How to write fiction: Adam Foulds on description with meaning

You need to immerse yourself in the world in order to describe it truthfully. Choose your words precisely and they will propel your plot forward, says Adam Foulds
Open thread: How to write fiction
An illustration by Jirayu Koo
Illustration: Jirayu Koo

Description is a violent act. A painting, said Picasso, is "a horde of destructions". Through description, reality is broken down and reassembled according to what you, the author, desire, what you want to see and feel. The resulting words must be formally satisfying, finding an artistic pattern that has only tangentially to do with lived experience per se and yet somehow renders it with the greatest possible intensity.

Description in fiction should always be at least as vivid as lived experience, generally more so. We make and drink a cup of tea without really thinking much about it. It happens in a kind of half-light of inattention, with things as they are taken for granted. But how much more brightly, gorgeously real it is when the cup isn't even in front of us and the milk instead is added by James Joyce in Ulysses: "The sluggish cream wound curdling spirals through her tea." Or later with this close-up on a mélange coffee (a kind of Viennese cappuccino) and a scone: "He sank two lumps of sugar deftly longwise through the whipped cream. Buck Mulligan slit a steaming scone in two and plastered butter over its smoking pith."

Both descriptions are made real by their spatial precision ("spirals", "longwise"), by their sensory alertness ("sluggish cream", "smoking pith"), and by their music, attuned to the activities described. There are the long thick vowels of "sluggish cream wound curdling spirals" which contrast with the lightly sprung, quick vowels and vivid labial consonants of "Buck Mulligan slit a steaming scone in two and plastered butter over its smoking pith." Sound, sense, space – everything arrives at once and the reader is engrossed with the particularity of the experience.

Description masters reality but it can only come after submission to experience, immersion in it. In Four Quartets, TS Eliot meditates on the difficulty of writing and refers to "what there is to conquer/By strength or submission". There is a subtle insight in the second of these possibilities. Not conquest or submission but conquest by submission. Joyce owns the wealth of experience – that slow spiral of cream, the smoking scone – through his submission to it, his open, rapt absorption. To write good description, therefore, you have to love the world, to gaze at it as at a lover's face, forgetful of yourself, immersed.

Description is, so to speak, a violent act, not only because it remakes the world but also because it dissolves and remakes the self. It is a kind of meditation, one that can procure bliss. Here is Flaubert reliving that liberation from the ordinary boundaries of being an individual person in a letter he wrote at two in the morning, after a day's work:

No matter whether good or bad, it is a delectable thing, writing! not having to be yourself, being able to circulate in amongst the whole creation that you are describing. Today for instance, as a man and as a woman, as lover and mistress both, I have been out riding in a forest on an autumn afternoon, and I was the horses, the leaves, the wind, the words that they spoke to each other and the red sunlight that made them half-close their eyes, eyes that were brimming with love.

Notice how everything Flaubert talks about describing plays an active part in the scene: the light, the horses, the couple and their expressions. Nothing here is gratuitous and ornamental, everything is live and connected. This is important. When literary writing declines into fine writing it is often because description isn't purposeful; rather, it's filler, virtuoso, it's pretty and in supposed good taste.

We can see how careful Evelyn Waugh is to avoid such a slackening in this deft paragraph from his 1934 novel, A Handful of Dust. The paragraph is scene setting, pure description, the creation of a landscape in which events will unfold and that contrasts with the environment in which the "hero", Tony Last, will end up:

Outside, it was soft English weather; mist in the hollows and pale sunshine on the hills; the coverts had ceased dripping, for there were no leaves to hold the recent rain, but the undergrowth was wet, dark in the shadows, iridescent where the sun caught it; the lanes were soggy and there was water running in the ditches.

Waugh avoids indulgence by not spending too long on this description. The landscape is conjured with rapid notations that follow each other in a single sentence. Waugh resists the temptation to rhapsodise. There is a definite throb of patriotic feeling for this place in that phrase "soft English weather" but what follows is not at all kitsch or sentimental. Certainly there is a note of rapture in that pale sunshine and iridescent undergrowth but it is earthed by the counterweight of dark shadows, leafless coverts, soggy lanes and gurgling ditches. None of the adjectives Waugh uses (with the single exception of "iridescent") are high-sounding or unusual; they are commonplace and informal: soft, wet, dark, pale, soggy.

And this is all subtly to the point, contributing to the novel's story. The reader here learns how Tony Last's tenderness for this place is born of intimate knowledge. His relationship with it is a marriage, not an infatuation, and that makes his ultimate separation from it all the more painful. All this from Waugh's single sentence of description.

The current of story tends to flow more naturally through descriptions of action. Let's end with a moment from Hemingway's short story The Capital of the World. Note how strictly Hemingway keeps to the first person perspective, how sharply attuned his senses are as adrenaline flows through the character, how he notices only what's important to the character, in close-up, how precisely Hemingway renders the spatial arrangement of the matador's posture as he strikes, how he makes the unfamiliar familiar with a homely simile, how rapid action can be conveyed indirectly by the confusing gaps in events after the irrevocable has already happened. This is description at its most purposeful and it quickens the pulse:

He could remember when he was good and it had been only three years before. He could remember the weight of his heavy gold-brocaded fighting jacket on his shoulders on that hot afternoon in May when his voice had still been the same in the ring as in the cafe, and how he sighted along the point-dipping blade at the place in the top of the shoulders where it was dusty in the short-haired black hump of muscle above the wide, wood-knocking, splintered-tipped horns that lowered as he went in to kill, and how the sword pushed in as easy as into a mound of stiff butter with the palm of his hand pushing the pommel, his left arm crossed low, his left shoulder forward, his weight on his left leg, and then his weight wasn't on his leg. His weight was on his lower belly and as the bull raised his head the horn was out of sight in him and he swung over on it twice before they pulled him off it.

Adam Foulds will be teaching a Guardian Masterclass alongside Sarah Hall on Fiction Writing in London on 28-29 January 2012

Adam Foulds is the author of two novels and The Broken Word, a narrative poem. He has received a number of awards including the Costa poetry prize, the Sunday Times young writer of the year and the Encore award. His latest novel, The Quickening Maze (Vintage), was shortlisted for the Booker prize and is available to order for £6.39 (RRP £7.99) via Guardian Bookshop