Descriptive Writing Exercises

Creative Writing Lesson Assignments for Description

© Jennifer Jensen

Your Character Affects Description , National Corvette Museum

Good creative writing requires good description, but what should you describe, and how much? Here are writing lesson assignments to help.

Here’s a simple writing exercise to help you find a comfortable level of description in your creative writing, followed by further exercises to refine the use of description.

Descriptive Writing Exercise #1

  1. Take a walk around the block. Look at everything – people, cars, trees, flowers, trash, sky, etc.
  2. Write a description of your walk, using every appropriate adjective when describing what you saw. Don’t worry about using too many – this is supposed to be overblown.
  3. Write a second description of your walk without using any adjectives or descriptive phrases.
  4. Now that you’ve done both overblown and bare-bones versions, re-write your walk using a comfortable number of adjectives. This will be different for different writers.

How did you do? Which version was harder for you? Did you discover that you are a naturally spare writer like Dick Francis? Or a descriptive writer like Anna Quindlen? Or somewhere between the two?

Descriptive Writing Exercise #2

Go back to your final version for more revisions:

Descriptive Writing Exercise #3

One final exercise to do with the narrative of your walk.

Read Creating Characters that Live and Description, Dialogue, Narrative: Finding a Balance for more help.


The copyright of the article Descriptive Writing Exercises in Writing Fiction is owned by Jennifer Jensen. Permission to republish Descriptive Writing Exercises must be granted by the author in writing.


Your Character Affects Description , National Corvette Museum
Descriptive Details Resonate       (Ginkgo Tree), Krzysztof Kozerski
     


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