How to Write Descriptions That Paint a Vivid Picture For Your Reader

ALMOST EVERY DAY I get a question from a writer about how to describe something or someone. I work as a writing coach and memoir editor, and I teach many online memoir classes. Every time I’m asked about the art of description, I pause to consider the varied and wondrous images from my life that have found a home in my own writing. Which one to use as an example? This is vital work for a writer, because what’s a stake in learning how to write descriptions that paint a vivid picture for your reader is nothing less than the ability to engage readers with your work.

Description of something you’ve seen or experienced is, by its very nature, pretty tricky. Experiences can come with sight, sound and smell; they can trigger backstory and terror, or inspire courage. They can harm or guide. In an instant, an experience can reshape a lifelong heritage of thinking. Consider what happens if you see something you are not meant to see. Now imagine that experience occurring at a time in your life when you didn’t yet possess the cognitive abilities or language to interpret what you are seeing. How should you describe that now?

To further muddle things, experience is deeply personal. It is filtered and interpreted by our own needs and wants, or by such factors as our birth order, what we were paying attention to and, of course, by what we refuse to acknowledge. Those are just a few ways through which we consider, store and remember our own life moments.

For memoir writers, the assignment to describe something is further complicated since the assignment is not merely to tell us what you saw, but to show us a person, place, thing or experience through your lens so that the reader gets to know who you are. This is a vastly different assignment than mere description. In fact, when writing memoir, it’s good to think of every description as an invitation for the reader to step behind your eyes — by showing us how you saw something, and how it informed or changed you when you did.

Memoir Writing Requires Accuracy

Of course, we want the truth. We want accuracy in the relevant details, whether that’s the name of your pet, the voice of your teacher or the year you’re depicting. That is a given. But when it comes to description, we want the truth according to you. Only when we can see what you see can we understand the effect it had, the influence it contained, and the resulting course you charted after witnessing something.

So, when writing description, begin with the truth.

Years ago, when I was just starting out as a memoir teacher, I had a student in my class who had experienced physical and emotional abuse at the hands of family member. One memorable scene took place outside, and in the first drafts, the piece described the day by noting that the sky was blue. That was true, she told me: It was a sunny day, and the sky was, in fact, blue. But as we talked about why that detail had any significance in the piece, the writer said she remembered being afraid under that sky since it was the exact color of the bruises on her body.

Suddenly, I realized the weight of my role as her teacher, as well as the chance for all of us to learn where and how to show that sky. As the writer made her way through several drafts, she worked that word “bruised” into the description of that sky, and then added a simple sentence about a “bruised sky” into the opening — the lede — of the piece. And with that opening line, the reader unconsciously braced for the scene that follows. To the writer, the sky looked bruised. From those of us in the room as she read the draft aloud, she got the gasp she deserved. And on she wrote, showing us her truth.

Who Are Your Characters?

When writing a piece of memoir, sit yourself in the front row of a theater. Go on. Envision it. You are the director of the play. All of your characters are backstage, waiting for you to call them onto that stage to play their parts as you assign them.

You are in control; they are not. Despite the huge roles some of these people have played in your life, they are no longer in control of your story. You are. How does that feel? That is writing.

Okay, now call someone onto the stage. Make him come onto that stage alone. All alone. Now tell him what to do. He is to deliver his lines, do his job in this one tale, and then he is to exit the stage.

This is your job. Much as in life, the essential question for you – and your characters – is this: What did you come here to do? That’s a cosmic question, I know. Wild, in fact. And absolutely the one question to ask. What is the job of this person — this dog, this house, this movie you saw — in this one tale that is yours to tell?

If you have not done so, please go read my little book on how to write memoir and pay particular attention to the three basic rules laid out in chapter one. Let’s think here about the third rule, which is, “Just because it happened doesn’t make it interesting.”

We are not looking for you to read to us from your datebook or your diary. Memoir is not your life story. Instead, at least the way I teach it, memoir is an argument-based genre in which only those details that move this one story forward get a place on your stage.

So, who are your characters, and what one role/job do they have in proving your argument? (If you’re not sure what I mean by “argument” here, go back and re-read that part of the book, too.) Knowing this will greatly pare down the choices when it comes to how to describe them. I do not want to read their height, weight, eye color and where they went to college, unless any of those is essential to the argument you are making. I want you to describe all your characters only in terms of how they fit into your story.

How? Don’t tell me your grandmother was the only kind soul in your life. Show me acts of unkindness in others in your family, and then show me a single scene of her kindness. What does kindness look like? Go on, direct this scene. Show us. Give us your truth. Get your grandmother up on that stage and have her give us a scene of one single act of kindness and we will see you store it in your heart and live off it amid the tumult of your life.

How to Write a Memoir When You Can’t Remember Things

My sister swears that my first-grade best friend was imaginary. It’s not true. At least, I don’t think it’s true, though he is absent from my class photos, and I have never been able to locate him on social media. Hmmm.

Despite that, she and I have a running joke that while I remember everything, she remembers nothing. That’s not quite true either, since I call her all the time to jog my own memory about certain childhood scenes. What she remembers well are the domestic details I never encoded. She was the baker, the gardener; I was the athlete. And when I need to know about the flowers in our grandmother’s vast garden, a china pattern, the pottery, the way things were cooked and whose recipe it was, my sister is my go-to source. She also has a version of our childhood tale that is wildly different from mine.

Do not let an inability to remember inhibit your ability to write. Call someone. Look in your high school yearbook. Check out old newspapers on microfilm. In a phrase, do some research.

How to Write Vivid Descriptions That Paint a Picture for Your Reader

Here are some words that mean nothing to readers: Sad. Beautiful. Delicious. Lovely. Exciting.

Here are some sentences that use those words:

It was the saddest day of my life.
She was a beautiful woman.
It was a delicious meal.
The room was lovely.
I found the conversation exciting.

What did you learn from reading those sentences? Nothing. What value will sentences of that sort bring to your story? None. Will that writing engage readers? Not at all.

In Memoirama, my entry-level online memoir class, I have an exercise where you’ll learn how never to write a sentence like, “It was the saddest day of my life,” and instead, show the reader the idea of sad. It is meant to transpose your thinking to a higher key. That’s what you must do here as you sit in that front row and direct your scene.

What do you need from that object you want to mention? Consider, for example, what happens when you see a vase in your sister’s house that once belonged to your mother. Do you feel longing? Jealousy? Loss? This is what we are after. We are not merely after the fact that the pitcher is tall and slender and red. We want those details only so we can see what it is you reach for, but it is far more important for us to be invited to watch what happens to you when you stretch out your arms to hold it again. Those emotions are shown in gestures. In that case, description actually emerges in action.

How to Write Well

Memoir is not autobiography. Memoir is an argument-based genre that allows you to show us your transcendence from when you did not know something to when you did, or from when you could not do something to when you could, or from when you needed to quit something or heighten something to when you actually did it, and how that enabled you to live a more integrated life.

That being the case, we need to see what objects, people, events, conversations and all the other experiences of life do to you.

What does this mean for learning how to write descriptions?

Try writing this on a piece of paper and slapping it to your wall:

Memoir is not about what you did. Memoir is about what you did with it.

Now go ahead and chant that to yourself. Then ask yourself what seeing that delicate red vase on your sister’s windowsill did to you. Tell us its color and shape, absolutely, but also show us the emotional response you had when you reached for it. Did you gaze at it, gently curling and uncurling your fingers without ever touching it? Did you merely brush one finger against its surface, or did you grab it and stuff it in your purse?

Don’t just tell us what you did. Show us what you did with it. And write well.

Memoirama: Live, 90 minutes. Everything you need to write what you know.

Memoirama 2. Live, two hours. Limited to seven writers. What you need to know to structure a book.

How to Write Opinion Pieces: Op-eds, Radio Essays and Digital Commentary: Live, 90 minutes. Get your voice out into the world.

And keep in mind that I am now taking names for the upcoming Master Class, the prerequisites for which are Memoirama and Memoirama 2. It’s live, once a month, and limited to seven writers who are determined to get a first draft of their book-length memoir finished in six months.

Photo by 五玄土 ORIENTO on Unsplash