I’m grateful not to be the sort of writer who suffers from the dastardly “Writer’s Block”—I can always write something, though it may be so lousy I throw it out later or spend many too many hours rewriting it. I suffer instead from a related condition I think of as “Description Block.” It’s not where I can’t come up with any descriptive detail at all, only that I’m miserably unsatisfied with whatever detail I concoct. It all feels hackneyed and dull, or else I just know it could be better—could provide that layered and exquisite feel of a perfectly-crafted description.
I never went to graduate school for writing, so some part of me always has to wonder: Would I have been forced to get better at description in a program that forced me to work at it, or would I just have been an MFA failure—my confidence shattered by lack of praise for my pith?
I recently read a story in The Sun magazine, in which the protagonist’s dog left “a curry of diarrhea” under the kitchen table. That’s brilliant, is it not? I don’t think I’ll ever describe diarrhea with such elegance, such perfect pithy nuance.
But what I can’t seem to decide is . . . Do I have to? Or, at least, do I have to be able to do it reliably day after day, story after story, chapter after chapter—calling it up at whim. And, as I said above, it’s not that I never get that pithy insight—I am blessed with moments of rare literary grace where the words that flow from my keystrokes are more beautiful than I think I deserve.
But when I push hard, sweating sentence after sentence over and over again, such as in a short story in which I’m pushing out of my comfort zone to create a character I’m struggling to understand, I swear the sentences sometimes just get worse. The details fail to illuminate anything other than my own torturous struggle. The characters seem to retreat in to the turtle shell of bad detail that obfuscates rather than illuminates. They slip further and further back because I can’t find the single detail that will pull them kicking and clawing into the light. Making them someone who feels real, because they’re someone we could easily know.
In a story I’ve been working on recently, I found the perfect detail for a small girl of eight, putting her into a pink Frozen t-shirt that makes her immediately recognizable as someone we know.
In contrast, the protagonist is a twenty-two year old Puerto Rican woman running from her vicious mother as she tries to remake herself into the person she wants to be, the person her Tia Rosalita has helped her to believe she can be. But what detail makes her immediately recognizable to us??
I’ve tried numerous ones and I’ll keep trying, but sometimes the perfect one is perfectly elusive. And of course for a complex character it’s never a single detail, but a mélange of details. Where having one of those five isn’t so useful. Or not useful enough.
I think it’s not helping that I’m reading Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin, because there’s an example of a writer who is absolutely gifted in detail. It seems to flow like a broken sewer line on a hot August day in Queens. (OK, that one’s not bad, but it’s not so great either.) But this Kevin book, gem after gem, on page after page, as if it’s effortless. Does she sweat over each one? Or do they just come to her in an unbroken stream, like the universe has chosen her to receive them all?
Maybe it’s like being a Jew, the proverbial Chosen Ones—some of us writers are Chosen Ones and others of us aren’t. Or at least not chosen for that.
Granted, it’s easy (especially for women!) to discount what we’re good at and put a premium price on what we struggle with. This kind of linguistic gift for seeing how the most unlikely pairings can often be the most illuminating (aka that curry of diarrhea) is a particular kind of skill, or maybe it’s just a gift, or maybe it’s an aspect of craft you can build and work at—but I do think some of us see these pairings more easily.
And certainly those with this kind of gift seem to earn the highest praise from professors of creative writing and circles of literati in smoky coffee shops.
And some days I feel willing to spend the entire day searching for that perfect word to describe the diarrhea, and other days I just don’t. Other days I think This is essentially all dressing on the Swedish meatballs, where the meatballs are the story that drives the novel and that’s what really matters. The rest of it, that’s polish. That’s spit. That’s a sentence people can admire but it’s not what moves you, tugs at you, gives you a new experience.
Until it does. Maybe all of us writers want to be good at everything. And of course, none of us can be. But I’ll keep plugging hard to find the detail for my story about the girl and her Tia Rosalita, because I want that for her. She deserves it. I want to bring her to life—if only so I can go back and read about her and think I did right by her.
We writers are a stubborn lot.