We began week 1 with readings and a little freewriting and a short essay assignment as follow-up and diagnostic. Today we'll share some of those those and air thoughts and comments on them, your first practice. Some of the topics we looked at included leaps of faith and making friends, and for these you had example essays to model your own work upon. Most of the examples were first-person essays; that is, they were written using the "I" grammatical point of view and reflected the author's own personal experience and observations. The first-person point of view (POV) is the most natural when we want to focus on our self and our participation in the matters addressed. We will continue using this POV in the next few essays, though a third-person POV is appropriate when the author wants a more distanced and objective rendering of the subject and to keep the author more or less in the background as a non-participant. In descriptive writing you will find a blend of the objective and personal or subjective views.
I've planned time to work in class on the aspect or mode of writing referred to as description, which mode is very much a part of creating sensory appeal in writing and of making abstract ideas, thoughts and feelings practically tangible. For homework I asked that you begin an informal account of strong images in your everyday world and activities and that appear in your mind's eye as you look over your life. You will use these as a way of working into autobiographical writing and of practicing a central aspect of cognition: direct observation and focused associations. We see selectively and no two people perceive things in precisely the same way. There is an objective world "outside" us, but we perceive from "inside" the body and mind. On the eminent psychoanalyst Carl Jung's authority, we can assume the images of importance to us have a reality fruitful to the search for meaning in our experience of life and self.
Key Points for Practice
In holding a mirror up to our subject, we may be overwhelmed by the sheer number of details and
vantage points which present. You can observe from many angles, after all. Imagine looking down at passersby from high in a tree on a roof or other place on a particular occasion. Now imagine a ground-level view. Perspective is important and it involves space and time. If the physical, sensory aspects of your subject are central to the presentation, you must organize the details spatially and temporally to create a clear, coherent image or series of that a reader can readily grasp, and then move to elaborate only those points that collectively create what is called a
dominant impression. These will underscore your purpose and main idea. At the outset, it is enough to simply record all you perceive and interesting associations. Later you can refine the imagery.
The following two paragraphs illustrate:
On the last Thursday in November, I could stay in bed only until the night chill left the house, hearing first the clash of the heavy grates in the huge black iron range, with its flowery scrolls and nickled decorations, as Mother shook down the ashes. Then, in their proper sequence, came the sounds of the fire being made–the rustle of newspaper, the snap of kindling the rush of smoke up the chimney when Mother opened the damper, slid the regulator wide open, and struck a match to the kerosene soaked corncobs that started a quick hot fire. [. . .]The duties of the kitchen on Thanksgiving were a thousand-fold, and I could tell that Mother was bustling about with a quicker step.
Marilyn Kluger, "A Time of Plenty"
A marvelous stillness pervaded the world, and the stars together with the serenity of their rays seemed to shed upon the earth the assurance of everlasting security. The young moon recurved, and shining low in the west, was like a slender shaving thrown up from a bar of gold, and the Arabian Sea, smooth and cool to the eye like a sheet of ice, extended its perfect level to the perfect circle of a dark horizon. The propeller turned without a check, as though its beat had been part of the scheme of a safe universe; and on each side of the
Patna two folds of water, permanent and sombre on the unwrinkled shimmer, enclosed within their straight and diverging ridges a few whote swirls of foam bursting in a low hiss, a few wavelets, a few ripples, a few undulations that, left behind, agitated the surface of the sea for an instant after the passage of the ship, subsided splashing gently, calmed down at last into the circular stillness of water and sky with the black speck of the moving hull remaining everlastingly in its center.
Joseph Conrad,
Lord Jim
The following excerpt is from Mark Twain's Autobiography, and relies heavily on descriptive detail, the naming of natural elements and their actions, the senses involved, memory and imagination.
As I have said, I spent some time of every year at the farm until I was twelve or thirteen years old. The life which I led there with my cousins was full of charm, and so is the memory of it yet. I can call back the solemn twilight and mystery of the deep woods, the earthy smells, the faint odors of the wild flowers, the sheen of rain-washed foliage, the rattling clatter of drops when the wind shook the trees, the far-off hammering of woodpeckers and the muffled drumming of wood pheasants in the remoteness of the forest, the snapshot glimpses of disturbed wild creatures scurrying through the grass–I can call it all back and make it as real as it ever was, and as blessed. I can call back the prairie, and its loneliness and peace, and a vast hawk hanging motionless in the sky, with his wings spread wide and the blue of the vault showing through the fringe of their end feathers. I can see the woods in their autumn dress, the oaks purple, the hickories washed with gold, the maples and the sumachs luminous with crimson fires, and I can hear the rustle make by the fallen leaves as we plowed through them. . . .
Here is another descriptive passage by Twain excerpt: I still kept in mind a certain wonderful sunset which I witnessed when steamboating was new to me. A broad expanse of the river was turned to blood; in the middle distance the red hue brightened into gold, through which a solitary log came floating, black and conspicuous; in one place a long, slanting mark lay sparkling upon the water; in another the surface was broken by boiling, tumbling rings, that were as many-tinted as an opal.
Graded writing #1 (formal), due next week in class: An essay built on descriptive detail of person(s), place(s), and/or thing(s) and the apparent meaning they suggest. Naturally, the matter of specific focus will be yours to make from among the artifacts or field of view you present.
As I write this, I see in memory (who knows why!) a red-eyed photographic image of Sammy, the family mutt (long dead), guarding my mother's shoes so jealously that she would bite anyone who tried to touch them. And now, the fake fox fur wrap I never wore but that I've used to dress up an old chair to give my place some shabby chic (as if it hadn't enough). With these images I could move to a number of topics meaningful to me, and to my imagined audience, providing more detail and direction. Think of someone who likes nothing better than to stroll to the top of the causeway bridge here on Southeast 17th Street and admire the view. He may want to describe what he sees, with an eye to the dominant impression, and to say, moreover, bridges are a wonder, no less this one, too, and want to detail some of its structure, its architecture, its history and all the blessings bridges bring.
Everything has a life, real or imaginative, and history, and function, and some of that can be researched–on Google, in an encyclopedia, data base, archive, and, animated too, by your concentrated recall or close examination, direct observation. An essay is by definition an open-exploration and we don't have to know everything, but a reader wants our thoughts, facts, ideas, feelings, and attitudes as expressed in language that comes as close as possible to the power and inspiration of our chosen subject matter.
So, in 500 words explore some element(s) of your world by focusing on the details of a person, place, or thing and the idea(s) put in play by that focus. You may write a largely personal narrative or a history of some other. The central work is to be invested in making us see, hear, taste, smell, feel and so on the impressions you have as you explore your subject, whether a childhood photo, a character you love, an old you-name-it you've been hanging onto, a new camera, a work of art, commercial product, dramatic view, or the menu you've assembled for an important feast. Your focus must have a leading idea or direction, a purpose and point.
The opening lines and/or paragraph should at least hint at the central idea. Supporting paragraphs should develop the promised topic by descriptive, expository, and perhaps narrative means. The conclusion should underscore your main idea and bring a sense of finish.
Title the essay, double space the lines, indent for each paragraph.
-------------------More Example Paragraphs of Description and Narration------------------------
The meaning we make of existence becomes clearer in our stories. A narrative involves events, actions, a conflict set in motion, consequences, the underlying motives and feelings of those involved, the lessons and insights gained through the experiences recounted. In writing narrative for a reading audience, you must also convey a sense of purpose, and a point. It's not enough to have had experiences; you must show readers the sense to be made of them.
The following paragraphs are shaped as narratives:
A hundred thousand people were killed by the atomic bomb, and these six were among the survivors. They still wonder why they lived when so many others died. Each of them counts many small items of chance or volition–a step taken in time, a decision to go indoors, catching one streetcar instead of the next–that spared him. And now each knows that in the act of survival he lived a dozen lives and saw more death than he ever thought he would see. At the time, none of them knew anything.
We imagine the action that took place in the event referenced above, but the writer does not show us the exploding bomb, the fire and smoke and devastation all around. The wails of the living, and the dying.
Narration does more than suggest, it shows action:
When I pulled the trigger I did not hear the bang or feel the kick–one never does when a shot goes home–but I heard the devilish roar of glee that went up from the crowd. In that instant, in too short a time, one would have thought, even for the bullet to go there, a mysterious, terrible change had come over the elephant. He neither stirred nor fell, but every line of his body had altered. He looked suddenly sticken, shrunken, immensely old, as though the frightful impact of the bullet had paralyzed him without knocking him down. At last, after what seemed a long time–it might have been five seconds, I dare say–he sagged flabbily to his knees. His mouth slobbered. An enormous senility seemed to have settled upon him. One could have imagined him thousands of years old. I fired again into the same spot. At the second shot he did not collapse but climbed with desperate slowness to his feet and stood weakly upright, with legs sagging and head drooping. I fired a third time. That was the shot that did for him. You could see the agony of it jolt his whole body and knock the last remnant of strength from his legs. But in falling he seemed for a moment to rise, for as his hind legs collapsed beneath him he seemed to tower upward like a huge rock toppling, his trunk reaching skywards like a tree. He trumpeted, for the first and only time. And then down he came, his belly towards me, with a crash that seemed to shake the ground even where I lay.
–George Orwell, "Shooting an Elephant"
Notice in the selection above how Orwell works the elements of sight, sound, movement in space, and deep feeling into the account, revealing only at the last line he has been lying down, firing up at the huge animal whose final collapse reverberates in our imagination.
Consider well the opening paragraph, as it should serve to draw the reader in to the essay subject. Choose concrete, specific words to relay details and the emotions at the heart of your piece. The following is the start of a roughly 5000 word biographical essay about the Russian ballet dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov, who defected to the West in 1974, and returned at age 50 to pay homage to his roots and dance for all those who had in some way shaped him.
It is raining, and Mikhail Baryshnikov is standing in a courtyard in Riga, the capital of Latvia, pointing up at two corner windows of an old stucco building that was probably yellow once. With him are his companion, Lisa Rhinehart, a former dancer with American Ballet Theatre, and two of his children–Peter, eight, and Aleksandra, or Shura, sixteen. He is showing them the house where he grew up. "It's Soviet communal apartment," he says to the children. "In one apartment, five families. Mother and Father have room at corner. See? Big window. Mother and Father sleep there, we eat there, table there. Then other little room, mostly just two beds, for half brother, Vladimir, and me. In other rooms, other people. For fifteen, sixteen people, one kitchen, one toilet, one bathroom, room with bathtub. But no hot water for bath. On Tuesday and Saturday, Vladimir and I go with Father to public bath."
I open the front door of the building and peer into the dark hallway. Let's go up," I suggest. "No," he says. "I can't." It is more than a quarter century since he was here last.
from "The Soloist," by Joan Acocella
Most of our stories are of events not unusual; they are often steeped in the ordinary and familiar but nonetheless telling, interesting and dramatic. An important strategy is to narrow your account down to the one or several key events and not to swamp the telling by including too much or anything that does not work to make your dramatic purpose clear, flowing, and forcefully delivered. Description of key places and people draws a reader in to a story. Dialogue used sparingly may also heighten the sense of immediacy and reality. Dialogue should reflect real conversation, minus whatever does not move the action forward or reveal character. Simple words and short sentences work best.
------------Further Selections of Narrative and Expository/Descriptive Work-----------------------------------
There is a minute and twenty-one seconds left on the clock in the 2002 Super Bowl, and the score is tied. The New England Patriots have the ball on their own 17-yard line. They are playing against the heavily favored St. Louis Rams. They have no time-outs left. Everyone assumes that the Patriots will kneel down and take the game into overtime. That, after all, is the prudent thing to do. “You don’t want to have a turnover,” says John Madden, one of the television broadcast’s commentators. “They just let time expire.”
The game was never supposed to be this close. The Rams had been favored by fourteen points over the Patriots, which made this the most lopsided Super Bowl ever played. The potent Rams offense–nicknamed the “Greatest Show on Turf”–led the league in eighteen different statistical categories and outscored their opponents 503 to 273 during the regular season. Quarterback Kurt Warner was named the NFL’s Most Valuable Player, and running back Marshall Faulk had won the NFL Offensive Player of the Year award. The Patriots, meanwhile, had been hamstrung by injuries, losing Drew Bledsoe, their star quarterback, and Terry Glenn, their leading wide receiver. Everyone was expecting a rout.
But now, with just a minute remaining, Tom Brady–the second string quarterback for the Patriots–has a chance to win the game. Over on the Patriot’s sidelines, he huddles in conversation with Bill Belichick, the Patriots’ head coach, and Charlie Weis, the offensive coordinator. “It was a ten-second conversation,” Weis remembered later. “What we said is we would start the drive, and, if anything bad happened, we’d just run out the clock.” The coaches were confident that their young quarterback wouldn’t make a mistake.
Brady jogs back to his teammates on the field. You can see through his facemask that he’s smiling, and it’s not a nervous smile. It’s a confident smile. There are seventy thousand spectators inside the Superdome, and most of them are rooting for the Rams, but Brady doesn’t seem to notice. After a short huddle, the Patriots clap their hands in unison and saunter toward the line of scrimmage.
Tom Brady wasn’t supposed to be here. He was the 199th pick in the 2000 draft. Although Brady had broken passing records at the University of Michigan, most team scouts thought he was too fragile to play with the big boys. The predraft report on Brady by Pro Football Weekly summarized the conventional wisdom: “Poor build. Very skinny and narrow. Ended the ’99 season weighing 195 pounds, and still looks like a rail at 211. Lacks great physical stature and strength. Can get pushed down more easily than you’d like.” The report devoted only a few words to Brady’s positive attribute: “decision-making.”
The quick decisions made by a quarterback on a football field provide a window into the inner workings of the brain. In the space of a few frenetic seconds, before a linebacker crushes him into the ground, an NFL quarterback has to make a series of hard choices. The pocket is collapsing around him–the pocket begins to collapse before it exists–but he can’t flinch or wince. His eyes must stay focused downfield, looking for some meaningful sign amid the action, an open man on a crowded field. Throwing the ball is the easy part.
–How We Decide, Jonathan Lehrer
The most famous outbreak of plague in Europe was the Black Death of 1348. But plague was a constant presence, flaring up erratically, unpredictably, irresistibly, throughout the late Middle Ages and the Renaiisance. And Venice offered almost ideal conditions for its spread–it was a warm seaport with high humidity, just the kind of place where the black rat flea (Yersinia pestis) flourishes. This flea preferred its original host, but it was so lethal that it killed the host population, proving more deadly to rats than to humans. Only when it had killed the available rats did it settle for biting humans–carried into proximity with them upon clothes or other items. These items came from ships where the fleas had ravaged the rat (and some of the human) population on board. Since only the flea spread the plague, contact of human with human was not of itself contagious (though this was unknown at the time). That is why only one person in a home might be killed, and why people tending those already plague-stricken in the lazaretti usually survived. Isolation was an effective preventative only secondarily, if the flea was kept from other humans until it had time to die itself.
Because the plague struck so mysteriously, killing and sparing in patterns little explicable, the fear of it could be apocalyptic, especially when numbers of the unnoticed fleas struck large parts of the population. The plague of 1575 to 1576 killed 5100 in Venice, almost a third of the population. Titian was one of its victims. Many saw in these catastrophes the punishment of an angry God, and turned to passages like Psalm 38.3 (37.3 in the Vulgate text used by the Venetians): “There is no health in my flesh, because of thy wrath: there is no peace for my bones, because of my sins.” Penitential services and public scourgings were meant to placate the Lord, and vows of reform were backed with promises to raise new altars or churches.
–Garry Wills, Venice: Lion City
Some paragraphs, particularly ones descriptive or narrative, have no directly stated topic idea, but the idea is implied, the purpose of the paragraph clear. What is the implied topic idea in the following examples?
Every year the aspiring photographer brought a stack of his best prints to an old, honored photographer, seeking his judgment. Every year the old man studied the print and painstakingly ordered them into two piles, bad and good. Every year the old man moved a certain landscape print into the bad stack. At length, he turned to the young man: "You submit this same landscape every year, and every year I put it on the bad stack. Why do you like it so much?" The young photographer said, "Because I had to climb a mountain to get it."
–Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
We would go to the well and wash in the ice-cold, clear water, grease our legs with the equally cold, stiff Vaseline, then tiptoe into the house. We wiped the dust from our toes and settled down for schoolwork, cornbread, clabbered milk, prayers and bed, always in that order. Momma was famous for pulling off the quilts to examine our feet. If they weren't clean enough for her, she took the switch and woke up the offender with a few aptly placed burning reminders.
–Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
There is a simplicity to the sun. It is a golden disk. It sits in the sky for everyone to see. The sun produces light energy. This energy of light is received and used by people and by plants everywhere on this planet. The sun, in a fundamental way, rules our lives from one day-length into another in our necklace of time.
There appears to be simplicity in sunlight itself. It can be seen coming as perfectly straight lines, shining into a dusty room and holding motes of dust in the stream of light. These lines of light illuminate the world; give perspective to landscape and even a meaning to its absence in shadow. The light shines on the bodies of plants and animals and it is absorbed by them in specialized organs called photoreceptors.
Photoreceptor organs occur in all plants except, perhaps, the fungi. They also occur in mammals and man as the pigmented retina of the eye. Mammalian photoreceptors scan a shorter length of the light spectrum and for the most part are more effective in light capture. Insects such as butterflies, bees, and wasps register invisible color. Many go one step further and can read polarizing light. Plants with their green-colored, spongy mesophyll and extraordinary pigmentation read the full spectrum of light, including the regions invisible to man. – The Global Forest, Diana Beresford-Kroeger
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Hanging in the trees, as if caught there, is a sickle of a moon. Its wan light scatters shadows on the snow below, only obscuring further the forest that this man negotiates now as much by feel as by sight. He is on foot and on his own save for a single dog, which runs ahead, eager to be heading home at last. All around, the black trunks of oak, pine, and poplar soar into the dark above the scrub and deadfall, and their branches form a tattered canopy overhead. Slender birches, whiter than the snow, seem to emit a light of their own, but it is like the coat of an animal in winter: cold to the touch and for itself alone. All is quiet in this dormant, frozen world. It is so cold that spit will freeze before it lands; so cold that a tree, brittle as straw and unable to contain its expanding sap, may spontaneously explode. As they progress, man and dog alike leave behind a wake of heat, and the contrails of their breath hang in pale clouds above their tracks. Their scent stays close in the windless dark, but their footfalls carry and so, with every step, they announce themselves to the night.
Despite the bitter cold, the man wears rubber boots better suited to the rain; his clothes, too, are surprisingly light, considering that he has been out all day, searching. His gun has grown heavy on his shoulder, as have his rucksack and cartridge belt. But he knows this route like the back of his hand, and he is almost within sight of his cabin. Now, at last, he can allow himself the possibility of relief. Perhaps he imagines the lantern he will light and the fire he will build; perhaps he imagines the burdens he will soon lay down. The water in the kettle is certainly frozen, but the stove is thinly walled and soon it will glow fiercely against the cold and dark, just as his own body is doing now. Soon enough, there will be hot tea and a cigarette, followed by rice, meat, and more cigarettes. Maybe a shot or two of vodka, if there is any left. He savors this ritual and knows it by rote. Then, as the familiar angles takes shape across the clearing, the dog collides with a scent as with a wall and stops short, growling. They are hunting partners and the man understands: someone is there by the cabin. The hackles on the dog’s back and on his own neck rise together.
Together, they hear a rumble in the dark that seems to come from everywhere at once.
– The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival, by John Vaillant
Notice that well written paragraphs develop adequately the subject; that is, there is sufficient detail and enough examples to make a persuasive case for the idea(s) expressed. Often, too, in descriptive and narrative writing you will notice the pattern of arrangement is either spatial (the eye moves from point A to B and on to C and D in clear, coherent direction) or chronological (time is tracked either from a beginning point on forward, or backward, or some mix of the past, present, and future). Sometimes both the spatial, as in description of a setting or scene, and the chronological, as in an account of actions in time, are at work. Look again at the examples above. How are they arranged?
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Notes on Autobiographical Narrative
