Descriptive Writing
English II
What the writer wants
to accomplish
• To create word pictures
• To bring the scene to life
• To put the audience “in the story”
Lightning flared in a blue sheet, giving
Anderson a shutter-click of what she had come to
think of – as her neighbors did – of her dooryard.
She saw the truck, with the first drips of rain on its
windshield; the short driveway, the mailbox with its
flag gown and tucked securely against its aluminum
side; the writhing trees. Thunder exploded a bare
moment later, and Peter jumped against her,
whining. The lights went out. They didn’t bother
dimming or flickering or messing around; they went
out all at once, completely. They went out with
authority.
Anderson reached for the lantern – and then
her hand stopped.
There was a green spot on the far wall, just to
the right of Uncle Frank’s Welsh dresser. It bobbed
up two inches, moved left, then right. It
disappeared for a moment and then came back….
She turned toward Peter, hearing the tendons
in her neck creak like dirty doorhinges, knowing
what she as going to see. The light was coming
from Peter’s eye. His left eye It glared with the
witchy green light of St. Elmo’s fire drifting over a
swamp after a still, muggy day.
The pediatric waiting room is divided into
two unequal sections by a length of Plexiglass
that just out into the middle of the room. A
table at one end keeps people from walking into
the flat edge. Orange and brown upholstered
chairs line both sides of the transparent wall,
back to back, as though some enormous game
of musical chairs is about to begin. The smaller
section of the room is reserved for well patients,
and a prominent sign directs the rest of us to
the other side.
When I carried Jancey in the morning, I
stopped in the entrance, momentarily confused.
Some redecorating had gone on since our last
visit. A large oval braided rug covered an
expanse of institutional carpet in the unwell
section, and a baby not much older than Jancey
was seated in the middle of it. While I watched,
he crawled to the edge and then back again, as
though the rug were an island and he was
marooned.
When I think of the hometown of my youth, all that I
seem to remember is dust – the brown, crumbly dust of
late summer—arid, sterile dust that gets into the eyes
and makes them water, gets into the throat and
between the toes of bare brown feet. I don’t know why
I should remember only the dust. Surely there must
have been lush greet lawns and paved streets under the
leafy shade trees somewhere in town; but memory is an
abstract painting – it does not present things as they
are, but rather as they feel. And so, when I think of that
time and that place, I remember only the dry September
of the dirt roads and grassless yards of the shanty-town
where I lived. And one other thing I remember, another
in congruency of memory – a brilliant splash of sunny
yellow against the dust – Miss Lottie’s marigolds.
We were afraid at night in the winder. The
upstairs of our house was not finished. A brick
chimney went up one wall. In the middle of the
floor was a square back hole, with a wooden railing
around it; that was where the stairs came up. On
the other side of the stairwell were the things
nobody had any use for anymore….I had told Laird,
as soon as he was old enough to understand such
tings, that bats and skeletons lived over there;
whenever a man escaped from the country jail,
twenty miles away, I imagined that he had
somehow let himself in the window and was hiding
behind the linoleum.
Picture Canyon, though not the most beautiful of
places, has a special, enigmatic effect on p0eole. As you
enter the canyon, the soft golden sandstone wall begin
to build and loom overhead until they meet the electricblue skyline. Native American drawings etched inside
the canyon cover sheer cliff walls on either side,
illustrating a past long since forgotten. The rugged floor
of the canyon is scattered with multitudes of squirrels
feeling on the pea-sized pinon nuts. Each playfully eats
his fill and stores the excess in bulging cheeks. As the
sun sets over the horizon, the jagged, golden rock
formations on the skyline seem to radiate an eerie,
golden energy known only to a few infrequent visitors
and to the Native Americans who lived in the canyon
centuries ago.