The Last Word On Nothing

Describing people, actual people you’ve sat across from and interviewed, can be really hard to do well. We writers keep trying, with mixed results.

But it’s worth the effort. Here’s what I think: Especially in a tough science article, getting to know people—by way of a simple “tidy brown beard” (though I’d vote to use physical traits sparingly), a telling quote, or, beautifully, by “a stride that [gives] the impression of imminent flight” (from a recent New Yorker article)—helps humanize our subjects and adds reader-sustaining oxygen to our prose. The neurologist tapping her index finger against her head for emphasis. The archaeologist’s jaw muscles dancing under the skin as he concentrates. These might be nice and even useful to share, if they don’t feel burdensome where they fall.

I appreciate writers who neatly weave illustrative words or phrases into a sentence without them jarring the reader; they’re integral, not extra. Descriptions of people can also be “chunkified”—a bigger commitment of real estate—especially in a profile. I like graphs like this one from another New Yorker piece, about Paul and Patricia Churchland (a couple studying the relationship between the brain and conscious experience). Few words speak to physical traits, but the picture is clear:

Pat is constantly in motion, throwing the ball, stepping backward, rubbing her hands together, walking forward in a vigorous, twitchy way. She has pale eyes, a sharp chin, and the crisp, alert look of someone who likes being outside in the cold. (Even when it is sunny, she looks as though she were enjoying a bracing wind.) She seems younger than she is: she has the anxious vitality of a person driven to prove herself—the first to jump off a bridge into freezing water. Paul stands heavily, his hands in his pockets. He is still. He nudges at a stone with his foot. He looks up and smiles at his wife’s back. He has a thick beard. He looks like the sort of person who finds it soothing to chop his own wood (and in fact he is that sort of person). (Feb 2007)

My LWON colleagues are masters at this sort of thing. Painting with words can be a struggle—it needs to be smooth and authentic. A nice paragraph can crumble around a description that’s shoehorned in. Young writers often suffer from overwrought adjective-laden prose because of them. (I know I did.) Some of us professionals still do (though we catch ourselves more than we used to).

I asked the LWONers to comment on how they add life to subjects and to give me some favorite examples of descriptions, or lines that act as such more subtly, from their own work. For the most part, straight-up physical depictions didn’t make the cut (which didn’t surprise me). Here’s how some of my colleagues replied:

Erik Vance says he aims for balance by simply writing about people from the heart: “When I write about someone – yeah – it’s a little like falling in love just a tiny bit,” he told me in an email. “Not romantically, just like really wanting to get to know them.” He goes the adjective route sometimes, but I like how he gives this character life without strings of corporal detail about the guy:

For him, a drive down a New Mexico highway is something between taking a trip to Disneyland and being subjected to Chinese water torture. Miles upon miles of potential finds lie in wait, but each mile marker represents another lost opportunity. A few times he can’t contain himself, and we pull over to look at deposits by the highway.

Lewin’s dual passions of medicine and fossils make for dizzying conversation as he switches, rapid fire, between how to fill a dinosaur footprint with plaster and how to use that same plaster to fashion an emergency cast. Back in the car, he lists famous fossil discoveries the way others recite baseball stats, and he holds forth on the many uses of safety pins in an emergency — like pinning an unconscious patient’s tongue to his cheek to prevent choking.

Jessa Gamble says, “I find the most successful examples of humanizing are in quotes that really capture a person’s style. It’s like a deeper level of show, don’t tell. My favourite article about my brother, for example, opens with something that only he would ever say: “You’re no doubt familiar with a publication called the Microsat Way in Canada?” Like, no, Doug. Nobody is familiar with that obscure treatise on Canadian microsatellites. I treasure the person who wrote that article.”

Between sciency bits Helen Fields dropped in a perfect little breather, a glimpse of personality, to her story on red-eyed tree frogs:

A giant blue morpho butterfly flits by, its iridescent wings a shocking splash of electric blue against the lush green forest. “They come by, like, the same place at the same time of day,” Warkentin says.

“I swear I see that one every morning,” Vonesh says.

“It’s the 9:15 morpho,” Warkentin says.

From Ann Finkbeiner, a tad of the physical but mostly much more edifying stuff:

Grace Somers Brush is of medium height. She has curly, sandy-grey hair, doesn’t stand quite as straight as she used to, and looks like she’s nobody in particular. If you’re talking mundanities, she’s polite but tends to drift off. If you want to know about the silt piling up in the Susquehanna behind the Conowingo Dam, she snaps to, knows exactly what she thinks, says so, and backs it up with evidence.

From Craig Childs’ work, we get the gist of the archaeologist at the table who “[leans] back in his chair like a doubtful king…”

And more:

A New Mexico-trained field archaeologist, Stanford is a sturdy bear of a man, strong hands, beard mostly gray. When I asked about genetic research that flies in the face of his hypothesis, he responded, “Bullshit.”
and
Yesner, with brillo-pad hair and rings on his fingers, is an icon in Alaskan Paleo sciences. It’s hard to disagree with him.

Maybe my favorite is this chunk that Richard Panek supplied from one of his books, a perfect mix of character-shaping strategies:

Phillip James Edwin Peebles—Jim to everyone—was all angles. Tall and trim, he explained himself to the world through his elbows and knees. He would throw his arms wide, as if to embrace every possibility, then wrap them around his legs, as if to consolidate energy and focus—mannerisms not inconsistent with a man of conflicting sensibilities, which was how Jim Peebles saw himself.
And this:
He loved identifying the next big problem, solving it, seeing where it led, identifying that big problem, solving it, seeing where it led: a bend-in-the-knees, wind-in-the-face rush into the future. (He was an expert downhill skier.)

The writers I know have strong opinions about how much illustration—especially anything to do with physical traits—is good or necessary. Ann wrote to me: “I hate gratuitous descriptions: dark curly hair and dancing brown eyes. I think any description should let the reader see who they’d see if the profilee walked into the room, and then should contain only the details that make the story move forward.”

From Richard: “Physical descriptions are like any other exposition: They have to be there because they need to be there. I’ve struggled with exposition for all my career, so I’ve given it a LOT of thought. And I still catch myself sometimes making mistakes. But the mantra I tell my students is: The information has to be there not because you the writer want to get rid of it but because the reader needs to know it (because you the writer have made the reader need to know it).”

A side note from Sally Adee: Beware the danger “of hitching dodgy science and tech to a charismatic personality.” Indeed, one who promises to be lively on the page isn’t necessarily peddling ideas worth sharing.

When done well, especially in articles about something technical, a descriptive interlude (whether woven in or chunkified) does me good. Reaching one is like turning away from a complex math problem to gaze out the window for a beat. The numbers and symbols drop out; the eyes soften, the mind cools, you notice the trees. It’s as if the “left brain” rests and the “right brain” takes a turn—if we accept for a moment this faulty division of labor between hemispheres. (Forgive me for the lazy metaphor; it’s past my bedtime.)

So for a reader digging into a new subject, this type of pause, I’d suggest, doesn’t just humanize subjects but gives the reader quiet moments to make connections and understand complex material. Toggling between the details of a new high-tech tool and the sound of the engineer’s voice describing it—“like truck tires on gravel”—brings the scientist and the work down to earth. When “his eyes go wide like an excited kid’s” the reader can think, hey, he may exist in another intellectual realm but really he’s just a guy showing off the toys he plays with. When juggling new concepts, this sort of thing helps me. Otherwise, I get brain overload, I get frustrated, I may lose interest and turn to the Style section.

Of course, when it comes to physical descriptors, we have to avoid not just overdoing it but it going horribly wrong. The doctor’s thin comb-over, the physicist’s droopy eye, these may jump out from the reporter’s notebook. (It goes without saying, but never leave your notebook unattended.) But, duh, they’re not nice and certainly not relevant. However, a missing pinky? Perhaps the primatologist shares her experience of the pissed-off macaque that crunched it through to the bone. Now it helps shape her portrait. It could be germane to the story, no less.

Writers have to be judges. Good ones. We take a risk each time we turn subject into object; you never know what a person is self-conscious about, no matter how gentle your words. After scanning the physical we must train our senses elsewhere, in search of more appropriate fodder. An experienced writer ignores a crooked nose (unless the subject tells you he boxes on Saturdays) and picks up on laugh or style or gesture instead, something that presses the story forward while adding more pixels to the sharpening image.

From Emma Marris: “Ultimately, I think telling details about what people DO are better than details about what they look like. Here’s one I like from my own work: Sarah Skinner, an Oregon State student who supervises pit B, says that she wakes up clenching her fists around dream trowels. “When I close my eyes, I see artefacts,” she says.

Writing about women scientists, though it shouldn’t be, is its own sticky thing. Some LWONers have very strong opinions about what does and doesn’t belong in a description of a woman and her work. My calling them “women scientists” might already cross a line. (A real crime would be to mention their silky hair and how they manage three kids while also running a lab.) You can read about these rules here and here and then form your own.

Whatever our various strategies as writers, I think how we people our science-focused prose matters. These moments are important to our subjects, and, especially, our readers, who may wish to brush against a fellow human—but not be hit in the face by one over and over—as they stumble through the hard stuff.

Photo by Charles Deluvio via Unsplash