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Vivid Description
Grab your word brushes and let's get painting! Vivid description is what will really set your copy apart, give it personality and engage the reader. If you haven't already, then read through the previous Copy Corner articles because we'll need them all.
Guayasamín is a genius
Anyone asking "who?" will be summarily executed! He's an amazing artist and sculptor from Quito who's work is awe-inspiring and his house/gallery (La Capilla del Hombre) is an unbelievable experience. His "Age of Wrath" work is so thought/emotion provoking – even for an art philistine like me. Here's my favourite piece of his:
Is that a mother soothing her child who is staring-out in innocent hope? Or is she cradling her dead son who stares out with lifeless eyes? His work deals with the plight of Latin American peoples - will it ever wake from it's slumber and throw-off the shackles of oppression or sleep some more…
What am I showing you this for? You signed up for copy writing tricks and tips didn't you? Fair enough… so why did he bother to paint this when he could have just taken a photograph instead?
Because painting goes far beyond factual representation and uses a visual kind of "vivid description". Words, used effectively, do the same. Vivid description is word painting.
Barn Storming
Thought I'd made a typo didn't you?! We're going to use one example to gain an understanding of vivid description:
"In the far corner of the courtyard was a very old barn and it looked in bad shape. The roof was bent and had big planks of wood that poked out through really large holes. The big doors were open and appeared to be inhumed some way into the ground and it could be seen that the wood had rotten."
Doesn't seem to bad does it? Ah, but once I show you vivid description you'll never settle for this second-rate drivel ever again! Let's take a look how it could be written:
"The ancient barn, rafters protruding through gaping holes in the roof and everything sagging, created a perspective with no sensible horizon; its great doors lay slumped open, the sills buried a foot into the ground, the damp earth rotting and splitting the wood."
I hope you like this version – it's taken from my half-finished novel!
Vivid description is active
Yes, I'm going to be weeding-out passivity again – I hope you spotted it!
"In the far corner of the courtyard was a very old barn and it looked in bad shape."
Let's put the subject first:
"The old barn,"
This prepares the reader, he/she will be picturing an old barn in their heads and ready for you to fill in the details. This is important. Don't put the description first – it requires much more imagination.
Now we're going to weed out a more subtle and more insidious form of passivity – all those past tenses. It's a quirk of the 'narrative voice' to talk in the past tense. All this does is:
- Make the description seem stale and old
- Put distance between the reader and what is being described
- Create another form of clutter (more on this in a minute)
Passive:
"...the wood had rotten."
Active:
"…rotting and splitting the wood."
Can you see how the active version brings the description to life? The wood hasn't just had some passive thing done to it – it's 'rotting' and 'splitting' before our very eyes.
Now the clutter that comes from using the passive past tense:
Cluttered:
"…was a very old barn and it looked in bad shape. The roof was bent and had big planks of wood that poked out through really large holes."
Clean:
"The ancient barn, rafters protruding through gaping holes in the roof and everything sagging…"
See how we've brought the description and the object closer together? When you talk in the past tense you tend to use a lot of "was an", "and had" etc. to qualify what is happening.
Another form of clutter is putting in things like "it looked", "it appeared to be", "and it could be seen that" etc. to describe things from a point of view. This not only clutters a sentence making it harder to read, but also prevents the reader from seeing it through their own eyes which is far more powerful.
In novel writing they say "Show don't tell".
Vivid description is accurate
By this I don't mean in meticulous detail. A good description 'grounds' itself and becomes a credible description if it uses the proper (but not poncy) name for something. Let's look at the barn:
It has 'rafters protruding through gaping holes' not 'big planks of wood'.
The doors have "sills buried a foot into the ground" not "inhumed some way into the ground". Firstly, 'sills' adds some detail that helps a reader in visualising it and then builds credibility by adding the proper name. Then we have 'inhumed' which is the wrong word! The doors aren't dead! This is a common mistake when people try to raise their level of diction and raid the Thesaurus. The right word is always accurate, in common use and understood by the reader (even if it's technically wrong).
Vivid description doesn't need 'soft' adverbs
Simply speaking - an adverb is a word that modifies some other part of the sentence. For our purposes we'll just consider them 'adding' words that add something to the word written. So what's wrong with using them?
Vivid description uses strong words. The use of lots of adverbs (usually '-ly' words) is a symptom that the description is weak and needs propping-up. Here's a couple of examples from the barn:
"very old barn" – the 'very' is there only to bolster the weak 'old'. We change it to "ancient barn".
"really large holes" – really large holes? Better is "gaping holes".
See what I mean? It's a combination of using the proper name for things, more active language and words that evoke a stronger emotional response.
Vivid description is original
Avoid cliché and blandness in description like the plague. How about subtle vividness?! From our barn description:
"…created a perspective with no sensible horizon"
Now what's going on here? Remember this is an extract from a novel and novels are all about description and subtle interweaving. The protagonist in my novel is an architect and there is a subtle astrological theme running beneath the surface. 'Sensible horizon' is to do with perspective in both engineering and in astrology and so gave me a unique description I would never have used otherwise.
That's your basic tools loaded-up
Description is, like everything else I've covered, an endless subject and, as always, I hope I've given you food for thought. We're about done on the basic tools – we'll get on to more advanced techniques soon enough.
But first, and by popular demand, we'll be taking a look at the 'canvas' and beginning to structure your writing in 'Part 9: PoFint' (and that's no typo).
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