It’s day three of NaNoWriMo. I’m pretty pleased that I’ve managed to crap out over three thousand words in such a short time. One thing is that’s becoming readily apparent, though, is how much I suck at writing compelling descriptions of things. Not having any idea what I’m doing, I’ve sort of been approaching this novel like I might approach a screenplay (which I have written before) in that I’m trying to weave a thread of narrative through a series of set pieces. Granted, no one is going to win a Nobel prize in literature using this method, but it’s how Michael Bay approaches a story, and that motherf@#ker is rich.
The problem arises from the fact that my set piece ideas are visual. I can see them clearly in my head. This would be fine, you see, if I were writing this thing just for myself. It would seem, though, that any potential reader needs me to describe that which I see in my head. This has been harder than it initially appeared for me. I had been handling it like I handle all difficult problems, which is to say that I simply avoided them in the hopes that I’d figure something out later. This was going well until last night, when I read the first few paragraphs of my girlfriend Sarah’s NaNoWriMo efforts. Sarah has a degree in English from the prestigious Smith College in western Massachusetts. She is an unqualified genius and an absolute painter when it comes to words. In less than two hundred words, she was able to evoke an utterly compelling sense of place and a whole set of emotional responses to go with it. She’s painting the Sistine Chapel whilst I lay on the floor of the den with a box of crayons, drawing stick figures next to a two-dimensional house with a sun in the sky.
I knew full well what my set pieces and characters made me feel like, but I was having trouble describing them. Then it hit me. What I’m trying to do is paint a picture. What I simply called out places in my text where I wanted to paint those pictures and pasted in a photograph of what I wanted to describe? Once my description matches the picture to my satisfaction, I can simply delete the picture. I tried a test with a road through a forest I wanted to describe, and to my amazement, it worked really well.
I spent the first part of today finding the right pictures of people and places I want to describe and inserting them into my text. I’ve got around twenty right now. If a picture is worth a thousand words, describing these pictures should get me twenty thousand more words! At least I think that’s how the math for that works out. I’ll let you know.
Crap. Here’s 489 words that aren’t in my effing novel. Back to work!
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