Verbs and Senses

Descriptive writing does not consist in adding more adjectives and adverbs. It is dynamic verbs which carry the day.

In Journeys I describe an outdoor scene where a period of heavy rain has finally stopped and I said, “There was an odour of petrichor in the air.” There is usually a better alternative to There is…, There are…, There was… I revised the sentence to “A petrichor odour hung in the air,” and I continued the sentence with “and carriage horses stood by dropping dung onto the muddy ground.” (Always good to invoke physical senses.)

However, a well-chosen adverb may be included in a verb phrase for dramatic, humorous or ironic effect. In the short story Goodbye, Stanley Tan, Owen Marshall recalls a scene where Stanley, naked, takes a shower in his pig abattoir among the hanging, gutted pigs.

“If he jostled them as he held the hose with one hand and washed with the other, the carcasses would sway coyly away, then back again.“

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Descriptive writing gives the reader something to see, hear, smell, taste, feel. Describing sensory particulars makes the difference between simply reporting an event and bringing it convincingly to life.

Anton Chekhov advised: “Don’t tell me the moon is shining, show me the glint of light on broken glass.”

My first drafts are mainly plot and dialogue and I usually insert the scenery in subsequent drafts.

One of the exercises I used to give students in creative writing classes was to transform a plain sentence with descriptions of sensory impressions, beginning with a prompt with plenty of scope for sensory description.

For example:

I was riding my bike along the gravel road when a stock truck passed me.

is transformed into:

My handlebars were juddering like a jackhammer over the stony road, when a stock truck rumbled past and sucked me into a choking slipstream of dust and dung.