Description -- the Real Deal

Write for truth, not for effect -- it's a cardinal rule.  I read a phrase in someone's blog: water remembers you, and it struck such a hollow note, largely (I think) because it is inaccurate. Of all the elements, it seems to me that water is the least capable of remembering, because it's freeflowing and ever-changing.  Stone could conceivably retain an impression (I'm talking metaphorically here, of course) and fire could scorch something into your memory, but water?  Even with artistic license, it's too great a leap for me to take. and because it isn't accurate or plausible, it leaves me with the unavoidable impression that it's been written purely for effect, which immediately debases its value.  It's a kind of narcissism, and therefore to be avoided.

The best description springs from close observation, worked upon by imagination and intuition. Your goal when writing should be emotional and linguistic truth; by comparison, anything else is a kind of counterfeit, and who wants that?

Radiohead?

The inestimable Radio Four is this country's most prolific commissioner of new dramas (and probably short stories too) so looking in more depth at writing for radio is something that interests me - I once did a week-long intensive course run by Jane Dauncey for the BBC at Ty Newydd in North Wales and still have a few of her tips to pass on, but I'll have to do some thinking first, and some rummaging in old files...

What I wanted to unpick a little today is how you can approach descriptive writing -- how to conjure a place in the mind of your reader - and I guess for most of us our default setting is to concentrate on the appearance of a location, describing a remote valley, or a beach, or a suburban street in visual terms.  Smells can also be incredibly evocative, but I think a more unusual and lateral approach can be to talk about the way a place sounds.

To test this out, it might be useful to describe somewhere relying solely on what your central character can hear.  Just as there are different fields of vision, there are different fields of sound and you can bring depth and texture into your writing by moving from close, almost internalised, minute sounds (breathing, the flutter of a pulse) to something more intermediate and then on to something in the background.  It's a great way of making yourself focus upon detail, and what it can reveal, but also of flexing different descriptive muscles.  When you have finished your soundscape, you may find that you can incorporate it into a description that includes visual information too, so that the overall image you are creating has greater completeness and resonance.

It would also be a good way of limbering up for some radio writing, and today we are going through the pink door....