A Scene Outside Your Window

If you're old enough to remember M*A*S*H, you might recall the episode where Radar decides to become a writer.  Wanting to improve his writing he signs up for a correspondence course.  The first assignment is to describe a scene outside his window.

I've thought about that.  Easily you could have five people describe the same scene and have five very different passages.  So, is there a "best" way to go about a descriptive passage?

When I had a short stint as a homeschooler, I remember some of the writing assignments from our chosen curriculum.  The directions indicated that you should describe a scene from right to left or left to right, or otherwise in a logical manner.  This type of assignment always made me uncomfortable.  Shouldn't a description be more free-flowing than that?

I think the balance should be somewhere in the middle.  I know when I read a description of an item or scene in a book it frustrates me when I can't create a picture in my head from what is written.  I also believe a technical description would be boring.  Take the following examples.

If I wanted to "define" the scene outside my window it might appear like this: Out of my four-foot-square window, a portion of my side yard is visible.  On the left is a row of bushes, still devoid of leaves.  Six feet to the right of this, along the far edge is a large oak tree.  It's trunk is gnarled and branches don't begin until twenty feet up.  Beside this is a pine tree ... (you get the idea).

If I try to find the middle ground, allowing you to create a picture in your mind, and giving you the impression that you actually cared enough to want to build that picture, if might be like this:  The morning sun paints the scene outside my window before leaking inside to warm my toes.  I can tell it's late morning since the early birds have already abandoned the bushes along the yard edge.  I scan towards the middle of my yard to the stately oak tree, reaching it's aging branches to the heavens.  Occasionally squirrels twists 'round it's gnarly trunk, but the limbs of the nearby pine tree periodically block my view of their upward progress, allowing them to play an unintentional game of hide-and-seek.  etc.

I imagine if you took a "crack" at the scene outside my window, your words would vary greatly from mine.  And that's okay, because it's what allows me to be a writer in the first place.  If we all wrote the same way, there wouldn't be over a quarter of a million books printed each year in the US alone.  Hopefully, this year, one of them will be mine.