Wednesday 8 July 2015

Descriptive Passages

I do not set out to write about food. However, for my subject matter, I am entirely in the hands of the excellent authors on whom I comment! There may be one or two descriptions of Nicholas van Rijn's Brobdingnagian feasts somewhere on the blog although a bit difficult to track down? More recently, a sequence of intra-blog links has given us:

a breakfast
a free lunch
a harvesters' lunch
a harvest supper
an evening picnic
curry and naan in the Angrezi Raj
Balti in Lancaster
authentic Indian food in Birmingham

Meanwhile, if we might return our attention to a descriptive passage addressing another sense, I count seven colors in what the evening picnickers see:

blue sky and sea
green coast
white foam
red and gold sunset
blue and green flames

Blue and green are counted twice because these colors in flames will not be the same shade as in sky, sea or coast. I suggest that the colors of flames caused by salts dried into the wood are well observed.

Why do I linger on these details instead of racing ahead to the next action scene? Because this attention to detail is what good writing is about.

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

And I do appreciate how you linger over even the most minor details. The one which stuck in my mind being your comment about how salts dried into wood can cause BLUE flames. Most likely, I would hardly have noticed that!

Sean