Drowning in Description: 5 Tips for Minimalistic, Deep Writing

Vincente Huidobro, a Chilian writer, said something that I greatly admire. Huidobro was an aristocrat, so he definitely knew something about unnecessary luxury and false faces. He was surrounded by people who constantly “overdid it” with their lifestyle, clothes, and parties.

As a writer, Huidobro fell into a group of people who called themselves “los creacionistas” (the creationists), who, unsurprisingly, wrote using a style entitled “creacionismo” (creationism). The purpose of this group (and Huidobro’s personal purpose) was to make written works come alive through the use of dynamic description. However, he believed that there are important qualifiers to this type of description. “Creacionismo” was just as much anti-overt description as it was anti-non-description. He said, “El adjetivo cuando no da vida, mata.” (The adjective, when it doesn’t give life, kills.) Therefore, any unnecessary adjective is just as negative as no adjective at all. What an important thing to remember as a writer!

On one hand, in a world where Facebook stimulates us to update our status with a question such as “How do you feel now?,”  people make job, car, religion, and lifestyle decisions based on feelings, poetry has degenerated into an abstract collage of passions alongside smells, we are drowning in overt descriptions of unnecessary things.   

On the other hand, we also consistently miss the mark of actually describing how we feel because the only words that we often use to capture our horrible experiences or beautiful moments are strings of curses married to phrases of self-centered complaining.

Ever notice how our culture can’t find a balance between two extremes?

How do you come up with good, precise descriptions for your written work? Here are five tips to deep, minimalistic adjectives and word pictures:

1. Do read translations of books from other languages. Especially books translated from languages originating from the romantic languages. In other cultures, writers use different word pictures, and they often see the world in a way that resonates with readers who would never have dreamed of articulating a phrase in a particular manner.
2. Don’t be satisfied with your vocabulary. If you can’t find a word that’s not a curse word to describe how you feel, you have a serious vocabulary problem. That’s okay, however, because there is a cure. Ever notice that the thing you’re constantly texting on can be a pocket dictionary, too??
3. Don’t use clichés. Nobody ever knows what they actually mean, or the words generate an automatic response, not a critical evaluation of how the description changes the writing or the mind picture of the reader.
4. Do write raw. If you’ve clawed through your mind and you can’t find an appropriate word (providing that you’ve completed suggestion 2!), maybe there isn’t one. Raw writing can be so powerful and numbing. For example, read The Fault in Our Stars.
5. Don’t be scared to share your writing with others. They will be able to tell you if they can picture what you are trying to say/write. The highest compliment a writer can receive is, “I never thought of it that way before.”