Want to bring your pages to life? Then you need imaginative writing and vivid imagery that helps the reader vicariously experience your story. But if you want those descriptions to really sing, you need to opt for descriptors and verbs that are as unexpected as they are creative.
I just came across notes I made after reading two very different books by two very different authors that make this exact point.
To say that James Conaway is controversial would be an understatement. His books about Napa are most certainly subjective–and some would say fictionalized–accounts of the valley’s main players. But the man does have a way with imaginative language. In Napa: The Story of an American Eden, I love his description of a lawyer as the “wearer of suspenders and the soup-straining mustache” and of a vineyard owner as having “unruly red hair that swallowed the stems of his aviator glasses.” Vineyards stretch like corduroy in Conaway’s world, and post-harvest vines “spread in riotous senility.” I also appreciate his use of unexpected verbs to punctuate his prose. “By the time the meeting was under way, fine rain needled the windows,” he writes. Can’t you just see it?
In My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry, author Fredrick Backman’s ridiculously imaginative language is as evocative as it is reflective of the novel’s seven-year-old narrator who is clearly not your average little girl. Elsa’s introduction of her grandmother tells us so much about the little girl and the older woman. “Granny is seventy-seven going on seventy-eight, She’s not very good at it either. You can tell she’s old because her face looks like newspaper stuffed into wet shoes, but no one ever accuses Granny of being grown-up for her age.” Backman’s unexpected description is as striking as his narration is revealing. “Elsa sits down again on the bench. Leans her head back and feels the cold little feet of snowflakes landing on her face.”
I wish I had written that.
If you’ve read descriptions you wish you had written, I hope you’ll share them.
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