The Chrsyanthemums," where he employs a closed pot – you’ll see other pots in the stories, and more yellow/black contrasts – as a visual metaphor for the protagonist Elisa’s entrapment:
"The high gray-flannel fog of winter closed off the Salinas Valley from the sky and from all the rest of the world. On every side it sat like a lid on the mountains and made of the great valley a closed pot. On the broad, level land floor the gang plows bit deep and left the black earth shining like metal where the shares had cut. On the foothill ranches across the Salinas River, the yellow stubble fields seemed to be bathed in pale cold sunshine, but there was no sunshine in the valley now in December. The thick willow scrub along the river flamed with sharp and positive yellow leaves."
I don’t mean to suggest that every setting or location has to be symbolic – symbolism is one of those things you can very easily and clumsily overdo in fiction and poetry – but it helps to understand that choices in stories are never truly arbitrary, and objects can assume meanings and resonances that the author himself or herself may not even be aware of (and perhaps shouldn’t be, while the story is being written).
Describing people is even more difficult than describing places, because it’s hard to resist the urge to dip into one’s bottomless trove of adjectives. Even the most experienced writers forget that the best character portrayals involve action rather than direct description. Witness the narrator’s robust and vigorous self-description in Alice Walker’s "Everyday Use" – also a terrific example, by the way, of how to get the most from nouns and verbs:
"In real life I am a large, big-boned woman with rough, man-working hands. In the winter I wear flannel nightgowns to bed and overalls during the day. I can kill and clean a hog as mercilessly as a man. My fat keeps me hot in zero weather. I can work outside all day, breaking ice to get water for washing; I can eat pork liver cooked over the open fire minutes after it comes steaming from the hog. One winter I knocked a bull calf straight in the brain between the eyes with a sledge hammer and had the meat hung up to chill before nightfall."
Description can be objective or evocative, or both. Objective description gives the physical particulars of a scene or a character, much like a police report; evocative description can be oblique and even lyrical, suggesting rather than bringing to full-bodied life the thing or person being described. Effective writers will know when and how to modulate between these modes, too much of either of which can get mannered and tedious.
Remember, also, that scenes are never just one- or two-dimensional – that dialogue takes place, for example, in a setting that extends beyond just the speaking characters or talking heads. Be conscious of foreground and background, of things and spots off-center that could prove interesting if not vital to the development or enrichment of the story. A bright green umbrella, parked in a corner and dripping with rainwater, or the street scene down below, or a reflection in a window – all these could act as counterpoints to the main action in the foreground. Be as attentive to these details as a production designer and cinematographer, and learn how to frame your scenes, manipulate your images, and shift your focus. I always ask my students: "What’s in the picture? What’s in the upper left corner? What’s his right foot doing?" That’s what mise en scene is all about: control of the totality of things, and an awareness of the full and final effect.
I gave examples earlier of how stories begin; now let me show you one ending, from John Updike’s now-classic "A&P," the story of a young nonconformist who quits his job – perhaps foolishly, but also necessarily and inevitably:
"I look around for my girls, but they’re gone, of course. There wasn’t anybody but some young married screaming with her children about some candy they didn’t get by the door of a powder-blue Falcon station wagon. Looking back in the big windows, over the bags of peat moss and aluminum lawn furniture stacked on the pavement, I could see Lengel in my place in the slot, checking the sheep through. His face was dark gray and his back stiff, as if he’d just had an injection of iron, and my stomach kind of fell as I felt how hard the world was going to be to me hereafter."
In my course on contemporary American fiction, I sometimes use that paragraph as a final-exam question, asking the student to relate the "young married screaming" and the "powder-blue Falcon" and the "aluminum lawn furniture" to the rest of the story. If Updike did his job and if you do yours, you should know the answer, and pass my course.
"Put it this way: fictional persons are objectifications of actual impressions of life received by the author. Because they are not actual, the author is free to invade their privacy and confide to us their thoughts and sensations however evanescent and trivial. Thus, he – or she, for the females of our species excel at producing fiction – provides the reader with an image of life more close-texture and vivid than any reality-bound genre, such as history, sociology and even autobiography can provide. Fiction is realer than real, one could say."
"Yes, well, (they’re actual persons) but they’ve been re-created; the information isn’t the point. Fiction is directed at neurons more complicated than the fact-collecting ones. Fiction aims to give the illusion of experience, so we know what it is like to be alive."
"Fiction is experience that has been chewed by somebody else."
"…There isn’t really one topic of fiction – it’s about everything and almost nothing at the same time. It’s an appeal to the whole soul. The existential, it’s ontological, it’s accidental, it’s sublime. It’s as broad as life, as high and as deep, as shallow and bittersweet and murky, even. It’s a mirror out for a walk, if you can picture that.
"…What’s wrong with love and talk, heh? Make the world go round, don’t they? The thing about fiction you’re not getting is, it’s delicious."
"Our latest critical theories demonstrate that the distinction between writers and readers is entirely illusory. The writer is a reader, reading what he write as he goes along, watching the text create itself, and the reader as he reads creates the story in terms of scenery he can imagine, faces he can see – it’s the story of his life! There’s nothing like it, fiction, for immaterial interpenetration; it expands the sympathies and gives us more lives to lead than our own. It’s life under the microscope, slice by slice, but also it’s in the empyrean, among the stars!"