Theme.—Write one or more imaginary newspaper items, without plot, each detailing some simple incident. Choose a subject of local interest if possible. For example: 1. A runaway. 2. Fire on Seventh Street. 3. Trolley-car accident. 4. Curious act of a bird. 5. April 23 at the Brown School. 6. Brave deed of a child. 7. He returned $500. 8. An old building demolished. 9. The new library is opened. 10. Arrested for “scorching.”
Themes.—Select several topics for five hundred word themes, and write outlines showing what details you would emphasize in composing. Then write historical narratives from the outlines, making them as interesting as you can without deviating from facts. Sample subjects: 1. My struggles with cooking. 2. A day in the berry patch. 3. The first time I saw a play. 4. An adventure of my father. 5. A few days with a doctor. 6. How a certain town was named. 7. Misfortunes of our circus. 8. The tribulations of a truant. 9. My first ocean voyage. 10. An uncomfortable call. 11. My career as an actor. 12. A visit to the World’s Fair. 13. In a graveyard after dark. 14. How Smith looked me up. 15. A week in the woods. 16. The fall I had. 17. My experience as a clerk. 18. A glimpse of college life. 19. What I saw some bees do. 20. An unwilling swim. 21. That Fourth of July. 22. Experiences with a pony. 23. Haying. 24. How the vacation passed. 25. When I was a book-agent. 26. Crossing a swollen stream.
Complex Incident.—Many a narrative must be composed of several threads, telling different events that were going on at the same time. If you were giving an account of how two hunters after being separated in the woods finally reached home again, you would relate first how one got home, then how the other got home; or, having narrated the wanderings of the first, you would let the second tell his own story on rejoining his companion.
Theme.—Relate a complex incident, either historical or fictional, in a theme about five hundred words long. Two or three threads are enough. The following may suggest a subject: 1. Two roads to town. 2. How our party reached the top of the mountain. 3. Adventures of a lost child and its parents. 4. The rescue of an amateur sailor from a wreck. 5. What happened at our club meeting. 6. Three boys and a boat. 7. An overheard discussion.
Description
Language is better adapted to narrate than to describe, for words follow each other, just as events do; they cannot flash the whole picture, with all the details, upon the reader. Consequently writers often combine narrative and description in order to dwell on details. Homer[54] describes the shield of Achilles by telling the story of its forging—how Vulcan wrought each part in turn. What is called the traveller’s view is description from successive points of view. There is a good example of this kind of description in Hawthorne’s American Note Books, p. 181.
In some descriptions the writer is willing to sacrifice the general look of the object, in order to secure accuracy of detail. Giving each detail is called description by inventory. This is often useful, particularly in business or in science. Turn to any book of natural history and read the inventory description of some bird or animal. But ordinarily a description should give a general impression whether it afterward gives details or not. The most common way of doing this is to tell what in general the object to be described makes you think of. If the object is a river, it may remind you of a snake or a letter S; if a village, it may recall to your mind a flat-iron; if a little old lady, it may appear to you, as to Dickens, in Hard Times, “a bundle of shawls.” The main impression thus received is called the fundamental image.
Not every object will furnish a fundamental image, but every object is sure to be remembered for a few chief details. If of a given landscape there lingers in the memory only a dim sense of green woods, with here and there a patch of white, it is as much description to record this dim image as it would be to detail kinds of trees, distances, etc. Indeed, it is a mistake often made to report in a description things that could not possibly have been seen from the given point of view. To keep the point of view is vital. It is a good practice to describe a photograph—such as those published by the Soule Company, of Boston—in order to learn the art of proportion in these matters of living details.
It must not, however, be thought that details have no place in description. In studying an object with a view to writing about it, one should have the eye of a hawk for every visible detail, in order that what he writes may be truthful. There is no better training for the powers of observation than description. Send a careless person to the lake to describe it. He reports “myriads of ripples dancing in glee,” things that every wretched poetaster has seen before him. Send a careful observer, and he will report wonderful shades of color, and curious surface effects, like corrugation and damascene.