COMMENTARY -- THE FICTION WRITER'S USES OF DESCRIPTION

 

 

("...vivid detail is the life blood of fiction" -- John Gardner)

 

 

 

            In The Art of Fiction, John Gardner defines and explains two primary concepts that any beginning fiction writer should understand -- verisimilitude and willing suspension of disbelief:

 

    "In any piece of fiction, the writer's first job is to convince the reader that the events he recounts really happened, or to persuade the reader that they might have happened (given small changes in the laws of the universe), or else to engage the reader's interest in the patent absurdity of the lie. The realistic writer's way of making events convincing is verisimilitude. The tale writer, telling stories of ghosts, or shape-shifters, or some character who never sleeps, uses a different approach: By the quality of his voice, and by means of various devices that distract the critical intelligence, he gets what Coleridge called -- in one of the most clumsy famous sentences in all literature –‘the willing suspension of disbelief’ for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.'"

 

           

Gardner's book is built on the age-old idea that a piece of good fiction constitutes a "vivid and continuous dream" in the mind of the reader. Both writer and his or her willing reader create this "dream" between them, by mutual cooperation, the reader by desiring that his disbelief be suspended, the writer by using his technical abilities with sufficient virtuosity that the dream's continuity is not disturbed by flaws in taste, style, logic, etc.

 

            The writer's primary tool is description. Good, specific description gives the reader's imagination a definite object, place or person to picture, and thus the reader can step into the world of the story. The writer should keep two basic principles in mind in regard to description:

 

            1. Description should show, not tell.

 

            2. Description should embody and convey attitude.

 

            As you study the stories in the anthologies, pay attention to how much "information" you get about the world of the story through the description that any narrator, be it first or third-person, uses in it. For instance, fiction writers would prefer to have their characters eat chili-burgers instead of "lunch," and they'd give a man a plaid beret rather than a "hat," simply because the man in the plaid beret who is eating a chili-burger across the table from the first-person narrator has much more individual personality than "a man eating lunch," and those two specific details suggest that the story is (perhaps) comic, that the character is an eccentric (a plaid beret is  most uncommon headgear), and that the characters are either poor or have no particular regard for food. She unsnapped her Louis Vuitton purse and complained that the vichyssoise was warm. He pried his bronc-busting buckle out of his gut and ordered chicken-fried steak. You get the point.

 

            For the convenience of studying the uses of description in fiction, we will break it down to:

 

            1.   Descriptions of objects, props.

2.     Description of places, settings.

3.     Descriptions of people, characters.