How to Enter a Reader’s Heart

By Sarah Creech

If writing were a sport, then the top conditioning exercise would be to evoke the senses with as many reps as possible—elongate the description with endurance or make it a quip, fast as a sprint. Artful description is the foundation of the writer’s craft. Through concrete, sensory description, the writer accesses the reader’s experiences and emotional life. Abstraction can access the intellect, but to enter the heart, the writer must immerse the reader in description so vivid that the pleasure comes from the shock of someone else being able to render a life adjacent to your own with accuracy.

Say someone asks me to name the number one reason I love to read, I would first beg to name two reasons, but under pressure, I would choose high-quality description. I go to books to marvel at a world so often in motion that it blurs — until a writer slows down the many moving images I navigate over a lifetime.

Like on a road trip when I stare out of the window and watch the highway and the trees disappear and wish for a moment for it all to stand still, or at a birthday party for a child when lips part and the flame goes out, or at a nightclub dancing in unreasonable red heels years before the chronic foot pain begins—all of these images so full of yearning and so relatable find space in the pages of fiction, nonfiction, and poems. Those pages say, Yes, Sarah, live it again, live it like you do and do not know. Description, images, and figurative language should feel familiar yet surprising.

Writers are driven by the need to live twice. In The Art of Description, poet Mark Doty notes that “the need to translate experience into something resembling adequate language is the writer’s blessing or the writer’s disease, depending on your point of view…If it is indeed a symptom of a problem, of life not having been really lived until it is narrated, at least that’s a condition that winds up giving real gifts to others. The pleasure of recognizing a described world is no small thing” (10-11).