TODAY’S WRITING MOMENT: The In-the-Moment Impact of Amazing Description

We’re told all the time in school that description is good. But it’s only good when it does more than describe. When we just slop a bunch of adjectives and adverbs around in an endless attempt to please our teachers or ourselves, what we’re trying to clarify for our readers becomes, ironically, murkier.

Great writers know this intuitively. They use description for more than making pictures in their readers’ minds, and they use it, often in tiny bits, for in-the-moment impact.

Barbara Claypole White is one of those great writers.

In her latest Amazon bestseller, “The Promise Between Us”, Barbara uses bits of carefully crafted description to illicit within her readers a flood of inferences that reveal the depths of her main character.

Her descriptions are vivid and enjoyable for their own sake, but they accomplish more than mere entertainment. With just a few well-chosen phrases, she tells us things that might require thousands of words of exposition.

Let’s take a long walk off a short opening and see how she works her magic.

“Crouched in the corner of my baby girl’s bedroom, we both shake: the three-legged mutt and the mother with a colony of fire ants multiplying in her brain.”—from “The Promise Between Us” by Barbara Claypole White

“Crouched in the corner…”

“Crouched” is a terrific verb. “Corner” is a perfect place.

Four words in and we know this character is frightened, anxious, falling apart perhaps, wedging herself against walls to hold herself together.

“…of my baby girl’s bedroom.”

More alliteration, that’s nice for energy. Now we know she’s a new mom. This adds to the weight of her anxiety and opens a question: “Is the fear she’s feeling about herself or her child?

Let’s read on.

“…we both shake:…”

Maybe it’s both of them. Or?

Now, look at those tiny two points of punctuation: a colon. This tells us that the words on the left side that we’ve just read are in some way equivalent to the words we’re about to read on the right.

“…the three-legged mutt and the mother with a colony of fire ants multiplying in her brain.”

“… three-legged mutt….”

A dog who has lost a leg, a stray, a rescue, not a purebred—and no longer “whole”.

“… and the mother with a colony of fire ants multiplying in her brain.”

“…THE three-legged mutt and THE mother…”

Switching to the third person here. Why? We’ll tackle that in a moment.

“… with a colony of fire ants multiplying in her brain.”

Me—an arachnophobe and a just-about-every-other-kind-of-insect-aphobe—I’m a little creeped out by this which is probably exactly how Barbara wants me to feel, whether she knows about my quirky queasiness or not.

It’s a “colony of fire ants”. That’s pretty serious. Not your every day bumble bee buzzing around like a random thought looking for a pretty flower.

These are fire ants. They’re in this woman’s brain. It’s a “colony”, an organized mass of Helter-Skelter-scurrying creatures. And it’s “multiplying”. This is not a static situation. It's terrifying and perhaps intensely painful.

Is it a panic attack? I’d say not. I’d say it’s something more chronic, something that happens often to this woman, if not very often.

What’s the clue for me? The switch to third person.

When we go from “I” to “me”, we distance ourselves from ourselves. This typically indicates that a behavior or situation is something that happens so regularly we can describe it as if we’re the omniscient narrator of our own lives.

I think this woman struggles with some kind of serious mental illness: anxiety or OCD? But probably not PTSD or full-blown paranoia. The first two tend to be chronic and seemingly continuous; the last two, while possibly chronic, tend to be episodic.

What I’m also pretty sure of is that we can rule out one thing that’s very common in fiction today: she’s not hiding from an intruder.

If she were, the book would be some kind of thriller perhaps. But I don’t think she’s afraid of someone else. I think she’s afraid of herself and what she might do, or fail to do, for her child, if those fire ants continue to multiply.

Do we need a definite diagnosis of her mental state? Nope. We just need to know that this is probably the worst possible feeling a person could hold in her head and still be self-aware enough to momentarily reflect on her situation.

This is another reason why the switch to 3rd person is so important: we know she’s not mentally dissociative; she’s holding it together—herself, her child, her motherhood—even if just barely.

The important thing for me is that I’m getting the feeling, in just one sentence and 29 words, that this is not a thriller, that this may be the story of a personal struggle for a new mother.

Oh! The book is called “The Promise Between Us”. Is the story about that implicit promise of protection that exists between every mother and child? Just a guess on my part. But not a bad one. And if I’m right, Barbara has also tipped me off to genre, too.

A few well-chosen words can do a lot of work—if they’re the right words written in the right order. In 29 words, a talented writer can set up an 80,000 word novel.

This what we need to tell our students, again and again and again—well, every time they start something off. First words need to work, of course, but most young writers don’t know how hard they need to work—nor how hard even unskilled kids can push them.

But with practice—and models of good writing broken down as we’ve done here—they can do it. Even very little kids can do it. But we need big kids, like Barbara, to show them how.

https://www.amazon.com/Promise-Between-Barbara-Claypole-White-ebook/dp/B071WK6YJG