Start with Description: Why Sensory Details Are Essential in Fiction

Pull down any book from your shelf, flip to a random page, and try to identify how many sentences contain sensory details and descriptions. Most likely, you’ll be surprised. When we read for pleasure, we often don’t recognize sensory details when we see them, because we’re caught up in the story or the emotions or the thematic significance of the work. Descriptive passages, meanwhile, usually feel effortless and natural, like background noise. But when you read something as a writer, with the goal of breaking down the author’s techniques and trying to understand what makes a piece of prose really work, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that at the core of great fiction writing is an ability to describe things.

Here is a passage from Donna Tartt’s The Secret History (the first book I happened to pull from my shelf): 

The dormitories weren’t even dorms—or at any rate not like the dorms I knew, with cinderblock walls and depressing, yellowish light—but white clapboard houses with green shutters, set back from the Commons in groves of maple and ash. All the same it never occurred to me that my particular room, wherever it might be, would be anything but ugly and disappointing and it was with something of a shock that I saw it for the first time—a white room with big, north-facing windows, monkish and bare, with scarred oak floors and a ceiling slanted like a garret’s. On my first night there, I sat on the bed during the twilight while the walls went slowly from gray to gold to black, listening to a soprano’s voice climb dizzily up and down somewhere at the other end of the hall until at last the light was completely gone, and the faraway soprano spiraled on and on in the darkness like some angel of death, and I can’t remember the air ever seeming as high and cold and rarefied as it was that night, or ever feeling farther away from the low-slung lines of dusty Plano.

Our protagonist Richard has just arrived at his new home in Hampden College, and he is overwhelmed by the sensations of the place. Tartt builds this feeling through contrasts in descriptive details— Richard expects “cinderblock walls” and “depressing, yellowish light” but instead gets “white clapboard houses” in “groves of maple and ash”—and by the end we’re left with a sense of how intense Richard’s first impressions here has been. But the effect would not have been the same if we’d just been told that Richard was profoundly moved by Hampden—if his feelings were summarized and if Tartt had left out all the details she includes in the paragraph. Every detail works together—the slanted ceiling, the soprano’s voice, the windows, the cold air—to create the paragraph’s emotional effect. As readers, we might not realize the work that goes into creating a paragraph like this, and likely we’d just enjoy the emotional experience of reading it, but as writers, hopefully we can recognize how the emotion we’re feeling is built through the accumulation of descriptions and sensory details.

]This brings me to what I feel is the primary argument for writing with a strong attention to description and sensory detail: emotional identification is not possible without it. If we accept that one of the primary goals of good fiction writing is empathy—to get a reader to connect to the emotional experience of your character—then our next question should be how we create that empathy as readers. Well, one way is through description and sensory detail. Readers connect with characters not simply when they understand what those characters are feeling but when they feel those feelings too—when they feel immersed and embodied in that character’s experience. The word “embodied” here is key: we have to make our readers feel as though they are experiencing what the characters are experiencing. Sensory detail is the way to accomplish this. Donna Tartt does this in that passage above from The Secret History—she gives us Richard’s sensory experience through vivid descriptions of his new college home and as a result makes us feel the thrill and wonder of being in such a beautiful place.

Here, meanwhile, is a passage from Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, often regarded as one of the most challenging books ever written:

The caravan has halted. It is the end of the line. All the evacuees are ordered out. They move slowly, but without resistance. Those marshaling them wear cockades the color of lead, and do not speak. It is some vast, very old and dark hotel, an iron extension of the track and switchery by which they have come here… Globular lights, painted a dark green, hang from under the fancy iron eaves, unlit for centuries… the crowd moves without murmurs or coughing down corridors straight and functional as warehouse aisles… velvet black surfaces contain the movement: the smell is of old wood, of remote wings empty all this time just reopened to accommodate the rush of souls, of cold plaster where all the rats have died, only their ghosts, still as cave-paintings, fixed stubborn and luminous in the walls… the evacuees are taken in lots, by elevator—a moving wood scaffold open on all sides, hoisted by old tarry ropes and cast-iron pulleys whose spokes are shaped like Ss. At each brown floor, passengers move on and off… thousands of these hushed rooms without light… 

This passage appears in the first chapter, as we follow a group of evacuees in London trying to escape a rocket attack. Whereas the passage from The Secret History focused on Richard’s emotional experience, here there is no specific character to connect to but instead only atmosphere—the atmosphere of London in these final years of the war, the atmosphere of this wretched old hotel. Notice how the sensory details are essential for conjuring this dark atmosphere: the green “globular” lights, the velvet blackness, the smell of old wood, the elevator with its “cast iron pulleys.” Each individual detail feels simple, but the combination of them, the accumulation of them, creates a very particular atmosphere and conjures up very particular feelings. Like much of Pynchon, the passage feels like magic, but when you break it down, you see that it’s built on sensory detail and descriptions.

Ultimately, I find myself fixating on sensory detail and description as much as I do because these craft techniques were the basis of my own profound writing epiphany. In 2015, as a struggling writer with no publications frustrated with my own lackluster novel-in-progress, I suddenly realized that what I was missing was a stronger attention to detail—to the more minute and sentence-level descriptions that make up the lyrical prose that I admired in other writers. Instead of obsessing over big picture questions of theme and meaning, I began with the particular and started paying attention to how I described things. I attribute this shift in perspective to Lou Mathews, one of my teachers at the UCLA Extension Writers Program. After this, as if by magic, my work started getting accepted by literary magazines. I published several short stories and then a few years later, my debut novel. Most importantly, I found my voice as a writer. 

Now, whenever I read novels, I focus on the way an author uses sensory detail and how this forms the basis of my own emotional experience as a reader. Then in my own work, I think about that connection. Writing something as big as a novel can feel like a daunting and unwieldy task, but if you start with the specific details, it becomes more manageable than you realize. As I tell my students, if you’re ever stuck and unsure what to write, start with a simple description. Where is your character right now? What details do they notice about the room they’re in? If you can write a strong, specific sensory detail, like “white clapboard houses” in “groves of maple and ash” or “corridors straight and functional as warehouse aisles” then you’ll end up creating a particular emotion without even fully realizing it. 

Start with the descriptions, and the rest will follow.