Jess Stork
A Writing Exercise For Description
There are several things in this world that I have trouble with: tax forms, club dancing and those little packets of soy sauce that I can never seem to get open without squirting them all over myself. But perhaps none rival the amount of frustration that I often have with description. The entire scene is right in my head! So, it should be easy to put on paper. Someday, I'm going to invent a steampunk contraption that allows me to extract the setting from my head, and put it down into the pages. So I can move on with the story.
Until I get around to inventing that, (copper, steam-powered with lots of gears that make sizzling sounds and stuff,) I would like to suggest a writing exercise I did with my Young Writer's Group at the library, if you too suffer from a lack of flowery adjectives.
First you need a Word Cloud Creator. Some good ones are:
ABCya! Word Clouds for Kids! (Note: You can still play with kid things if you are an adult.)
Then choose a character, or setting, or even a scene. Write the character/setting name in first, then brainstorm descriptive words, and don't be stingy with the verbs. I've found this is a fun way to play around with a topic or characters I'm having trouble with to get a better sense of who they are. If you're a visual person like myself, you may want to try it. It's amazing what bubble letters can do for your character development. The young writers in my group had fun with choosing colors and fonts that related to their characters, i.e. cheery yellow to denote an energetic character, or darker colors for more reserved ones.