Composing Descriptive Lists

When it comes to descriptive writing, I'm a sucker for a good list (or series)--any playful hodgepodge of dizzying details that can stir a person or place to life through sheer excess and exuberance. Like Jean Shepherd's olfactory evocation of a basement:

I could smell the moldering old tires that my father kept hanging on the walls just in case someday he might pick up another Hupmobile, and the mildewed Sunday papers of years back that lay piled against the concrete-block walls, and the scent of countless generations of field mice who had lived out their lives in the basement, and the dusty Mason jars filled with grape jelly and strawberry preserves that lined the plank shelves under the steps, and the sharp rubber smell--bitter and strong--of the coiled garden hose under the workbench, and the more subtle but pervasive aroma of a half ton of damp soft coal in the pitchblack bin, all held together with the soapy dankness of the drains, covered with perforated iron lids, that every week carried the family's used wash water back into Lake Michigan.
("Scut Farkas and the Murderous Mariah")

Or Shepherd's vivid description of a boy dressed to confront a northern Indiana winter:

Preparing to go to school was about like getting ready for extended Deep-Sea Diving. Longjohns, corduroy knickers, checkered flannel Lumberjack shirt, four sweaters, fleece-lined leatherette sheepskin, helmet, goggles, mittens with leatherette gauntlets and a large red star with an Indian Chief's face in the middle, three pair of sox, high-tops, overshoes, and a sixteen-foot scarf wound spirally from left to right until only the faint glint of two eyes peering out of a mound of moving clothing told you that a kid was in the neighborhood.
("Duel in the Snow, or Red Ryder Ryder Nails the Cleveland Street Kid")

And when that same boy visits a department store Toyland, Shepherd shows how a good list can bring a scene to life with sounds as well as sights and smells:

Over the serpentine line roared a great sea of sound: tinkling bells, recorded carols, the hum and clatter of electric trains, whistles tooting, mechanical cows mooing, cash registers dinging, and from far off in the faint distance the "Ho-ho-ho-ing" of jolly old Saint Nick.

(If any of these images strike you as familiar, consider this: the boy's name is Ralphie, and back in 1983 Shepherd's descriptive lists--from the book In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash--were translated into the cinematic images of A Christmas Story.)

Though lists may appear to be rather artless, haphazard affairs, Robert Belknap insists that they are "deliberate structures, built with care and craft." In his book The List: The Uses and Pleasures of Cataloguing (Yale University Press, 2004), Belknap shows how writers have relied on lists throughout literary history: the catalog of ships in Homer's Iliad, the record of "schoolboy treasures" in Tom Sawyer's pockets, the inventory of America in Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass.

Lists have a role to play in essays and compositions as well--especially those that describe people or places or things. See, for instance, how Alfred Kazin relied on lists to describe "The Kitchen" of his childhood.

Drawing up lists can help us to generate materials for a composition (see Discovery Strategy: Probing Your Topic). Lists can also serve as a way to arrange and connect ideas and images, as shown in our Model Place Descriptions. According to Belknap, lists may "compile a history, gather evidence, order and organize phenomena, present an agenda of apparent formlessness, and express a multiplicity of voices and experiences."

Of course, like any device, list structures can be overworked. Too many of them will soon exhaust a reader's patience. But used selectively and structured thoughtfully, lists can be downright fun--even more fun than an Official Red Ryder Carbine-Action Two-Hundred-Shot Range Model Air Rifle.

More About Listing:

• Writing with Lists
• Ian Frazier's List of Reasons in Great Plains
• Listing With William H. Gass
• Model Place Descriptions

Image: Jean Shepherd (1921-1999), author of In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash (Doubleday, 1966) and Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories (Doubleday, 1971).