Word Painting by Rebecca McClanahan

Author:Rebecca McClanahan
Language: eng
Format: epub

Rosa Guy stood in the doorway, dressed in a blue denim jumpsuit with silver braid. Her face was bright and shiny, as if she'd just scrubbed it with complexion cream or Dove soap. Yellow earrings, in the shape of sunflowers, dangled from her tiny pink ears. Her neck was thick and veiny. She was broad-chested, like a female wrestler from Channel Nine's Monday Night Wrestling. Her hips were wide, but her feet were as long and narrow as the oars my grandfather uses when he rows his canoe.

Yikes! Where is the reader supposed to focus attention? True, the details are sensory and specific, but are they significant? What overall impression was I trying to make? In the previous chapter we discussed how a figure of speech fails when images are too farfetched or mixed, or when one image cancels out the other. The same principle applies to physical descriptions. Too many details, however sensory and specific, overload the reader. When my husband builds a puppet character, he chooses one or two physical details to focus on. He says that beginning builders provide too many features, resulting in what he calls the "Salad Bar Puppet." There's no need to overload your plate, he says. Select a few distinguishing features and ignore the others.

In describing characters, we need to select details carefully, choosing only those that create the strongest, most revealing impression. One well-chosen physical trait, item of clothing or idiosyncratic mannerism can reveal character more effectively than a dozen random images. This applies to characters in non-fiction as well as fiction. When I write about my grandmother, I usually focus on her strong, jutting chin—not only because it was her most dominant feature but because it suggests her stubbornness and determination. When I write about Uncle Leland, I describe the wandering eye that gave him a perpetually distracted look, as if only his body were present. His spirit, it seemed, had already left on some journey he'd glimpsed peripherally, a place the rest of us were unable to see.

Besides including too many details, beginning writers also tend to clump details of physical description together, usually at the beginning of the story or when the character is first mentioned. There's no need to frontload your story with physical descriptions, or to reveal all your details at once. Details can accumulate as the story progresses. This technique protects your readers from overly long or static passages, while providing the series of proofs that help sustain the fictional dream. According to Flaubert, an object in a story has to be mentioned three times in order for the reader to be convinced of its existence. The same can be said for physical description. If you describe a character's freckled skin only once, the reader may not remember it. But if you mention it again, even briefly, you increase the chances that the detail will be not only remembered but believed. Look back at the passages of physical description in your stories or essays. Are all

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