t tears." Not only has the expression been worked
to death, so that it has no primary freshness for a reader, but it is
too artificial and strained for a story of the commonplace.

CHAPTER VIII

DESCRIPTION

Interest--Secondary Function of Description--Distribution--
Story of Atmosphere--Effectiveness of Distributed Description
--Description of Persons--Example--Analysis--Accuracy--
Mechanical Limitations of Story--Use of All Senses--
Description of Setting--Two Objects--To Clarify Course of
Events--To Create Illusion of Reality--Use of All Senses
Order of Details--Contrast.

All writing is descriptive, in a sense; narration, for instance, is
simply the picturing of shifting physical conditions in a state of
fluxation. But description is usually taken to mean the picturing of
physical conditions more or less static. The term is used so here, for
the technique of describing persons, scenes, and objects generally
requires treatment separate from the description or narration of bare
events. In describing a happening of his story, and in describing one of
the characters, the writer's general object is the same, to show the
person or event with the vivacity of life, but the conditions to which
the writer is subject are somewhat different in each case. To mention
but one difference, normally much more space is available for pure
narration than for pure description. The events of a story are the
story; its people and its setting are drawn only to give the fiction the
highest attainable degree of verisimilitude. And, since the space
available for description in the normal story is somewhat limited, the
writer is under stringent necessity to make each word tell. In narrating
an event, the matter has an interest of its own for a reader apart from
the manner of telling, but in describing a person, scene, or object, the
word is all in all. If the picture is not effective, nothing is
achieved.

In coming to the writing of a descriptive passage, the writer should
realize its secondary function in the story. Except in the case of the
story of atmosphere, and perhaps of the story of character, a reader's
interest will focus in the progression of happenings as such, and the
sole object of strictly descriptive matter is to give maximum
concreteness to the events by depicting their setting and
individualizing the persons concerned. What happens is the first
consideration, not where it happens nor