Thread: question on description

Greetings,

I have a question, when I am writing the scenes usually, well always play out in my head as a movie which leads to some obstacles when writing it down, at least for me, for instance how would you translate a person dead asleep and is awakened to the phone ringing? Or at least translating the sound of the phone ringing onto the written page? Usually I can figure out most of the scenes in my head but for some reason I cannot get past the description of the phone.

Thanks for helping
Vickie

Something to the effect of: Bob awoke with a start. As the fog cleared he realized the phone was ringing.


Put yourself into that situation and write of your experiences/sensory perceptions. I'm sure you have been awakened by a ringing phone in the middle of the night. How did you experience it?

vickie, I come from a very artistic family: my mother, sister, and aunt are all very talented artists. So a lot of my imagination is visual, too. You could even say I have an artist's eye. Just without the talent! Here's what I've found out about "scenes" when they're playing out in your head: they rarely make for good writing.

A lot of the creative impulse today is generated by TV, games, and movies. With good reason, too--there have been a lot of great stories told through the visual medium. Unfortunately for writers, what works great visually is often banal and clunky on the page.

Think about the scene you just described: your main character asleep, the phone ringing, the way the hungry, insistent clamor of the ringtone pulls him/her out of the depths of unconsciousness. How are you visualizing the scene? I'll bet you ten to one that you're seeing it from an "audience" perspective. Your character is reacting to the phone, and you're watching the scene unfold.

This works great in cinema. Really, it's the only way we as the audience can make sense of a movie. In prose, however, the reader is not just an "audience." The reader is a participant. Readers don't watch. We experience.

Consider the following short passages:

#1) Sara lay asleep on the bed, sunlight streaming in through the window to paint white stripes on the linens draped over her body. The room was quiet; only her soft, rhythmic breaths broke the silence.

The telephone on her nightstand let out a sharp trill. Sara's breath changed. Her eyelids fluttered and she drew in a sharp breath. The phone rang again. Groaning, she rolled onto her side and swatted out with one sleep-limp hand toward the noise. Her fingers brushed against the small phone, knocking it off the stand and down onto the pale carpet. It bounced once, landing on its face, and rang again.

Cursing, Sara opened her eyes to the bright morning light.

-----

Now, here's the next passage:

#2) Something was screaming. It was a hungry sound, insistent and angry. It was the sound of a small, petulant animal used to getting its way.

Sara groaned. She was floating. The dark, numb depths of sleep lay sprawled below her, and she was slowly drifting up into the world of bustle and strive and gotta-do. She didn't want that world. She wanted the rest and the deep nothing and the no-feeling. The no-feeling most of all.

The shrill animal cried out again, and Sara swatted out at it. She was rising like a balloon now, up and away from the peace and the beautiful void of sleep. The tiny, stupid, reptilian part of her mind promised that if she could just make the hungry little thing stop screaming, she could drift back down into sleep. Into peace.

Her fingers bumped the noisemaker. It skittered away, and Sara heard a muffled thump as it fell to the carpet. Angrily, the thing screamed out again, seeming louder now than it had been before.

"Shit," she muttered. It was no use. She was too high, too far away from the blissful nothing. The busy, demanding world had caught her. It wasn't going to let her go back.

The phone rang again.

She opened her eyes against the bright morning sunlight.

-----

Okay, so here we have two short passages describing the exact same event: Sara's telephone waking her up in the morning. In passage #1, I used pure visual and auditory description, all from a spectator's POV. In this one, we can see the bedroom clear as day. We can probably see Sara, too. It's very sensory-dense.

In passage #2, though, we don't see anything. There isn't a single shred of visual information in this version, save the very last sentence. However, we are very close to Sara. Instead of watching the scene as a spectator, we're actually inside Sara's head. We're experiencing it right alongside her. Really, we're putting ourselves in Sara's place and going through the whole thing vicariously.

These two passages illustrate the extremes when it comes to narrative technique. The first allows a quick, wide-angle view of the scene, and is loaded with sensory data. The second gets us close to the character and lets us feel her waking up. It also allows some character-building right off the bat: why does she not want to wake up? What is she hiding from? Why does she have such a hostile view toward the world, as evidenced by her perception of the phone as "hungry" and "screaming"?

I'm not going to say which technique I feel to be superior. I will say this, though: you could turn #1 into a movie scene. #2, however, is something you can only do through writing.

Just sayin'.