Paint Me A Picture

“I rented a room in an old building on Broadway. The room was dark, and had not been occupied for many years. Dust and spiderwebs were hanging from every wall and corner. I went up the stairs, and did not see a cobweb because of the darkness. It hit me in the face; it was creepy.”

“I took a large room, far up Broadway, in a huge old building whose upper stories had been wholly unoccupied for years until I came. The place had long been given up to dusts and cobwebs, to solitude and silence. I seemed groping among the tombs and invading the privacy of the dead, that first night I climbed up to my quarters. For the first time in my life a superstitious dread came over me; and as I turned a dark angle of the stairway and an invisible cobweb swung its slazy woof in my face and clung there, I shuddered as one who had encountered a phantom.”

The first paragraph accurately describes the setting; the second takes you there, and puts you smack in the middle of the action. You see, feel and sense everything that the narrator has experienced. The difference between the two lies in the use of powerful adjectives and adverbs. Effective use of descriptive words allows your readers to paint a mental picture, and transmutes them from passive recipient to active participant.

The English language is redolent with adjectives and adverbs, each of which imparts subtle shadings to the objects or actions they describe. Yet, writers tend to stick to the familiar. In the process, their manuscripts lack verve and allow reader interest to wane.

Adjectives allow the writer to expand on seminal ideas. For example, describing a train ride from the Indiana Dunes to Chicago’s Loop as “relaxing, yet educational” doesn’t offer the reader much information. Take that reader on your journey. Contrast the differences between the pastoral greens and sparkling open ponds of Dunes State Park to the rotting hulks of abandoned steel mills ringed with razor wire fencing, burned out businesses and blocks of housing projects in Gary, Indiana. Give them a glimpse of the rows of brick houses with neatly-clipped green lawns all lined up like soldiers on parade that you spot in East Chicago. Take them from the barren expanses of Hammond’s oil refinery tank farm to the magnificence of McCormick Place’s glass and steel glinting like a prism with the sunlight reflecting off Lake Michigan. If your reader eventually takes this journey, they will have an immediate sense of deja vu. After all, you’ve taken them there before.

Rich descriptions also allow you to build empathy for your characters by giving their subsequent reactions and behavior a context. Effective use of adjectives and adverbs allow the reader to “get into the head” of the character. To mention that your main character was abused as a child is instructive, but to take the reader through the main character’s dark memory of being thrashed on bare legs with the buckle end of a belt by a parent stinking of whiskey and sweat allows your reader to connect emotionally with your character. This serves to motivate them to read on; the reader, like your main character, longs for resolution.

One word of caution regarding adjective usage – don’t overdo. Many times, laborious descriptions tend to slow down the progress of a story. Remember that adjectives are the spices that brighten the meat loaf. Just enough and you’ve created a gourmet meal; too many, and your end result meets the garbage disposal.