Develop and refine your descriptions.

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To be effective, a remembered event should include specific details about the people and places involved. Describe people in detail—what they looked like and how they dressed, talked, and gestured. Describe the setting—what you saw, heard, smelled, touched, and tasted. Once you’ve described the people and places involved, try incorporating them into the action. The following activities will help you get started.

Ways In

How Can I Make My Descriptions of People and Places More Vivid?

  • Consult memorabilia, like scrapbooks or souvenirs (ticket stubs, T-shirts), for details you may have forgotten.
  • Look at photographs from your own albums, visit the Facebook pages of key people, or consult Google Earth views to sharpen your descriptions. Consider scanning, uploading, or attaching images of the memorabilia to your essay.
  • Come up with a list of names or nouns to describe the most important people and locations in the story.
People Places
Consider the job(s) they have, the roles they play, their facial features or accents, articles of clothing they wore, or items they carried. Consider the type of location (clothing store, funeral parlor), the architectural features it had, or what it was near.

Brandt’s security guard: man, street clothes, badge.

Dillard’s pursuer: man, driver, city clothes, suit and tie, street shoes, jacket; after the pursuit: cuffs full of snow, prow of snow on shoes and socks, Pittsburgh accent.

Brandt’s store: General Store, knickknacks, buttons, calendars, posters, lines at the cashiers, basket, threshold, office.

Dillard’s neighborhood: Reynolds Street, cars’ tires, trail of chunks, sidewalk, house, path, tree, hedge, bank, grocery store driveway, porch, gap in hedge, alley, woodpile, backyards, hilltop.
  • Come up with a list of narrative actions that remind you of the ways people acted, moved, and talked or that capture what was happening in the setting.
People Places

Brandt’s security guard: tapped shoulder, flashed badge.

Ruprecht’s Ernie: insisted, rushed, swabbed, muttered.

Brandt’s shopping center: was swarming with frantic last-minute shoppers.

Ruprecht’s cave: slithering through tight spaces.
  • Use detailing to flesh out descriptions.
People Places

Brandt’s security guard: unexpected tap, middle-aged man, some type of badge, politely asking.

Dillard’s pursuer: thin man, red-headed, chased silently, pants legs were wet.

Brandt’s store: other useless items, 75-cent Snoopy button.

Desmond-Harris’s friend’s house: well-stocked liquor cabinet, high-ceilinged kitchen, speakers perched discreetly.
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  • Use similes or metaphors to compare people or places with other people or things.
People Places

Desmond-Harris and her friend Thea: were two earnest soldiers in the East Coast–West Coast war.

Ruprecht: felt like a kindergartner.

Dillard’s neighborhood: a complex trail of beige chunks like crenellated castle walls; mazy backyards.

Remember that you can rearrange the components of your description in any way that makes sense to you.