This was convicting to me personally. A lot of the 18th century novels I've read start with pages and pages and pages of description that I typically find exhausting. Some of that is shed as the novel develops into the 19th century, so I wouldn't say that all description is good description, but I should give description more patience and attention as an act of discipline and out of respect for the author.
Recently, a colleague brought paper and colored pencils for her 8th grade students to draw ents while they listened to a relevant chapter in The Lord of the Rings. I mentioned it to my seniors, and they asked to do that sometime when we read together. I wonder if, on occasion, that would help my students attend to longer passages of description. We'll see!
Perhaps another cultural shift that has aided in our inability to dwell with description is the scientism, or logical positivism, of the 20th-century, which made concision, or "parsimony" the number one theoretical virtue. Whatever cannot be reduced down to its simplest, grammatical form, is deemed unnecessarily complex, cumbersome, or mere aesthetic "fluff." While concision, or parsimony, can certainly be a desirable pursuit, especially in the technical fields, I am not sure it is the most desirable, nor that it carries over, or should carry over, to the arts (one of the reasons why so many "Faith-based" movies are so bad, is because they fail to take the time or effort to build setting, character, mood etc., and try to get as quickly as possible to a very simple, and simplistic, Gospel proclamation).
The whole idea of "get to the point" is a very reductionistic impulse, one that may be important in certain contexts, but that is harmful in others, especially in those areas of human creativity that are meant to address existential concerns.
Good thoughts my friend. Brevity and clarity are great in many instances, but it can definitely kill the beauty of a story. Also, in philosophy, I find modern philosophy to largely suffer from this same issue. In the attempt to be clear and concise, modern symbolic logic, and the philosophers who use it, tend to fail to communicate to hardly anyone but highly specialized peers. Whereas Plato and Aristotle and Boethius and Aquinas can be read and understood (sometimes with greater effort than others) by just about anyone who gives them the time of day.
The points you brought up with mental couch potato-ry is very true and definitely should be addressed, but I think you missed (or at least, mentioned but didn't explicitly include) a simple reason why students get impatient with description - film/tv has also greatly influenced the idea of what a story should be, or at least streamlined it in the same way that someone retelling a long-winded story might be asked to "get to the point." I think it's assumed that story = action, and if you're introduced to a story with a wall of description, you automatically view description as something not related to the necessary parts of the story. It's not an automatic thought that description might be used to actually help a story forward (whether by deepening it or setting details that will become relevant later on), and it might also not be an aspect of story that's as commonly explained.
You are right about story being equal to action in many people's mind. I am reminded of C. S. Lewis' comments about the making of King Solomon's Mine into a movie and how they added earthquakes and lava and missed the entire point.
Thank you for your insightful article. My thoughts are going back to the time when I read the complete Iliad in Greek and the actions of the Greek heroes were interrupted by the extensive description of the new weaponry for Achilles. I realized that the Greek listeners admired it as much as the actions.
"One of the best things we can do to help students see the value of description is to ask them to write descriptions themselves. Recently I wrote on the exercise known as Description which is part of an ancient series of exercises known as the Progymnasmata. I am convinced that by helping students become great at description themselves that it will simultaneously give them an appreciation for it when they see other masters at work. In the same way one cannot completely appreciate a fine work of art until they have themselves applied brush strokes to canvas, so a person who has never tried to accurately describe something (real or imaginative) cannot really appreciate what another author is doing when painting an image in their mind with only words." --Jacob Allee. We are not all the same, Mr. Allee. There is no generalization to be made.You are correct about training, but some geniuses, the greatest examples, are exempt from this kind of collective formulaic idealization.
This was convicting to me personally. A lot of the 18th century novels I've read start with pages and pages and pages of description that I typically find exhausting. Some of that is shed as the novel develops into the 19th century, so I wouldn't say that all description is good description, but I should give description more patience and attention as an act of discipline and out of respect for the author.
Recently, a colleague brought paper and colored pencils for her 8th grade students to draw ents while they listened to a relevant chapter in The Lord of the Rings. I mentioned it to my seniors, and they asked to do that sometime when we read together. I wonder if, on occasion, that would help my students attend to longer passages of description. We'll see!
Excellent reflections Jacob!
Perhaps another cultural shift that has aided in our inability to dwell with description is the scientism, or logical positivism, of the 20th-century, which made concision, or "parsimony" the number one theoretical virtue. Whatever cannot be reduced down to its simplest, grammatical form, is deemed unnecessarily complex, cumbersome, or mere aesthetic "fluff." While concision, or parsimony, can certainly be a desirable pursuit, especially in the technical fields, I am not sure it is the most desirable, nor that it carries over, or should carry over, to the arts (one of the reasons why so many "Faith-based" movies are so bad, is because they fail to take the time or effort to build setting, character, mood etc., and try to get as quickly as possible to a very simple, and simplistic, Gospel proclamation).
The whole idea of "get to the point" is a very reductionistic impulse, one that may be important in certain contexts, but that is harmful in others, especially in those areas of human creativity that are meant to address existential concerns.
Good thoughts my friend. Brevity and clarity are great in many instances, but it can definitely kill the beauty of a story. Also, in philosophy, I find modern philosophy to largely suffer from this same issue. In the attempt to be clear and concise, modern symbolic logic, and the philosophers who use it, tend to fail to communicate to hardly anyone but highly specialized peers. Whereas Plato and Aristotle and Boethius and Aquinas can be read and understood (sometimes with greater effort than others) by just about anyone who gives them the time of day.
The points you brought up with mental couch potato-ry is very true and definitely should be addressed, but I think you missed (or at least, mentioned but didn't explicitly include) a simple reason why students get impatient with description - film/tv has also greatly influenced the idea of what a story should be, or at least streamlined it in the same way that someone retelling a long-winded story might be asked to "get to the point." I think it's assumed that story = action, and if you're introduced to a story with a wall of description, you automatically view description as something not related to the necessary parts of the story. It's not an automatic thought that description might be used to actually help a story forward (whether by deepening it or setting details that will become relevant later on), and it might also not be an aspect of story that's as commonly explained.
You are right about story being equal to action in many people's mind. I am reminded of C. S. Lewis' comments about the making of King Solomon's Mine into a movie and how they added earthquakes and lava and missed the entire point.
Thank you for your insightful article. My thoughts are going back to the time when I read the complete Iliad in Greek and the actions of the Greek heroes were interrupted by the extensive description of the new weaponry for Achilles. I realized that the Greek listeners admired it as much as the actions.
Indeed! Achilles shield! Also the description of the ships and their numbers.
"One of the best things we can do to help students see the value of description is to ask them to write descriptions themselves. Recently I wrote on the exercise known as Description which is part of an ancient series of exercises known as the Progymnasmata. I am convinced that by helping students become great at description themselves that it will simultaneously give them an appreciation for it when they see other masters at work. In the same way one cannot completely appreciate a fine work of art until they have themselves applied brush strokes to canvas, so a person who has never tried to accurately describe something (real or imaginative) cannot really appreciate what another author is doing when painting an image in their mind with only words." --Jacob Allee. We are not all the same, Mr. Allee. There is no generalization to be made.You are correct about training, but some geniuses, the greatest examples, are exempt from this kind of collective formulaic idealization.