A shaggy, wet-haired man in his early thirties sits on a comfy old couch, a large chrome laptop covering his legs. He's wearing an indigo t-shirt with a white drawing of Super Mario on it; the shirt used to fit a little better, but he's dropped some weight since those days. Below his feet the floor pulses with the sound of dance music from his neighbors in the apartment below. In his own, cluttered apartment, the sound of Patsy Cline starting up "I Fall to Pieces" can be heard from the stereo as his wife waits in the kitchen for the fish to marinate; she's gazing into her own laptop on the granite countertop. When the man looks over his shoulder at her, she gives him a wry smile and walks towards him, gently chiding him about what he's been writing about her on his blog.
I've noticed that my writing doesn't tend to have a lot of physical detail in it, especially in the first drafts. Part of that is because setting the scene doesn't usually interest me as much as getting the characters doing stuff and interacting with each other, but part of it because of my limitations: I don't have a great deal of descriptive power, even though Iike to think I have a decent-sized vocabulary (although I've been trying to expand my vocabulary lately by studying SAT words---among other language-related stuff---on a nifty little memorization site called Memrise). The specific words for things often elude me, or are downright unknown. Specific articles of clothing, especially women's clothing, and the materials that they're made of, are common offenders, along with architectural features both interior and exterior. I'm also often stuck when I'm trying to describe a very specific emotion, and that tends to be the trickiest situation of all, since unlike the other cases I'm not always certain that the word I'm looking for actually exists. It's times like that when I have to resort to evoking the feeling through description, and being evocative is always a tricky business, since signifiers can mean different things to different people when they're not part of an established shorthand. Now here's the point where I'm supposed to go citing specific examples of this phenomenon, but it turns out that that's something else I'm not terribly good at, especially when I'm trying to write extemporaneously and don't really feel like it's worth the energy of doing research.
I'm also hesitant to put more detail than necessary into my stories for pacing reasons, as I alluded to earlier. I don't often enjoy hearing long descriptions of clothing or food (I'm looking at you, George R. R. Martin, although you certainly redeem yourself many times over for it), and being too specific about a character's appearance can even make it harder to get the reader into the story, since it'll be that much harder to relate the writer's creations to themselves or people they know (or at least that's been my experience as a reader sometimes). I've found that, in my favorite stories, a few very particular, well-chosen details can be the most effective of all. If you see a three-legged dog with a human femur in its mouth, do you necessarily even need to know its breed?
I need to do more exercises like the first paragraph of this entry, drawing from my actual surroundings to practice description. It's a muscle that can grow stronger in time, but it needs to be used regularly if it's going to develop properly. Then we get to the issue of finding time again. I read an interesting blog entry on the New York Times website this morning about people (and New Yorkers in particular) feeling busy all the time, but that busyness being a product of their own ambitions and priorities, not anything born of necessity. The tone of the article felt like the author was oversimplifying things a bit, but it still gave me pause. Should I be taking more time to just sit back and enjoy life, instead of rushing from one scheduled task to the next? I probably have more free time than a lot of people, but there are still so many things that I feel like I don't have enough time to work on, and there are always exciting events going on in the city that I feel like I'm missing out on because I don't have the time or the energy to head out every night to try and catch every single one of them. All in all, I really can't say that I have many regrets at this point in my life though, and I feel blessed to be surrounded by an abundance of possible things to do. Having all the time in the world but nothing to do with it would drive me insane (in fact, it's probably at the root of my concept of hell).
No comments:
Post a Comment