“Good description usually consists of a few well chosen details that will stand for everything else.”
Stephen King
On Writing
After visiting the prison in Ohio where they shot the movie The Shawshank Redemption (and writing a post about it yesterday), I thought it was time I finally read the novella Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption by Stephen King. Having been in Maine last week and learning that lobster was once prison food I was interested if King would touch on that detail (he didn’t).
But in one paragraph King does an excellent job of describing Andy Dufresne and touching life in New England:
When Andy came to Shawshank in 1948, he was thirty years old. He was a short neat little man with sandy hair and small, clever hands. He wore gold-rimmed spectacles. His fingers were always clipped, and they were always clean. That’s a funny thing to remember about a man. I suppose, but it seems to sum Andy up for me. He always looked as if he should have been wearing a tie. On the outside he had been a vice-president in the trust department of a large Portland bank. Good work for a man as young as he was, especially when you consider how conservative most banks are…and you have to multiply that conservatism by ten when you get up into New England, where folks don’t like to trust a man with their money unless he’s bald, limping, and constantly plucking at his pants to get his truss around straight. Andy was in for murdering his wife and her lover.”
Related posts:
Descriptive Writing—Part 1 (tip #22)
Descriptive Writing—Part 2 (tip #23)
Descriptive Writing—Part 3, Characters (tip #24)
Descriptive Writing—Pt. 4, Action (tip #25)
Descriptive Writing—Pt. 5, Setting tip #26)