Vivid Description through Senses & Specifics

Let’s study an excerpt from the first chapter of Everlasting Nora by Marie Miranda Cruz, about a young girl who lives in a shantytown built on a Manila cemetery.

I spent the day selling garlands of dried flowers—everlasting daisies—on a street corner in front of the cemetery gates. On the way home, I’d stopped at a food stand to buy dinner: steamed rice and dried salted fish. While I was there, a pebble had lodged itself in a hole at the bottom of my rubber slippers, and it now poked my heel with every step. But I didn’t stop to take it out. I kept moving to keep myself from staring too long at the cemetery visitors and comparing my T-shirt and faded pink shorts with their nice clothes, my dirty slippers with their shiny shoes, and the darkness of my skin with their pale complexions.

Squatter. The unspoken word stabbed as keenly as the pebble under my foot.

I walked deeper into the sementeryo. The grave houses in this part of the cemetery were smaller and shabbier. There were small children playing hide-and-seek between the tombs. Some kids were standing on top of them, tossing a ball made of old newspapers wrapped in twine. There were men and women, either sweeping out mausoleums or fetching buckets of water for drinking or washing. Others carried whatever food they could buy that day. These people weren’t visitors. They lived here.

Like me.

When we read this, we feel like we’re walking with Nora. Why? What do you notice about these paragraphs? What makes it feel so vivid? How does Cruz use description in this passage to make it come to life?

When done well, description takes the readers inside the piece, letting them experience things as if they’re standing alongside your characters. This is done through skillful use of several basic techniques. One of those is the use of sensory details, since this is how most of your readers experience the world. When done well, sensory details pull readers right into the moment.

Notice how Cruz uses imagery that evokes all five senses, both directly and indirectly.

• Sight (faded pink shorts, dirty slippers, dark skin, pale complexions)

• Sound (small children playing hide-and-seek, sweeping)

• Taste (steamed rice and dried fish)

• Touch (pebble lodged in rubber slippers)

• Smell (dried flowers)

She also avoids generalities. Instead of “My clothes were shabby compared to theirs,” she uses specifics—T-shirt, faded shorts, shiny shoes. Instead of “Children were playing,” she tells us they were playing hide-and-seek, specifically. Instead of, “Men and women were doing chores,” she told us exactly what they were doing—sweeping, fetching, washing.

Are there areas in your work where specificity could create a more vivid picture for your readers? Instead of: “The dog was mean.” Try: “The dog growled every time I went near him.” Instead of: “My bike was old.” Try: “The chain rattled all the way to the supermarket.” And so on.

Typically, you’ll spend more time with specific description during moments of relative importance to your narrator. Consider this passage from Ramona the Pest by Beverly Cleary:

Susan’s hair looked like the hair on the girls in the pictures of the old-fashioned stories Beezus liked to read. It was reddish-brown and hung in curls like springs that touched her shoulders and bounced as she walked. … Ramona put her hand to her own short straight hair, which was an ordinary brown. She longed to stretch one of those curls and watch it spring back. Boing! thought Ramona, making a mental noise like a spring on a television cartoon.

Cleary—through Ramona’s POV—devotes several sentences describing Susan’s bouncy hair. Why? What does it tell us about Ramona?

How and when are you using description in your work? What does it tell the reader about your narrator(s)? How and when do you evoke sensory details? You shouldn’t do this with every scene (that would get tiresome), but it’s useful when you want to evoke some kind of resonant emotional response. How are you handling those moments in your work?

Is there a craft topic you’d like me to cover? Let me know!