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
- Take a walk around the block. Look at everything – people, cars, trees, flowers, trash, sky, etc.
- 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.
- Write a second description of your walk without using any adjectives or descriptive phrases.
- 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:
- Can you use a stronger noun and delete an adjective? Instead of “red sports car,” can you write “red Corvette?”
- Can you replace a long descriptive phrase with a shorter one? How about changing “the wall was covered with spray-painted words” to “grafitti-covered wall.” Or make it more specific in its own sentence, such as “High schoolers had sprayed ’Cougars Rock’ and ‘Class of 2010’ in red across the brick.”
Descriptive Writing Exercise #3
One final exercise to do with the narrative of your walk.
- Create a character (or use one you’ve already created) and experience the walk through his or her eyes. Does the red Corvette remind him of lost dreams? Does she grimace at the ugly grafitti? Or smile at remembrances of when she did the same thing?
- With your character in mind, choose which details are important to him or her and delete the others. Part of writing descriptive fiction is choosing what to include, and a character who notices the red Corvette may not care about the maple tree under which it is parked.
- Change details as necessary to fit your character. Perhaps the red Corvette won’t mean as much to your character as a fully-loaded black pick-up with chrome accents.
- Change details to enhance your theme. At a conference, Jessica Page Morrell encouraged writers to look for details that resonate. She gave the example of a ginkgo tree, whose yellow autumn leaves fall very suddenly, all within a few days. This sort of description can echo a failing relationship, for example.
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 in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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