The Dark Art of Description by Patricia Hampl is one of my favorite craft essays. This is not becuase I feel like it presents some revolutionary ideas on writing nonfiction but rather pulls out and polishes an inherent and fundamental truth about writing that we might sometimes forget about.
This passage speaks most clearly on her feelings about description I believe: "In attending to these details, in the act of description, the more dynamic aspects of narrative have a chance to reveal themselves–not as action or conflict or any of the theoretical and technical terms we persist in thinking as of the sources of form. Rather description gives the authorial mind a place to be in relation with the reality of the world."
I think this idea, this tether or entrance, we have via description is perhaps the most mesmerizing way to go about writing. A narrative arc without a well told world or tea cup is just a structure with no adornments. I am curious how all of you see description in you writing. Is it the trappings that you add to the story or is it the story itself? How important are well chosen details and can they do more than create the couch for your narrative to sit on? In best or worst case what do details do? All of these questions I think speak to the same function of detail in your writing.
I am also curious on everyones thoughts in regards to the section in which she speaks about using detail to get to a story she didn't know she wanted to write: "Description written from the personal voice of my own perception, proved even to be the link with the world's story, with history itself." The story she arrives at from the teacup she believes is the act of divine description. Thoughts? Have you ever had a similar experience?
And speaking of experience I'd like to set aside a moment to consider this in tandem with our essay Arrival Gates. How do you see the detail as divine in this essay? Is it functioning in the way Hampl suggests?
I am also curious just on your thoughts about the essay: it's structure in relation to the squiggly lines we talked about. About the bait and switch in the tour of disaster? And the almost zealous conversation and comments about time and arrival?
Happy thinking.
-Erin
It’s choosing the right kind of details that I struggle with. I have a tendency to write the way I would look at a photograph and point at something small and say well isn’t that interesting, while neglecting to move back to looking at the bigger picture. I’m also really self conscious about using details in a way that form my essay into a list without a thread of meaning to connect them. I really appreciated Hampl’s commentary on description as a bridge from the author to the “reality of the world.” I think I experience this in my writing, that there are familiar, mundane things that I write about, because in some way certain objects, spaces make me feel closer to people I know and people I’ve never met. That said, I’m self conscious about these “links” operating as a universal bridge for other readers. What makes me feel connected might not work the same for other readers, and other people.
ReplyDeleteI felt like Solnit’s essay worked with a pretty universal “link” to the “reality of the world” with the idea of “time...measured...as moments of arrival.” I think the breathless, fast-paced, section at the start of this essay places emphasis on the concept of “arrival” as “the culmination of the sequence of events.” I don’t know that this essay neatly figures into the form of the lyric essay. There’s quite a bit of reflection in this piece that may push against Bascom’s commentary on the lyric essay as “devoted more to image than idea.” I think this essay, at least from my own perspective, uses the details to support the idea.
A couple weeks ago in class we talked about knowing what to cut in an essay, and that the details that are left might give shape to it and make something that seems mundane relevant and anything but mundane. Like Ariel though, I still struggle in choosing the details. In all honesty I don't really think about it, which is certainly to my detriment. This semester I've simply been trying to record my memories accurately and get all the pieces that feel important; taking those next steps or changing this process all together to be more detail-oriented still feels out of my reach. Maybe this will come easier with more and more time spent on revision.
ReplyDeleteFor Solnit, I definitely believe that the details aren't "the trappings that you add to the story but the story itself." I think it's interesting that why the author is in Japan isn't totally revealed until the fourth page of the essay. On page 201, the paragraph starts: "I had been invited to Japan for the one-year anniversary..." That whole paragraph is how someone might start telling this story out loud, or how new essay writers like me would start the whole essay. But I like that Solnit isn't afraid to give us four pages of description because she makes all of it the plot of the essay itself. The very last paragraph is also interesting because Solnit has chosen the exact collection of brief details that sum up her experience and perhaps the whole essay: "All you really need to know..." I'm still wondering about the effect of that conclusion. I also wonder if someone who isn't an engaged reader would just want that last paragraph, but there really is something to the journey Solnit takes us on with her descriptions.
Similarly to Madison and Ariel I struggle with incorporating and using description appropriately. I find that I have been too caught up in getting to the end of a story—or trying to tell a story in the right way that I have, unbeknownst to me, despite all of your lovely comments continually asking for more particular details, been missing out on one of the most essential building-blocks of the personal essay: description. I loved Hampl’s essay because it reminded me that I need to not be afraid to write in the details. In my own education I have read numerous novels, books, stories that were bogged down by description that I truly did barely endure, not relish (Hampl 47)… It has scared me away from including the intense observation and detail-work I think and process in. I find meaning in everything around me, and understood before reading this essay that it is through a narrative of description that this happens. Hampl’s essay is a much needed push into revisions and embracing the descriptions that will (hopefully) be a universal connection to any reader. I will take this quote, meant toward the student at the end, Tom:
ReplyDelete“All he needed to do was sit down and describe. And beause the detail is divine, if you caress it into life, you find the world you have lost or ignored, the world ruined or devalued. The world you alone can bring into being, bit by broken bit. And so you create your own integrity, which is to say your voice, your style (Hampl 52).
“Arrival Gates” reminded me, briefly, of all those heavily-descriptive and lofty passages in novels I had been told to read in school. But her essay was something I ended up relishing in because of the way she did continue to move through time and her experience with description. The first giant sentence that brought her to the gates was lovely and embodied her musings on how time and arrival work and interact. Also, once I recognized that the arches were a physical manifestation of time I was even more involved in the ways she saw and felt about them and the foxes—I imagined with her a vision colored entirely in orange and the ways that we sometimes feel time very actively in life, aware of who and where we are in a series of moments or experiences. I cannot imagine the story beginning with how she got to Japan, as Madison mentioned, and feel as though “Arrival Gates” is a wonderful compliment to Hampl’s essay for all of its well-crafted description and the ways narrative structure worked around those details.
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ReplyDeleteWhen I first read "The Dark Art of Description" I was so inspired by it that I spent the next few days doing what Hampl did--observing and remembering and drafting deep descriptions of what I'd seen. I found this tremendously satisfying. It also alerted me to how unskilled I was at taking notes, and that this was a serious deficit for a nonfiction writer. In Hampl, Henry James is quoted as saying that taking "Notes" was "as natural as to look, to think, to feel, to recognize, to remember." It is unclear to me whether James was referring to note taking, but he easily could have been. The revelation that my descriptions often depended on notes, and that I was a poor note taker, led me to design and teach a class on "Field Writing," and we spent a fair amount of time in that course talking about the best ways to get things down to later use in our creative work. (Ali was in that class). Though we can describe effectively from memory, it does help immensely to have notes when we can, and this helps ease the problem that Ariel, Madison, and Nicole mention: what "divine details" to choose. With notes, we at least have more to choose from.
ReplyDeleteBut to get to Erin's question about how Hampl's essay illuminates Solnit's craft, I thought the opening paragraph of her essay--that long river of a sentence--beautifully illustrates Hanpl's thesis that the essay is often more the "story of perception" than it is a dramatic narrative. Description, she writes, is "where the consciousness of the writer and the material of the story are established in harmony, where the self is lost in the material." Style, Hampl suggests, is where this self registers. In the beginning of "Arrival Gates," what we get is in many ways not about the object described--a "disaster tour" of Japan in March, 2011--but a stylistic tour de force in which the narrator's weariness is punctuated by the recurrence of the word "after ____," and at the same time the phrase marks the slow drumbeat of time, signaling a serial sequence of events that seem seem to forever delay her final "arrival" at the orange gates. The description reveals the narrator's emotional state, and even more impressive, lays the thematic groundwork for the rest of the essay. Description is not the wallpaper but the walls. What could be a better example of Hampl's assertion that "description gives the authorial mind a place to be in relation with the reality of the world?"
I have to echo the struggles with description that have already been described. I often find it hard to remember descriptive details, especially from my childhood, but then when I remember details, I tend to go overboard and have trouble figuring out which details are important. It kind of feels like the struggle is getting the structure and the meaning to mesh just right with the description. And then sometimes there is a miraculous moment when—as with Hampl’s teacup experience—everything seems to be working together. And then I just hope that when I go back to revise, it was actually working in a way that still makes some kind of sense not just to me but to any readers I might have.
ReplyDeleteI really need to start taking more notes, as Bruce discusses. Most of my experiences feel so ordinary that I’ve mostly gotten out of the habit of writing down the details (since my Dear Diary rants as a teen or my very detailed journal entries from when my kids were little), especially in the moment. But as Hampl points out, that is where most writers’ material can be found.
I love Solnit’s essay and her thoughts on “arriving.” I’m generally really bad about living in the moment and not worrying about things, and I miss and/or forget a lot of details because of it. But when I am experiencing something new and beautiful—usually in nature—I feel that strange sense of time that Solnit writes about, and I notice so much more than I usually do. That is why I think her description is so central to her essay.
Also, Solnit writes that she wasn’t able to recreate this experience when she returned to shrine’s entrance. I wonder if this is why we sometimes have trouble knowing the right details to include in an essay. We are, in a sense, trying to arrive at that experience again, and if we didn’t note the details that mattered most when they were fresh in our memory, we will struggle to recreate that epiphany or feeling or whatever we want to convey as we really experienced it.
"I wonder if this is why we sometimes have trouble knowing the right details to include in an essay. We are, in a sense, trying to arrive at that experience again, and if we didn’t note the details that mattered most when they were fresh in our memory, we will struggle to recreate that epiphany or feeling or whatever we want to convey as we really experienced it."
DeleteI struggle with this as I feel obligated to not miss a single detail out a need to share the 'truth' and in doing so, often flood the reader with more than is really necessary...
Nor does description come easy to me but I do find it pleasurable to get lost in the act of it—a rarity, and yet, usually these are the moments that yield the most surprising results. I think getting lost in the act of anything is a connection to the divine, whether there is a product or not. I was really drawn to Melissa's musing on whether we must note details in the moment in order to recreate the moment and this seems to support Bruce's call to the notebook.
ReplyDeleteSolnit's piece felt like a meditation, beginning with the repetitive 'after' that functions almost as a mantra. I was particularly inspired by her words at the bottom of 202, "that present is an infinitely narrow space between the past and future, the zone in which the senses experience the world, in which you act, however much your mind may be mired in the past or racing into the future." I had never thought of the present as the source of both experience and action—a powerful truth.
I want to start with Solnit’s essay, because it illustrates, to me, how description *should* work. I have a tendency to grow impatient with description. I love it, but when it goes on too long, I start to try to skip ahead, which makes me go back and forth irritatingly. Solnit’s piece does this wonderful thing where it unfolds naturally into reflection and meaning at just the place I need it to. We’re bombarded by this humongous, lilting first sentence which segues right into explicit description and then, suddenly, you’re there with her, believing her insistence that “Arrival implies a journey” (201) and the ways in which events and time and coming and going culminate into moments. The remainder of the essay then plays off of the initial descriptions, expanding here and there in tandem with reflection.
ReplyDeleteI love that quote you chose, the last line about giving the authorial mind a place. That makes the most sense to me in terms of writing description, which I struggle with. I liked rereading this essay now, and I think overall it makes me view description in my own writing in a different way, something I don’t think I got from it before. I’m feeling inspired to find a habit of writing description to see where it leads.
I realized today that I skim over large bits of dialogue...I wonder what that means...
DeleteWhen I first went to BSU back in 2003, I was a theatre student. There is a lot of potential for plays to have an affective resonance with their audience, but I think a lot of it is blunted by the orthodox view that that plot and character have to have absolute primacy in storytelling (Thanks, Aristotle). I think that this view of storytelling puts a severe damper on what a story can accomplish, and I think that Hampl does a good job of describing why. There seems to be more of a link directly to the psyche of the author that works preconsciously, or maybe prelinguistically through the things, or the scene, or the world, or the reality that the author creates.
ReplyDeleteHampl uses "show, don't tell" in a way that is counter to how I've thought of it before, because I was under the impression that providing seemingly excessive detail to create meaning through space would qualify as "showing." But regardless, there is a potential in the description of things and spaces that the reader will find resonance and meaning in them well beyond being told the meaning of things in ways that they are likely to agree with or not, but unlikely to feel or share as experience.
I think that my second reading of Solnit was more enjoyable for me, as when I was reading her long descriptions, I was observing how they tied to the themes she wanted to examine. Getting through the long paragraph of afters and then the long descriptions of place was like, as Hampl said "the desert to be crossed before the paradise of dialogue" (47). As I was reading it the first time, I kept thinking "get to the point" which, after completing it, is the point. Examining the passing of time not as an end driven, teleological passage, but as something that should itself be the object, or at least, not something only to be seen as having the potential for a later arrival somewhere. So the construction of the piece, of requiring the reader to trudge through the description before we know why we're trudging through the description makes sense to me as an artistic strategy, even if it tries my patience as a rhetorical strategy.
To be honest, I struggle with the different visualizations for the models of structure that the readings have discussed. Unless we use some sort of rearrangement of the page (footnotes, pullquotes, hypertext or some ergodic lit. structures) writing is still a linear thing regardless of jumping around in time, right?
There seems to be a splendid sync-up (well done, Bruce!) between Hampl's Nabokov quote/idea about the divine detail and Solnit's implementation of stirring--and expertly described--details. Solnit also uses wondrous and often complex sentences to weave detail with thought, memory, experience, speculation. Her sentences unfold, yet evolve in terms of meaning and insight. Even though there's a loose timeframe of entering the gates and then leaving, it's the journey of thought in this place--time interrupted--that's becomes of paramount importance. It was a quite marvelous to see how she could alter the perception of time, as well as talk of it, on the page.
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ReplyDeleteThat's where I often find myself - thinking how important the
ReplyDeletechoice of "pal" or "chum" is, how whatever truth writing lays claim
to resides in a passion for just such quite mad distinctions.
The quote from Hempl that resonated with me and my writing process was when she talked about monomania being “the six-hundred-pound gorilla of a book” (43). I dwell and fret and procrasti-clean as I ponder over the “right” words to convey a meaning, lately. This was a source of anxiety for me in high school actually. Because we weren’t taught to embrace a writing process (one draft, one grade, no review = 1980’s American Education Values) growing up, end of the semester paper writing equated to hours sitting frozen in fear of the red pen. While I’ve learned to embrace a more chaotic process of getting any and all words onto the page during my undergraduate experience, I have to admit that the word flow this year, learning to acclimate to graduate writing, seems to be back at a trickle. Part of this, I feel, stems from a paralyzing fear of making decisions about what I want to produce for my culminating activity—thesis vs. portfolio; specialized focus on one aspect of my writing life or a culmination of projects that spans all of the scholar-related identities…but, in general though I have to say that I gravitate toward pieces that offer sensory detail—I want writing that fully immerses me in the experience ‘til my fingers get pruny. I’d like to believe that this is also the kind of writing that I aim to produce…
Considering the dark art of description and Solnit’s essay, I was smitten by the opening. My husband said it was ‘a bit much’ for him. I love the idea of stacking all of the context that Solnit sees factoring into what brought her to the orange arrival gates and taking that risk to frontload the entire first sentence—she created a mental image of gates from these contextual details for me, as a reader. I recognize that not all readers may appreciate this amount of detail…I’ll admit that as a younger reader I didn’t care for the sweeping descriptions about nature that writers like Henry James is known for, but I do now
Like everyone else, I struggle with description. I feel like there’s a paucity of it in my writing – as a young reader I was incredibly impatient with long, flowery sequences and so in my own writing I tended to stick to the action instead of developing compelling descriptive passages. But especially as I’ve come to appreciate nonfiction writing, I’ve learned to love description and admire the way other writers use it to move a story along, just as Hampl discusses in her essay. I really agree that the art of description can be more telling of the “authorial mind” than the superstructures we’ve been taught to prioritize.
ReplyDeleteSolnit is, I think, a perfect example of this. That introductory paragraph is so powerful that by the time it’s over we’re at the same emotional state she was when she first encountered the gates, and so are prepared for this lengthy meditation on arrival.