G.K. Chesterton’s poem Lepanto opens thus: “White founts falling in the courts of the sun, And the Soldan of Byzantium is smiling as they run; There is laughter like the fountains in that face of all men feared; It stirs the forest darkness, the darkness of his beard, It curls the blood-red crescent, the crescent of his lips, For the inmost sea of all the earth is shaken with his ships.” This opening set of lines, like much of the rest of the poem, is a brilliant example of Chesterton’s descriptive prowess, how he paints a picture on your mind with his words. We all would love to have this skill; unfortunately, most of us don’t. Most of our descriptions are, well, not bad, but they aren’t great either. Complete success is a rarity rather than a standard. Today, therefore, we’re going to look at three basic aspects of description: its vectors, its species, and its central goal.

We’ll start at the most abstract, the central goal, and work towards the more concrete, the vectors. The central goal of describing something, properly stated, is not to create a particular sensory experience (I am aware this sounds all wrong. Wait a moment before you click away). The central goal of describing a person, a place, a thing, a feeling, a work of art, the central goal for an author is not to form a precise sensory image of that which is described in his reader’s mind. No, his central goal is to form a certain understanding of that which is described.

When I describe a landscape, I do not need to reader to understand precisely how the trees look. I need him to understand the idea of how they look (and, for plot purposes, elements like where they are on the map, how much coverage they provide, etc.). To borrow some of philosophy’s terminology, I need to convey not the precise instance of a tree I’m describing but the Form to which that tree corresponds. Note that this doesn’t mean I’m merely aiming to get him to see a tree. No, the concept is more specific. I need him to see and sense and feel the existence of this particular tree. He needs to understand the tree-ishness¹ of the tree, to understand the particular parts of it which are relevant to the story. This is why I do not need to carefully describe every leaf and branch, every shade of color, why I do not need to make sure that my reader’s own preconceptions are interfering with his visualization of the precise color, down to the wavelength, of the tree’s bark.

In service of that goal of conveying the essence of the thing described, I, as the author, create a sensory experience, because that is how people understand the world (through their senses). I give this detail of the tree’s visual appearance, that detail of how it sounds, another of how it smells, and I mention that it looks like it should taste of sugared jalapenos, if you licked it. That last detail, of course, isn’t literally true. If the tree were real, and you licked it, you’d taste dirt and bark and leaves, not sugary capsaicin. But we’ll get to why it still works as a description later. For now, this is the point: I give the details not to create a precise image but to create a precise understanding.

This means that even though every reader sees a different image of a tree in his mind, every reader, if I’ve done my job right and he’s paying attention, has the same understanding of the tree, a single essential idea of the character of this tree and its tree-ishness. When you read Tolkien’s description of the Misty Mountains as the Fellowship approaches the pass, you see a different image than I do, than anybody else does, at least in some detail. Even if you did see the same image, language isn’t a precise enough medium to communicate that congruency to another person; the details are too many, the slight differences in understanding and preconception fatal. What Tolkien’s skill created, however, was a congruency of understanding. Your understanding of the Misty Mountains which that description engendered is congruent to mine; even if we still have differences, they are differences in minutia and in emphasis, built around a singular core understanding.

We’ve established our central goal: creating an understanding of that which we describe through sensory experience. Next, we’re going to look at what I’ve termed the ‘species’ of description: direct, analogical, and sideways description. Direct description is simple: description via literal statement of something’s attributes. Calling an apple ‘sweet’ is direct description.² Calling it ‘full of worms’ is a direct description, provided it is actually literally full of worms. Direct description doesn’t mess around with including bits that aren’t part of what it describes; a spade is a spade. That’s that. Insofar as it is comparison, it is comparison of like to like.

Analogical description goes in a different direction, comparing that which is described to something not entirely similar and not entirely dissimilar. Metaphors, similes, and imagery (a blurrily divided bunch) are all forms of analogical description. They highlight the similarities and either discard or use the dissimilarities (what a thing isn’t is often very important). I’ve talked about this before here and here. Analogical comparison takes two things and uses the reader’s understanding of one to make the other clearer. It has more power than the merely mathematical transfer of properties. The associations of the thing compared can be communicated to the thing described, unconsciously on the reader’s part. Thus two different metaphors can have radically different effects, even if their literal meaning is nigh equivalent. Consider: “The apple is red as a lady’s cheek in courting season,” versus “The apple is red as a pale doublet freshly soaked in blood.” They have radically different tones, even if both theoretically could serve to convey only that the apple is red.

Sideways description is technically speaking a subspecies of analogical description, but it’s one that is worthy of consideration on its own. Like analogical description, I’ve talked about it before (here), if not under the same name.³ Sideways description is like analogical description in that it compares two things only partially similar to each other in order to highlight that which they have in common; unlike conventional analogical description, though, sideways description does not rely on sensory or literal correspondence for its ‘like’. It is, in truth, an extension of the use of a comparison to draw associations. I used a sideways description above in my example with the tree, saying it ‘it looks like it should taste of sugared jalapenos’. As I noted then, the tree doesn’t taste like sugared jalapenos. I’m not running the analogy off of a sensory congruency. No, the idea I’m getting at is that the tree looks like it should taste that way, regardless of how it does taste. In other words, I’m utilizing a taste description to describe the tree’s appearance, to evoke the effect of that appearance. If I’ve done well, you have an idea what the tree’s appearance feels to witness. I’ve borrowed the way ‘sugared jalapenos’ taste and applied it to how the tree looks- a lateral move, which is why I call it sideways description.

The species of description are useful, but they’re only half of the story. The six-and-a-half vectors of description (five-and-a-half alike and one odd man out) are also very important. These are: sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, and feeling (with ‘miscellaneous other senses’ being the ‘and-a-half’). A good description does not need all of these. Many descriptions, usually of less important elements, require only one. Most require only a sub-set of the list. Occasionally, all six-point-five must be utilized, even if only via using sideways description to cross the wires between them, use one to communicate another.

Sight and sound are the simplest and the most intuitive. Sight is easy, and sound comes right after it, because those are the longest ranged and most used senses we have. Describing how things look and how they sound makes sense. I don’t really need to convince you to use these two, because if you want to describe stuff (and you aren’t blind or deaf) you already use them.

Smell and touch are a bit harder but remarkably powerful. A well-described smell can make a meal into a feast, a beef roast into something that gets your reader’s stomach growling. It can make the bodies on the ground that much worse because he can almost smell the slight sweetness of charred flesh from the charnel pit, the septic taint of corpse’s bowels releasing, the iron tang of blood. Touch can have a similar effect. Touch can add the texture of cloth and old, wrinkled skin to the character hugging their mother, can ground each time he opens the door with a recollection of use-smoothed handles and slightly grainy wood, can render the muck of a cold, wet winter in the swamps not just terrible to look at but something that sucks and pulls at the feet.

Smell and touch are less used but still fairly intuitive. With taste, however, we have a problem: we don’t generally taste everything around us. Taste would seem to be useful only for food, for medicine, for things we eat, and for small children who lick everything, including the freezing cold lamp post. Taste, however, has more versatility than that. As I hope I demonstrated above with the tree, it’s very useful for sideways description, communicating the effect of the other senses. Taste is, after all, a very visceral, very intense sense, with strong emotional connections (because we humans care about food). Taste can also share some of smell’s area of use; smells sometimes seem to be in the mouth as much as the nose, when they’re strong or particularly associated in the mind of the person smelling with a certain taste. Take advantage of this.

Take advantage also of the semi-senses characters have. Use vertigo, proprioception, and other internal sensations to create a better impression of the world around them. This is the cross-over point between senses and emotions. Speaking of which….

The emotional response of the characters in the story to the thing or person described is also a method of description. Once the reader knows the character, how they respond to a stimulus will tell the reader much about the thing they’re responding to. This reflect real life. If your spouse is disgusted by somebody they’ve met but you haven’t, you’ll derive information about that person from their reaction, even before they give you reasons. You know, after all, what traits and actions will disgust your spouse, and so you attribute some of the character of those traits and actions to this person who disgusts them. So too if you understand the character, and you see their impression, you can reason from your knowledge of what would affect them in a certain way to understand what has affected them. This works in reverse too; a character’s reaction to something the reader has a solid impression of will characterize (describe, but for characters) that character in the reader’s eyes.

All in all, description is not an easy task to do well. We can’t just throw out a detail here, an idea there, and call it a day. We need to choose our details and our means carefully, among vectors and species, with our central goal always in sight. Too much detail can be as fatal as too little; white noise and silence are alike useless. The job of description is figuring out what understanding you want to convey and then choosing the right details to do so, choosing the right way to convey them, what sensory elements work best, what environmental details will stimulate the correct understanding in the reader. This is, usually, the work of multiple pass-throughs, multiple drafts, each adding or removing something till, ideally, the finished description accomplishes precisely what is needed, communicates what is intended and nothing else. This is a high goal, one that seems to recede as it is approached, but how else could it be, when it is in truth an imitation of God’s work of creation and His communication of that creation to us by all our senses.

God bless.

Footnotes

1 – As this word may not be obvious in meaning at first glance, I provide a dissection: ‘tree+ish+ness’.

2 – So too, technically, is calling an apple ‘an apple’. Tautological description could be its own category, but it really isn’t different enough in application from direct description to merit it.

3 – I think this lack of terminological consistency is excusable, given that I came up with the term in the process of outlining this article.