Tool: Extreme Specificity

I am working on revisions to a short story recently and I’ve been dwelling on a passage from Delany’s About Writing on the subject of specificity in descriptions. He says: 

“In his astute and useful essay “On Writing” Raymond Carver says he doesn’t like tricks, cheap or otherwise. Yet the creation of a certain order of particularly vivid description is a trick…The reason I call it a “trick” rather than a technique, strategy or method, is because it doesn’t always work in every instance with every reader every time. It rarely works in the same way with the same reader in repeated readings of the same text. Because it's fundamentally psychological, its success tends toward a statistical existence across a general audience.” p29-30

He goes on to with an example from Joyce’s Dubliners: 

“Listen to this: ‘On his wise shoulders through the checkerwork of leaves the sun flung spangles, dancing coins.’ Now I love this sentence. But why is it better to write than ‘Sunlight fell on him through leaves’?... A possible reason to love it is because it makes two things pop into the mind more vividly than does the sentence “Sunlight fell on him through leaves.” One is what specifically happened at that particular time when light fell through those particular leaves…The second thing that pops up is your awareness of the possibilities for the person in that space of shadow and light…The combination of specific description and strong implication (in this case the irony of the word wise) is one that, to a statistically large sampling of readers, affords a more vivid reading experience than the simple “statement of information” p30-31

What specifically happened in that particular time when light fell through those particular leaves. Specificity. Resonance. Many of the writing books I have read have tried to get across how descriptions should be specific to their exact time and place, but none so succinctly or so forcefully. It is one of the reasons I keep going back to Delany for my revisions. 

CHALLENGE

• Find a description in a piece of your recent writing. How can you change the description so that it could happen in no other place and time?
• Pick 3-4 strong emotions and 3-4 locations. Randomize them and write a short descriptive passage of each location that never uses the name of that emotion, but still evokes that feeling. 
• Sit in a public place and set a timer for half an hour. Write a description of what you see for that entire time. No stopping, no putting your pen down. Notice how your attention wanders, then notice how your description improves dramatically as you reach the 30 min mark. If you are feeling especially masochistic (or are stuck on the subway) go for an hour.  

Image Credit: Canaletto, Artist. Mountain Landscape With Three Bridges. Italy, 1743. [or 1744?] Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/97515551/.