Here, and in all of Gavin's work, his talent for description brings character and place to vivid life.
"America's most struggling city needs to attract business and talent," a description of the contest begins.
It was a fountain of metaphor". Given his own estimable talent for description, and his disciplined reluctance to stretch beyond it, the match of writer to subject might seem congenial.
Indeed, he uses his reportorial talent for description to conjure the glum, shopworn world they inhabit: he notices the linoleum curling at its seams, the fake antique furniture "broken out in pediments and lathework grenades and ornamental buboes," the old sewing machine "whose plastic had gone yellow".
It's an astonishing story – the roots of which Erdrich found in the Ojibwe culture she herself hails from – told by a storyteller both formidable and tender, her talent for description second to none: pained men "stacking heartache" as they chop wood; or poor LaRose, attempting to fit in to his new family, "It was like his mouth had a little strainer that only let through pleasant words".
Casting directors often send talent agents descriptions of the type of actor they're looking for, and talent agents then notify the casting directors if they're representing someone who would be a good fit.
Rivera contracted beriberi in the jungle and during his convalescence wrote La vorágine, combining firsthand knowledge with poetic vision and a talent for vivid description.
Despite the many long sex scenes that allow Nadas to indulge his talent for physical description, the first orgasm isn't until Page 634: "She had never before experienced such profound sexual contentment with a man".
The opening chapters showcase Bullough's talent for rural description, the specificity of a particular forest nonetheless dissolving into a vast emptiness; a landscape lunar enough that outer space is not, for Kostya, such a leap of the imagination.
George Eliot is an author whom dilatory writers can point to with some optimism: she didn't start writing fiction until she was thirty-six, and then only at the encouragement of Lewes, who suspected that she might have a talent for "concrete description," as she wrote later in an essay titled "How I Came to Write Fiction".
