The Silver Moon by Bryce Courtenay

Author:Bryce Courtenay
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781743485705
Publisher: Penguin Group Australia
Published: 2014-10-13T04:00:00+00:00

DESCRIPTIVE NARRATIVE

In a writing class the first written assignment is titled: ‘The sun rose in Africa’. I give class members half an hour to complete what is invariably around five hundred or so words of descriptive narrative.

I then call the writing to a halt and explain that in modern terms the reader has visually experienced being just about everywhere. We are now virtually in the third generation of colour TV, an age when telephones take pictures and send them together with text messages instantly around the neighbourhood, city or the world. Conversations across continents are practically composed of pictures, sound and immediate action. The scenic beauty of the planet we live in described so eloquently by writers in the pre-electronic age is now pretty redundant. We’ve all seen a hundred sunrises over Africa on TV or elsewhere on electronic media and so when spending words on the glorious happenstance of standing on the top of Mount Kilimanjaro one needs to be fairly selective. In other words, only describe what is essential to your storyline and is original information almost certainly unknown by your potential mass readership.

Of course, occasionally you will need to set a mood and this may require some careful description. But, as a general rule, go easy on the scenic wonder and leave the generally descriptive prose to the poets.

For example, should one of your characters be working in a kitchen it is not necessary to describe the environment. Most kitchens are pretty similar looking. The same applies with a hotel or restaurant kitchen, every reader has seen this cooking environment a hundred times in real life or on TV cooking programmes that seem to invade the air. As a general rule, describe only what concerns the plot, that is, should the description be omitted the impact of the narrative will be lessened.

The urge to write endless descriptive narrative goes way back almost to kindergarten. It’s hard-wired within most of us. It comes from times in centuries past when few people had travelled and books were the only journey they could make elsewhere. But somehow it has persisted even into the twenty-first century. Descriptive narrative was a good portion of any essay we wrote in the course of the ten or so years we spent going through primary and secondary school:

As the sun rose a drop of silvery dew slid down the length of a stork of grass and landed with a bright splash on the back of a small brown snail getting ready for bed.

Teacher’s note: Well done, Jessica! 9/10 – a stork is a bird. You mean, stalk. signed, Miss Forbes.

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