Mark Klempner's Blog - Posts Tagged "writing-exercises"

I have been noticing what marvelous descriptions Isaac Singer provides of fictional people. Unless he had a phenomenal memory, I can't imagine that he came up with these descriptions while sitting at his desk....my guess is that he tried in his notebooks to describe people he saw in real life, and then assigned some of those descriptions to the characters in his novels.

Example from Enemies, A Love Story:

Next to her stood a tiny man wearing a felt hat with a feather in it, a checked jacket that was too light for a cold wintry day, a pink shirt, striped trousers, tan shoes, and a tie that was a mixture of yellow, red, and green. He appearly outlandishly comical, as if he had just flown in from a hot climate and hadn't had time to change his clothes. His head was long and narrow and he had a hooked nose, sunken cheeks, and a pointed chin. His dark eyes had a humorous expression, as if the visit he was making was nothing more than a joke.

I heard that Singer would often sit in a cafeteria on the lower East Side (or West Side, not sure) for hours each day, sometimes writing, sometimes reading, sometimes visiting with people whom he knew or who recognized him and came over to chat with him. I bet that was where he did these literary sketches of people.

I had to be on public busses a lot today and I took out my notebook and tried to do a literary sketch of the person in front of me. I filled three pages just from looking at the back of this person. I am going to try to remember to do at least one of these sketches whenever I take a bus; I could feel that it was sharpening up my powers of observation and my ability to describe what I observed. And who knows, maybe I'll use part of one of these sketches when I someday need to describe someone in a novel.