How to write descriptively

In the How I Write Podcast, Harry Dry emphasised that good copywriting must be concrete, visual, and falsifiable. 

Say for instance, you want to say someone is rich in a story. Well, it's not very fun to say, "This person has a crap ton of money". The way I prefer to describe it instead is to say "This person flaunts black credit cards at luxury stores without blinking; they wear designer, neatly pressed shirts". A stereotypical image, for sure, but one you can see.

To be fair, "having a crap ton of money" can be visualised in other ways, and that's the beauty of it. Based on how you describe and unpack a certain thing, it gives people a vibe and a certain feeling. You're painting with words.

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I mention all this because earlier in 2025, I did an internship at a florist studio. I recall reading the brand guide on the first day and being struck by a single sentence.

Be inspired by our imagination.

It's a line that I try to take with me whenever I create something. Bursting with saturated colours, nature and subtle details in the foliage, I want my drawings to inspire tranquillity and fun in the viewer.

But, back to the original quote. I just came fresh from an internship at a very corporate-sounding brand. Rather than inspiration or imagination, they focus on news reporting with a touch of corporate jargon like sustainability and inspiring future leaders.

Hence, I had a culture shock when I realised that creativity is valued over formality. I struggled with adapting, but it's an uphill battle I'm ready to fight. 

Indeed, as I read the copy across the website and socials, I was, indeed, inspired by their imagination.

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Flowers are a perishable good. When I showed a friend this luxurious $600 bouquet for Valentines day that's bigger than the florist who made it, she said it is beautiful but you need a lot of disposable income to buy something like that. 

Knowing this, my supervisor tells me that when you sell flowers, you're selling feelings. You're selling the vibes a beautiful bunch of flowers bring to a space—a story about love, affection, creativity, of being in the moment, of injecting colour into the every day with tiny little details.

That's the point I want to make here. When you write descriptively, you're giving the viewer feelings, you're using words to paint a very vivid image of what you want them to see but also feel.

Let's take this painting I found on Instagram as a test subject.

Twin Flames, Irina Cumberland.

A blunt description would be: A painting of the ocean waves. (or if we're generous, add the phrase, 'on a sunny day'). It's perfect for an alt description, but it doesn't evoke feelings, let alone immerse me into the artistry. Let's try again.

A gentle scene of water flowing across a shallow bed of rocks, stained green with moss and the sunlight above. Waves ripple into the distance, forming abstract circular patterns, lulling the eye into a peaceful infinity beyond the canvas.

This type of copy takes more effort to write. It's tough to 'ChatGPT' stuff like this, and you'd have to refine it further for it to hit just right.

The difficulty comes from first identifying what you want readers to feel, and then the specific aspects of the thing you want to describe, either lovingly or scornfully. From there, you have to feel what you want the readers to feel. Then, to impart it all in a way that doesn't feel cringe. 

Once successful, though, you get copy that's in every way as beautiful as the thing you're trying to describe, or in a better case, more so. From one human's aesthetic sensibility to another.

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As I got the hang of writing, I waxed poetry like no one's business. My boss would look at it and tell me to make it shorter because "no one will read it". True, but I don't think that's the point.

When your writing is too long, not many will tough it out in the never-ending scroll of social media. I say this because I dislike reading long blocks of text online.

Yet, if the writing is engaging, why wouldn't I want to read it? If I can read text walls of 4k words on AO3 for a good fan fiction, I'm not opposed to reading three paragraphs on Instagram. No, what matters is that you capture people's attention, and a shorter text block is more efficient in that.

Speaking of efficiency, there's beauty in brevity. In the How I write podcast, once more, brevity is the soul of wit—soul, a very evocative word, something living, something essential and heartfelt about the thing. The same is here.

Writing briefly forces me to crystallise all of my most descriptive phrases and words into one perfect sentence that just sings to the mind's eye. Go too long and you risk diluting your words.

To bring it back, being rich isn't a personality trait; it's just a trait that's part of a whole person. If I spend five paragraphs showing you how rich he is, you'd roll your eyes and say, "Damn, this narrator has a problem like can we move on already!"

Likewise, you're describing a feeling of the larger, more concrete thing, whether it is flowers, a person or whatever your subject is. It's one thing to play with language and create something beautiful but let words represent, rather than reduce the thing to, in my dad's words, 'pretty words that don't mean anything'.