List Making

The effect that strings of nouns can have on your writing

I am a great list maker, but not a good list reader. Pre pandemic, I would accost complete strangers in supermarkets to see if they could make out the hasty scrawl on the slip of paper on which I’d written items I intended to buy. I’d wander round looking for a bench of floosies before realising I’d meant to buy a bunch of flowers. Ice cream would morph into cold cream and coleslaw into cold sore. My attempts to organise my life outstrip my ability to write neatly.

 I would still advocate list-making however. If you can read what you’ve written, it’s really satisfying to cross items off, and feel you are making progress.

 But what I really want to talk about is the kind of lists that appear in books. Readers love richness and detail in description, and strings of nouns can often provide that in a succinct fashion. Consider F. Scott Fitzgerald conveying the extent of Gatsby’s fortune, in The Great Gatsby. Here is a list he uses to describe Gatsby’s house and garden:

the sparkling odor of jonquils and the frothy odor of hawthorn and plum blossoms and the pale gold odor of kiss-me-at-the-gate….

And inside as we wandered through Marie Antoinette music rooms and Restoration salons, I felt that there were guests concealed behind every couch and table….

We went upstairs, through period bedrooms swathed in rose and lavender silk and vivid with new flowers, through dressing rooms and poolrooms, and bathrooms with sunken baths

All those nouns, piling in one after another, convey the impression of excess (music rooms – wow!) and skilfully establish the extravagant opulence of Gatsby’s domain.

The Seventeenth century English poet John Donne uses a list in his sonnet ‘Death be not proud’ to different effect:

Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,

And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell…

Here, in a poem addressed to death, the list reminds death of all the ways people can control him, as well as informing him of the unpleasant entities he has to consort with. The strings of nouns create momentum and add emphasis to Donne’s point.

In his ‘Play for voices,’ Under Milk Wood, Dylan Thomas uses a list to give a quick impression of the people who live in the town and the dreams they have:

Only you can hear the houses sleeping in the streets in the slow deep salt and silent black, bandaged night. Only you can see, in the blinded bedrooms, the coms. and petticoats over the chairs, the jugs and basins, the glasses of teeth, Thou Shalt Not on the wall, and the yellowing dickybird-watching pictures of the dead. Only you can hear and see, behind the eyes of the sleepers, the movements and countries and mazes and colours and dismays and rainbows and tunes and wishes and flight and fall and despairs and big seas of their dreams.

The result is full and rich, crammed with detail, and instantly conveying the kinds of houses and people Thomas wants to acquaint us with.

So – illegible shopping lists aside – lists can provide overviews, employ economy of style, give the impression of abundance and cram in detail effectively. They are a great writing tool.