Description as Discovery

There's something powerful about where the gaze happens to land.

Of all the essays I’ve read on craft, very few influenced me as much as Patricia Hampl’s “The Dark Art of Description.” In her essay, Hampl notes that in a world innundated with images it’s tempting to think that description in prose is less necessary, or that it is mostly a means of “scene setting” for the more important work of dramatizing a story.

I confess that until I read Hampl’s essay I sometimes thought about description in this way—as ornamental. But Hampl argued that it is much more powerful than that. To describe, she said, is to help writers establish their relationship to the reality that they are writing about, and for readers it is to “hear and feel the aborption of the author in the material.”

This absorption is evident in Gretel Ehrlich’s magificent Solace of Open Spaces. In the following passage Erlich doesn’t merely describe what she sees about Wyoming winters. She colors the details in ways that hint at her disposition towards place, and captures the winter’s beautiful violence.

A Wyoming winter laminates the earth with white, then hardens the lacquer work with wind. Storms come announced by what old-timers call “mare’s tails”—long wisps that lash out from a snow cloud’s body. Jack Davis, a packer who used to trail his mules all the way from Wyoming to southern Arizona when the first snows came, said, “The first snowball that hits you is God’s fault; the second one is yours.”

Every three days or so white pastures glide overhead and drop themselves like skeins of hair to earth. The Chinese call snow that has drifted “white jade mountains,” but winter looks oceanic to me. Snow swells, drops back, and hits the hulls of our lives with a course-bending sound. Tides of white are overtaken by tides of blue, and the logs in the woodstove, like sister ships, tick toward oblivion.

In literary nonfiction, to describe is less to document than to interpret, and the perceptual clues are everywhere in this passage, like this line: “the snow swells, drops back, and hits the hulls of our lives.”

But I don’t intend this essay as an analysis of effective description, as interesting as that might be. What I found most powerful about Hampl’s essay is the suggestion that description is how writers can locate themselves in the work, that it can be “a dynamic engine that stoked voice and even more propelled the occasional narrrative arc.”

I had never considered that description could be a method of discovery for writers, helping them to establish their voice and emotional relationship to new material.

Lately, during sleepless nights, I find myself imagining the neighborhood I grew up in, walking down familiar streets and by the houses of old friends and neighbors. This always feels like an invitation to write, one that I ignore, thinking that there doesn’t seem to be the hints of trouble that typically motivate me to try out a subject. Hampl’s essay inspires me reconsider. Might I simply begin by describing this neighborhood?Would this exercise suggest a voice that might carry me into a subject, a story, or details that suggest new meaning? I gave it a try.

Across the street from the white stuccoed house I grew up in was the Hirsch’s home, a two-story colonial with white lapboard siding and green shutters. Mr. Hirsch was a traveling clothing salesman, and in the back seat of his car was always a rack that held a dozen men’s suits. Mrs. Hirsch, Edith, was a holocaust suvivor with a number tattooed on her wrist. As a boy, I cut their lawn, and what I remember most is a patch of violets that invaded the grass on their front lawn and survived multiple mowings. When I pointed this out, Edith Hirsch merely shrugged. “We don’t mind,” she said.

Between the Hirsch’s yard and our house, on our parkway, were several American elm trees. These were old, mature trees with a characteristic wine glass shape. The school down the street, just a block away, was named Elm Place. The old school building was a massive brick structure built in the 1890s. Neither the elms or the school survived long after I left. The elms succumbed to Dutch Elm disease, and the school building, which was expensive to maintain, was reduced to a pile of bricks from which my neighbors took souvenirs. I don’t know what one does with a souvenir brick, but I wish I had one.

As I consider this brief bit of description I can’t see the shape of a larger work but I do sense hints of meaning—ideas about survival, resistance, and regret. There is a voice here, too, that might be strong enough to carry me further into the material. The writer Vivian Gornick writes that there is a “situation and a story.” The situation is the “context or circumstance,” while the story is “the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer.” Voice gives rise to a narrator “who could serve the situation and find the story.” I sense that voice here. But could I have found it just as easily without an exercise in description?

Perhaps. But there’s something powerful about where the eye happens to land. Of the many possibilities, why begin with the Hirsch’s house? And why does my gaze land on a pile of bricks, the ruins of my old school? Description demands details, and as writers know, these are often telling. What I see and how I see it also gives rise to a particular narrator, one rooted in a sensory world. To begin there seems useful because it connects us to a world we are trying to create, one that might include a survivor who accepts the invasion of violets.