Every Description Is a Crop

Today was the first day of a new week-long Arvon writing course for people writing memoirs, and in the last 50 minutes I ran an exercise on “Show, Don’t Tell” that seemed to work unusually well. I’m writing it up here so others can try it too.

The group included several people who wanted to write more vivid, compelling narrative than the more polemical, academic or marketing-based writing they were used to. This exercise was designed for exactly that.

Part One: The Photo

I asked everyone to think of a scene from their memoir – any scene – and make a note of it, because I might return to it later.

Then I tried to explain the difference between writing clinically descriptive Alt Text for photos online and writing something more opinionated and alive. I pointed out that if I showed people a photo of the current US president, it would be very hard for them to keep their feelings out of any description they wrote.

Objectivity is harder than it looks.

Then I shared a photo with the group, and asked everyone to describe what they saw by typing Alt Text into the chat. (You can see the picture here, and come up with your own description.)

Most people noticed broadly the same things; a few specific details were named by only one or two people. But almost everybody noticed this: a smiling woman was pressing her splayed hand into the face of a smiling man. Most people guessed the couple were middle-aged or older. A few noted the photo was black and white and estimated a date – the 1950s, perhaps. One or two mentioned things visible in the background.

Then I shared a wider shot from the same scene. Click here to see the second pic.

This revealed a third person – a woman standing just behind the first, also beaming. The woman in the middle, the one with her hand on the man’s face, was also holding hands with the woman behind her. That detail had been invisible in the first photo.

And then I told them who these people were.

The man was former US president Dwight Eisenhower. The woman touching his face was Helen Keller – who was both blind and deaf, and could not see or hear him. That’s why her hand was on his face. That’s why he was smiling. And the third person, the woman holding her hand, was communicating with Keller throughout the encounter by signing into her palm.

The room went quiet for a moment.

What the exercise shows

The point is this: a picture, including the “picture” we paint in words – in memoir, or in any narrative writing – will always include some things and leave out others. We can’t help it. Every description is a crop. Every scene we write is the first photo, not the wider one.

That isn’t a flaw to be ashamed of. But it is something to be aware of. Because once you know you’re cropping, you can start to make deliberate choices about what to include and what to leave out – and that’s where real craft begins.

Part Two: The Scene

Moving on, I asked for a volunteer to share the scene they’d written down at the start of the session. One person offered. I asked her to describe it simply and briefly. She sketched a scene inside a room: four people, a table, a meal.

I asked the rest of the group to type into the chat any question that immediately popped into their heads. What else did they want to know?

The questions came flooding in. Far more than anyone expected.

What time of day was it? Who sat where? Was anyone speaking? What was the atmosphere? What was on the table? Was the door open or closed?

This is the experience most new memoir writers need to have at least once: to feel, viscerally, how much a reader wants to know – and how much even a well-intentioned writer leaves out without realising it.

I then asked the volunteer to describe the scene again, in slightly more detail, from start to finish. And then to describe it again – this time from the point of view of each of the different people present in turn.

This shift in perspective is often revelatory. The same scene, seen through different eyes, becomes almost unrecognisable. Details that were invisible from one vantage point become central from another.

I also told the group about a previous Arvon course, when a participant described a scene that involved only herself, walking down to a beach alone. I’d asked her to re-describe it from the point of view of the animals she passed on the way – squirrels, birds, whatever was there. It sounds absurd. It unlocked something important.

Try it yourself

You don’t need a group to do this exercise. Here’s a version you can work through alone:

Find a photograph – ideally one with people in it, and ideally one you didn’t take yourself, so you have no prior knowledge of the context. Look at it for a minute. Then write a paragraph describing exactly what you see, as plainly as you can.

Now ask yourself: what questions does your description leave unanswered? Write those down too.

Then pick a scene from your own memoir – something you’ve already drafted, or something you’ve been meaning to write. Read it back and ask the same question: what does a reader not yet know? What have you left out without realising it?

Finally, rewrite the scene from the point of view of someone else who was present. Or, if you were alone, from the point of view of something else that was there – an animal, an object, the room itself.

Notice what changes.

You can’t include everything

“Show, Don’t Tell” is often taught as a stylistic rule – use sensory detail, avoid abstractions, let the reader feel rather than be told. All of that is true. But there’s a deeper version of the same lesson: every piece of writing is a photograph, and every photograph is a crop.

The writer’s job isn’t to include everything – that’s impossible, and it would be unreadable if you tried. The job is to choose your crop consciously, and to know what you’re leaving out.

Helen Keller understood the world through her hands. She made sense of an encounter with a president through touch. What we reach for, and what we leave aside, shapes everything we know – and everything we write.