Creative Writing
Graziano
The Red Barn Exercise
To the layman it may seem that description serves simply to tell us where things are happening, giving us perhaps some idea of what the characters are like by identifying them with their surroundings, or providing us with props that may later tip over or burn down or explode. Good description does far more: It is one of the writer’s means of reaching down into his unconscious mind, finding clues to what questions his fiction may ask, and, with luck, hints about the answers. Good description is symbolic not because the writer plants symbols in it but because, by working the proper way, he forces symbols still largely mysterious to him up into his conscious mind where, little by little as his fiction progresses, he can work with them and finally understand them. To put this another way, the organized and intelligent fictional dream that will eventually fill the reader’s mind begins as a largely mysterious dream in the writer’s mind. Through the process of writing and endless revising, the writer makes available the order the reader sees. Discovering the meaning and communicating the meaning are for the writer one single act. One does not simply describe a barn, then. One describes a barn as seen by someone in some particular mood, because only in that way can the barn—or the writer’s experiences of barns combined with whatever lies deepest in his feelings—be tricked into mumbling its secrets.
Assignment: Describe a barn as seen by a man whose son has just been killed in a war. Do not mention the son, or war, or death. Do not mention the man who does the seeing. If you don’t like that particular situation, plug in your own. For example: Describe a car as seen by a woman who has just discovered her husband and her best friend are having an affair. Don not mention the friend, the husband, betrayal, infidelity, or the woman herself.
from John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction
In essence this is the backbone of good, descriptive writing. In other words, to use the platitude, this shows rather than tells the reader what is going on, not by clubbing them over the head with what you’re trying to say, but by subtly implying meaning while giving your writing an emotional charge that is felt by the reader through their interaction with the text itself.
This assignment is due tomorrow. It, like every writing assignment in this class, should be typed and double-spaced. I’m not going to assign a length, but I will say that anything short of a probably isn’t going to be doing the work you want it to do.