Show.Show.Don’t tell.Don’t tell.The fine art of using description effectively.

DescriptionDescription

• Generates interest, suspense• Compares something abstract to

something concrete• Puts the reader in a specific time

and place• Gives the story a human face

DescriptionDescription Use concrete nouns and verbs

Along Burlew Street in East Dallas, the body of a dead cat lies on the sun-dried concrete. A torn 3-legged armchair stands near the curb. A swarm of flies hovers over the cat.

Nearby on San Jacinto Street, more flies swarm around a rusty bench where two young women sit with a cluster of children at their knees. In a run-down apartment complex, a group of kids sit playing with rubber bands. More children, bedraggled, hang from the stairs. This ground is sticky, littered with orange peels. The odor of rotting food fills the humid air.

This is Little Asia — what Savoeurn Bun, 16, calls home. She and her family moved here seven years ago after fleeing Cambodia.

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Details make the difference.

“Until he was shot, Ted Lavender carried six or seven ounces of premium dope, which for him was a necessity. Mitchell Sanders, the RTO, carried condoms. Norman Bowker carried a diary. Pat Kiley carried comic books. Kiowa, a devout Baptist, carried an illustrated New Testament that had been presented to him by his father who taught Sunday school in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma... [W]hen Ted Lavender was shot, they used his poncho to wrap him up, then to carry him across the paddy, then to lift him into the chopper that took him away.”

— Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried

Losing builds characterAll season long, senior Archie Whitt heard

about how losing builds character.“I’ve got plenty of character by now,” he said

after the team’s ninth consecutive loss. “I just want a victory.”

The burly, crew-cut lineman could chuckle as he said that. No matter how bad the Wylie Pirates looked in the newspapers — 0-10, five shutouts, a total of 29 points scored and 326 given up, Friday night frustration week after week— Whitt said he wouldn’t be anywhere else.

“Ever since I was little, I always wanted to be a Wylie Pirate,” Whitt said. “I’m so proud to be here. We’ve played hard all year. We never gave up till the last down. We might not be a winner on the field, but in our hearts, we’re winners.”

Coach Ronnie Watkins agreed.“You look at the scoreboard and think, ‘What a

horrible team,’ but I loved coaching these boys,” Watkins said. “I’m not going to kid you. We didn’t have a lot of talent, but these young men had a lot of heart. There wasn’t a moment that they gave up, and I’m proud to have been their coach.”

Fast as a speeding…By 1977, when the British punk band the Jam

recorded “London Traffic” (“No one knows the answer/No one seems to care/Take a look at our city/Take the traffic elsewhere”), the average speed of a car in central London was 12 miles an hour, or a little faster than the top running speed of a domestic pig.

That morning, in fact, waiting downstairs for him in a cavernous boardroom was a group of strategists who were highly paid to do just that. It was telling that most of these strategists were not from London at all but from a place with much worse traffic problems and a much more treacherous political climate for trying to solve them: New York City. (Average traffic speed: about seven miles per hour, no faster than a running possum.)

— Randy Kennedy, The New York Times

Look for detailsLook for details

• Body language. • Clothes. Jewelry. Face. Hands. • Sounds. Loud. Quiet. Thoughtful. Brash. • Aromas. Tobacco. Body odor. Cologne• Don’t describe what the reader already

knows. Find the tiny details that are most often overlooked.

Crucible that ended…A chain-link fence, two wooden crosses and a

plywood heart with angel’s wings are all that remain. That and a rectangle of red concrete from the crucible that ended 99 lives and charred many more. The truckload of mementos left by the mourning hordes — soggy wedding pictures, tangled prayer beads, fading plastic pansies — has been carted away.

The long line of craned-neck drivers on Cowesett Road is gone, too. The sign at a nearby restaurant that urged passers-by to remember the dead now urges them not to forget Mother’s Day.

The funerals are over. The dead are buried. The fund-raising parties and memorial concerts have dwindled to one every other week or so.

“It is time to get on with life,” said Missy Minor, cradling her 4-month-old daughter, Mara-Jade, in her red, mottled arms. “You just have to get up and move on.”

There but for the grace of God…The dead kept coming, floating down the river,

tumbling over a waterfall. Hundreds upon hundreds of bodies, some with hands and feet bound, others mutilated beyond recognition. This was Tanzania in 1994. From a bridge over the falls, Keith B. Richburg watched in silence. The Washington Post correspondent considered the massacres in neighboring Rwanda that had created the horrific parade.

He was struck by the anonymity of death. How a life, ten thousand lives, could be snuffed out without record.

“It was frightening that so many could die, and nobody made an attempt to find out who they were,” he says.

As he watched the dead, a second thought gripped him, one that he tried to chase away but could not. There but for the grace of God go I.

He could have been among the anonymous dead had it not been for an ancestor who had survived the journey from Africa to America 400 years ago, he says. Therein lay Richburg’s painful and controversial admission. He could never justify the evils of slavery, he says. Still, he was glad that his ancestor had made it to America. As a black American in search of his roots, he concluded that he did not belong in his ancestor’s homeland. He had, in fact, come to hate the brutalities and injustices he saw there.

Jack Black rubs…On the Paramount studio lot, in a trailer

near the corner of “Fifth Avenue” and “38th Street” on an ersatz New York set, Jack Black rubs his red-rimmed eyes with his beefy fists, trying to shake off the Tylenol PM he took last night. A White Stripes song bashes out of speakers wired to his iPod. Arrayed on the table in front of him are a bottle of Gatorade, a paperback copy of the Dalai Lama’s “Path to Tranquility” and a magazine about trucks.

— Josh Rottenberg, The New York Times“Jack Out of the Box”

Junk shop mogul…

Clarence Chapman is a 64-year-old former farmer forced out of that business by economics and out of a foundry job by asthma that still starts him coughing if he laughs too hard. He walks on a cane now, wears a thin mustache, a straw cowboy hat, a Rin-Tin-Tin string tie and whatever slacks and shirt he can find at home, across the street from his junk shop.

“We call it junk,” he said. “But after you buy it, you can call it anything you want.”

What did it look like?

Coach Miles stepped out of the field house into the blinding lights of the television cameras. The bags under his glassy eyes hung like leather pouches on a white horse. He’d been crying.

Grossman looked awful…That first day, Bill Keating hoped that Lew

Grossman was not a weeper. Anything else, he thought, he could handle, but please, not someone who cried. In a nursing home bed, still as stone, Grossman looked awful. A bedraggled, brittle-looking man, 77, he was able to move only his left arm. He had a large nose with protruding ears. He had sunken jowls, and all but five teeth were gone, victim of too much affection for sweets. Wispy white hair erupted from his head.

The doctors didn’t imagine he had much longer. Too many things wrong. An odd time to meet someone, when that person’s life is about gone. That was the point. It was supposed to be handshakes on death’s doorstep.

The hyena… I am not one to hold a prejudice against any animal, but it is a plain fact that the spotted hyena is not well served by its appearance. It is ugly beyond redemption. Its thick neck and high shoulders that slope to the hindquarters look as if they’ve come from a discarded prototype for the giraffe, and its shaggy, coarse coat seems to have been patched over from the leftovers of creation.

The hyena… The colour is a bungled mix of tan, black, yellow, grey, with the spots having none of the classy ostentation of a leopard’s rosettes; they look rather like the symptoms of a skin disease, a virulent form of mange. The head is broad and too massive, with a high forehead, like that of a bear, but suffering from a receding hairline, and with ears that look ridiculously mouse-like, large and round, when they haven’t been torn off in battle.

The hyena… The mouth is forever open and panting. The nostrils are too big. The tail is scraggly and unwagging. The gait is shambling. All the parts put together look doglike, but like no dog anyone would want as a pet.

Life of PiYann Martel

What did it smell like? The air smells like stale hamburgers and unbrushed teeth. It smells like cold coffee, like sour beer. It smells like exhaustion. The air smells as if it has been inhaled and exhaled by too many people for far too long, and they are breathing it still, snoring and snuffling, sighing and murmuring as they sprawl about O’Hare International Airport, like refugees from some invisible war.

Claustrophobic stankinessThe lobby of his old building, as he'd

expected, seemed smaller to him but the smell caught him off guard: a claustrophobic stankiness — urine and cigarette butts tossed into a coffee can full of old bacon grease.

What did it taste like?On their first date, Jerry kissed Sue,

perhaps more passionately than she had expected or wanted. She tasted like Wintergreen Altoids. He tasted like Frito pie, heavy on the onions.

What did it feel like?

The steak was as chewy as rubber vomit.

Her headaches arrive now on a regular basis, generally once a day, generally late afternoon. They feel as if a blacksmith is pounding a railroad spike behind her left ear.

A little about your brain

I’d like to tell you a little about your brain. It is an amazing organ, infinitely complex and mysterious, although at first glance it resembles nothing more than a large, soft, very wrinkled walnut. It weighs almost 3 pounds. Of that, about 2 1/4 pounds is water and the rest tissue. The combination explains why the brain is often described as looking like Jello, but the better comparison would be mayonnaise. Push your finger into the gray blob protoplasm and it will adhere.

What did it sound like?

He plays for a rock and roll band whose music sounds like a lawn mower at full throttle falling through a plate-glass roof into a pile of aluminum pots and pans.

Her pixie voice sounds like a Munchkin on helium.

…the way he talked…He was a short, wiry, but muscular little guy with dark curly hair and a tough-looking face that seemed (to strangers) to be saying, “You best not be lookin’ me in the eye, you peckerwood, or I’ll put four more holes your nose.” But that wasn’t what was puzzling. What was puzzling was the way Yeager talked. He seemed to talk with some older forms of English elocution, syntax, and conjugation that had been preserved uphollow in the Appalachians. There were people up there who never said they disapproved of anything, they said, “I don’t hold with it.” In the present tense they were willing to help out, like anyone else, but in the past tense, they only holped. “H’it weren’t nothin’ I hold with, but I holped him out with it, anyways.”

— Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff

Description gone bad…Description gone bad…

• It interrupts narrative• It describes nonessential

surroundings.• It focuses on unimportant action.• It’s too general. A drink rather than

a martini.

Describe the important details, not the irrelevant stuff?

Taking a sign of relief, Harris walked into the hospital room, wearing his gray Polo sweater and faded blue jeans. He was chewing on a piece of Wrigley’s Doublemint gum. Entering the room, he saw his father, lying in the bed, near death.

Describe the important details, not the irrelevant stuff?

Harris gasped as he walked into hospital room to see his father, a Vietnam veteran and former college linebacker, reduced to a sallow shell, barely able to lift his soft blue eyes or his hand to greet his son.

No cliches…Hawthorne was the strong, silent type.

Cool as a cucumber. He had chiseled good looks, a square jaw, jet-black hair and piercing blue eyes.

When our fair maiden saw him, her heart skipped a beat and she fell for him, hook, line and sinker. But he nipped it in the bud, and alas, she saw the writing on the wall. But give the devil his due, she left no stone unturned in her attempts to woo his affection. But he wouldn’t take the bait. Her entreaties fell on deaf ears. She faced the bitter end.

“Don’t cry over spilled milk,” he said, trying to calm the storm in her heart. “There are many others in the same boat. Grin and bear it.”

Be concrete…

Weak: “The dog was big.”

Better: “The Rottweiler was the size of a Volkswagon Beetle.”

No dead words…

Weak: “Darcy was a really unattractive girl. She simply was not very pretty. She was kind of ugly, in fact.”

Cliché: “Darcy had a face only a mother could love.”

Original: “Darcy’s pale green eyes bulged out of her long, narrow head, giving her the look of a bewildered reptile. Her chin was sharp enough to chip ice, and her lipless mouth seemed frozen in a perpetual grimace. Boys didn’t much care for her.

Put it all togetherPut it all together

• Use description to advance the story.• Blend description into the story.

Don’t use just to fill space.• Avoid ordinary details. Look for the

unique, the unexpected, the bizarre.• Look for irony.• Listen for dialogue.• Be specific. Be concrete.

Smoking calms me down…

Fifteen-year-old Amber Davis took a long drag on a Marlboro Light, rocking in a swing as the sun set and she surveyed the bedlam of carnival rides and live rock music at the Great Texas Mosquito Festival, an annual bash in the Gulf Coast refinery town.

"It's a social thing, I guess," the freckle-face Miss Davis said of her smoking habit - currently 10 cigarettes or so a day. "And besides," she said, gesturing to the lighted Marlboro, "I'd like to be a model. This burns off a lot of calories."

Amber's 16-year-old friend, Rachel Martin, smokes off and on.

"It mellows me out," she said, idling in the next swing. "The first time I tried it, last year, I was like, 'This is totally gross.' I was coughing, and I turned green, and I thought I was going to throw up. So, I had to learn to like it."

With two major studies in recent weeks suggesting that teenage smoking is on the rise, the question of just how teenagers "learn to like it" is the subject of an increasingly pitched debate in Congress. Many lawmakers are openly contemplating new ways to restrict tobacco or the estimated $5 billion a year that tobacco companies spend marketing their products, even as they insist they do not seek to sell cigarettes to minors.

But to many of the teenagers gathered on a hot Texas night at the Mosquito Festival in Clute, or in Surfside, a beach town a few miles away, that controversy might as well be taking place light years away. And many seem equally oblivious to the warnings from health experts that cigarettes are lethal.

"I heard they have some cure for cancer now anyway," said Sylvia Babb, 17, who smokes a pack a day and had her first cigarette when she was 12. "They can just shrink it and make it go away." She laughed and lit a Marlboro with the orange tip of her boyfriend's cigarette.

Brian Grindele, a burly youth of 18 with a T-shirt advertising "Coed Naked Beer Games" and a partiality to Camels, said that reports on the dangers of smoking must be exaggerated.

"I figure if it's really so bad for you, they wouldn't be selling them everywhere," he said. "I mean, you walk into a Stop 'N Go, and there's a whole wall of them right in front of the cash register. If they were really that bad for you, they'd make them less accessible."

To be sure, there are plenty of teens here in Clute who do not smoke, including Grindele's friend, Derrick Petteway, who said, "Man, you have to be some kind of idiot to be putting that crap in your lungs."

And Texas law prohibits the sale of cigarettes to anyone under 18, although the law is routinely ignored and carries no penalties for the youths who buy cigarettes or smoke them in public.

But for those who do smoke, it is clear that there is no easy answer to just why they started in the first place.

"Hey, I smoke because I like to smoke," said Phillip Bonnette, 18, the operator of the Rok n Rol, a whirling carnival ride perfectly suited to eliciting ear-pitching screams from its teenage riders. "This don't have nothing to do with no Marlboro Man," he said, puffing on a Marlboro.

Even more to the point, talking to teens makes it equally clear that there are no easy answers to getting them to stop.

"The first thing they gotta realize, they can't make kids do anything," Sylvia Babb said. "Actually, if you tell them not to do it, they're going to do it. Kids rebel against things."

Her best friend, Jackie Campbell, 18, who has been smoking since she was 12, nodded vigorously in agreement. But, she said she could think of a way to that would probably get more people to quit.

"Hike the price," she said. "If it was $4 pack, I wouldn't smoke. Of course, I don't want them to do that, but I think if they were serious about it, you'd get a lot of people saying, 'That's too much money for a smoke, so forget it.'"

A tracking study of 50,000 teenagers, released earlier this month by the University of Michigan, found a sharp increase in smoking among the young even as it was falling among adults.

Similar findings of increased smoking by the young were also released this month by the federally-financed Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

But neither of the surveys could pinpoint just why this increase was occurring. And the comments by the teens who smoke here raise a kind of chicken-or-egg question about the appeal of smoking. Virtually all of them scoffed at the idea they had been swayed by advertising, instead insisting they had been turned on to it by friends or watching their parents smoke.

"A lot of it is peer pressure, not advertising or anything," said Miss Martin, 16, a young lady with a brown ponytail and hoop earrings.

Miss Babb, who recently dropped out of high school, said, "Cigarettes are just the best after sex." When some of her girlfriends started laughing, she said, "No, I mean it. They really are. It's kind of like a ritual."

Still, asked why the smoked particular brands, the teens were clearly familiar with marketing-based distinctions. Miss Babb and her boyfriend, Elvis Carter, pointed to the side of their Marlboro packets, which earn them five points (technically, frequent flier miles) toward the 2,286 they would need to send in for a free compact-disk player.

"Let's see, at this rate, only about 400 more packs to go," said Mr. Carter, who recently started collecting the points.

Added Mr. Grindele, "Most of my friends smoke Camels. Now, why do we smoke Camels? I don't know. Half say the like the taste. Half because they're cheap. And half because they think Joe Camel is cool."

Many of the teens said they had no interest in trying to quit, while others said they had tried without success to kick the habit.

"I tried already, but I just can't do it," Mr. Bonnette said. "My nerves are bad. It aggravates me. Smoking calms me down."

Miss Davis said she has never really tried to quit, although a few times she ran out of cigarettes and had to go without them.

"I got headaches really bad, and it was like I didn't want to do anything," she said. "I just laid around the house.

"I guess if I really wanted to, I could stop," the 15-year-old continued. "Maybe when I get older or have kids or something."