"Vagueness is often our first impulse when we're getting things down," writes Chris Lombardi in the Gotham Writers' Workshop's Writing Fiction: The Practical Guide from New York's Acclaimed Creative Writing School. But it's specificity that gives our descriptions power. For instance, in The Shipping News, Annie Proulx could have written "Quoyle was fat." Instead, she begins with a general description of how he stands out from others, and how it led him to eat:
Hive-spangled, gut roaring with gas and cramp, he survived childhood; at the state university, hand clapped over his chin, he camouflaged torment with smiles and silence. Stumbled through his twenties and into his thirties learning to separate his feelings from his life, counting on nothing. He ate prodigiously, liked a ham knuckle, buttered spuds.She continues with a description of how others treat him:
Quoyle shambled, a head taller than any child around him, was soft. He knew it. "Ah, you lout," said the father. But no pygmy himself. And brother Dick, the father's favorite, pretended to throw up when Quoyle came into a room, hissed "Lardass, Snotface, Ugly Pig, Warthog, Stupid, Stinkbomb, Fart-tub, Greasebag," pummeled and kicked until Quoyle curled, hands over head, sniveling, on the linoleum. All stemmed from Quoyle's chief failure, a failure of normal appearance.And finally, she describes this body, which has led him to feel like, and at the novel's beginning, to be, a failure:
A great damp loaf of a body. At six he weighed eighty pounds. At sixteen he was buried under a casement of flesh. Head shaped like a crenshaw, no neck, reddish hair ruched back. Features as bunched as kissed fingertips. Eyes the color of plastic. The monstrous chin, a freakish shelf jutting from the lower face.Notice that in this key paragraph, the paragraph that introduces Quoyle to us, there's not a cliché in sight. Every simile is completely original, and she's extremely specific about his weight and his chin, the two attributes that set him apart and define his life up to this point, and that in many ways set up the conflict of the novel. Will Quoyle ever belong anywhere? Can he make good?
