Some writers can get pretty cheeky and irreverent when they describe characters they’ve written about. I’ve never forgotten how one man who sat with Jim Harrison described him when they visited at Livingston, MT to gather information for a 2011 OUTSIDE MAGAZINE article called “The Last Lion”: “His head looks as though it belongs on the end of something a Viking would use to knock down a medieval Danish gate.”
A writer for a 2016 article in ESQUIRE said Harrison's voice sounds like he's spent half his life gargling gravel.
Harsh as these sound, the writers were admirers of Harrison. A definition of Descriptive Writing says its purpose is to describe a person, place, or thing in such vivid detail that the reader can easily form a precise mental picture of what is being written about. The author may accomplish this by using imaginative language, interesting comparisons, and images that appeal to the senses. I think that is fair. Straight factual writing would be boring without some spirited writing tidbits thrown in.
Baxter Black, a popular but skinny cowboy poet says, “My calves are so puny, I have to tamp dirt in my boot tops to hold ‘em on.” Of course those of us who have built fences and tamped the dirt around the posts so they’d stand firm and straight probably can form Baxter’s mental picture most easily.
One of the best short stories ever written, “Genesis” by Wallace Stegner, tells of the young Englishman who came to the Canadian prairie to learn how to cowboy. Stegner is a master of description: “The sun was just rising, its dazzle not yet quite clear of the horizon, and flooding down the river valley whitened with the dust of snow, it gilded the yellow leaves that still clung to the willows, stretched the shadow of every bush and post, glazed the eastern faces of the log ranch buildings whose other side was braced with long blue shadows.”
I can picture this: “The concrete highway was edged with a mat of tangled, broken, dry grass, and the grass heads were heavy with oat beards to catch on a dog’s coat, and foxtails to tangle in a horse’s fetlocks, and clover burrs to fasten in sheep’s wool; sleeping life waiting to be spread and dispersed, every seed armed with an appliance of dispersal, twisting darts and parachutes for the wind, little spears and balls of tiny thorns, and all waiting for the animals and for the wind, for a man’s trouser cuff or the hem of a woman’s skirt, all passive but armed with appliances of activity, still, but each possessed of the anlage of movement.” from Chapter 3, THE GRAPES OF WRATH, by John Steinbeck.
This simple line from Beryl Markham’s WEST WITH THE NIGHT grabbed me, “I learned what every dreaming child needs to know — that no horizon is so far that you cannot get above it or beyond it.” This made me think about my younger days.
No end would be served to continue listing examples because they can be found easily with just a little reading. My shelves hold 300-400 books, some I haven’t read, so I’d better get busy.
