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I hope you never have to do that!

Now ... as to preconceived formula:  The preconceived formula is just the exact sequence of events, for all events internal and external.  It doesn't cover things like 'I'd never dreamed of anything so wonderful.'  Nor do I suggest or demand that you write everything that way ... only that you practice a little so that you learn, as a habit, how to see that ordering.  That will give you the freedom to use it or avoid it by choice.  I don't think you'll ever be a pointilist, or want to be.  But doing things on that very foreign way for an hour or so, on a very short sample, may show you the other side of Jack Spratt (or his wife ... you decide which is which).

Unless you think the exercise will ruin you forever?

When a movie script is written, especially for an action movie, it's often converted into cartoon-like drawings called a storyboard.  Sometimes (as for Jackson's LoTR) the director or author and a few others play out the parts before a camera to test both the script and the director's blocking and composition of shots.

What I'm suggesting is a little like rehearsing the story internally, going through things as they happen, as they must happen, for things to make sense.

Back to The Elements of PROGRAMMING Style for a moment.  The authors suggest, in different words, that the first step is to be able to identify bad style so you can go back and revise it ... and the second step is learning, during the revision, how to avoid the problems when you first write it, so revision is less and less necessary over time.

Only KH can say how well the samples I wrote match Jenna's voice.  In part, that's because he's kept it to himself so much!  More specifically, he's let Jenna show herself by her large actions, but not by small details.  A detail like the Unfamilar Potato can be telling--and touching.  If I didn't know Jenna before, this would hit me in the face like a mudpie.

I  have to work on description because I don't see things that way--yet.  When I work mentally I cut right to the action and skip the establishing shots and all the rest.  But I'm trying, and maybe even doing a little better.  The ideal, of course, is to have the description and action so closely linked that you can't pigeonhole the bits of story into one or the other.  That's a long way off for me.  But the nearer goals will get me closer.

Ah, I've got email about your next posting.  And Awwwayyy Wweee Gooo!

Thank you.  A KH compliment!  I must learn how to happy-dance.

That's not changing from oblique thinking to linear.  That's wiping the thinking out and writing in its outcome.

Oh, K (where have we heard that?) you might want to see the revision I put up of my B1 Ch90 (which really belongs in a later volume).  See how it plays on these description and interior description questions.

In =Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance=, a book that I don't know whether to recommend, the narrator recalls trying to get a student to write with focussed specifics.  He wanted her to write an essay; she chose the USA as a topic.  Too broad he said, forcing her down through her state, her county, her town, neighborhood, and street, past her home and down to a single brick in the front wall.

She filled page after page with vivd descriptions of that brick, its colors and imperfections.

You don't have this fictional student's inability to focus, but your descriptions do not always stand up to close examination of the physics and your logic flow is sometimes irregular.  That's why I'm suggesting this detailed exercise--on the small scale, please!  If it works for you, you'll be able to carry the lessons to your larger work and the questions will nag you when you need nagging--and only then.  They'll pipe up more often at first, but experience will show them their place in the team.

Janet's remarks are on point here.  And much depends on the action and sequence in which this must fit.

You've got synesthesia here.   Sizzle is to the ear, bacon's aroma to the nose.  And bacon's aroma is so strong that it will overwhelm the eggs.

There might be another lesson here.  If you go to art school, even for photography, they'll want you to learn to draw first.  Pencil and paper is the simplest medium and requires the least learning of the medium freeing you to learn the essence of representative art, and that essence is to unlearn, to learn to see with your eyes instead of your brain.  To learn to see a thing as your eyes show it to you, not as your brain says it must be.  Because you are trying to present something to someone else's eyes, not directly to  his brain.

This might be the unwinding of your sorting socks.  Or maybe not.

Let me offer another analogy.  An electrical engineer learns first how to study the behaviour of an electrical circuit as a function of time.  But very soon the study turns to characterizing according to frequency or 'moment'.  The tools are the Fourier and Laplace transform, which have nearly the same algebraic form in practice, and have the great virtue of turning the calculus into algebra.  Hairy polynomial algebra, but algebra still.  (And today we have other transforms, and I don't know the beginning of it: Z transform, wavelets, ... ... ...)

The beginning student sees the circuit either in the time domain OR in the frequency domain.  The accomplished engineer (which I am not) sees it in both domains at once, and understands the effect of a circuit change in both domains at once.

The accomplished artist sees with both the eyes and the brain, at once.  Socks AND their sorting.

Not always true.  'sizzle' is a verb (sometimes noun), not an adjective.  Strunk and White will tell you (perhaps paraphrasing Twain?) that the adjective hasn't been built that can get you out of a tight place.  And in the opening matter of An Exultation of Larks the author points to the glory of English's huge vocabulary, for instance the differing shades of 'paternal'' and 'fatherly'.

Let's see how I might have treated your incident, bearing in mind that grammar mood and grammar flow and topic flow are always involved.

How old is Sam?  It affects how he moves down the stairs.  Is he hungry or sated?  It affects his reaction to the smell of frying fat.  And of course, he is neither a vegetarian nor an observant Jew or Moslem.

Here's a first try:

A bit pointilistic, perhaps, but you might try pointilism as an exercise, just to pull you toward center.

Oops, right.  Kat got the Mistress's wand.  But what's happened, and to happen, is not the result of intervention.  Hmmm.

Tilly seconded the now-enhanced Anver.  Will she show any effects?  Oh, and is there some kind of truce between her and Kat, or is Anver just the fence between them?

It just means you never visited a whaling museum.  They have one on Nantucket.

Cheese

Cheese

Quincunx

Guarded by those poison-teeth tentacles.