Category Archives: Writing Description

Writing Practice and Meeting up with your MUSE

Writing Leap #54

Writing a Character Description

Hi Writers,

I belong to the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (S.C.B.W.I.) They have a new offering for their members. Write a 50 word description of a character for a children’s book, using the word wart. They will post it on their widely-subscribed website (scbwi.org) for agents and editors to see.

At first I dismissed the idea. I wasn’t inspired by warts. Then my closed mind decided to open up and I had an idea! Big lesson: Consider everything as inspiration for your writing. Don’t be an inspiration snob like me. Stretch!

Writing a 50 word description of one of your characters is great writing practice for showing not telling. Fifty words is a challenge to try and evoke, not describe, something about your character that is real. Try it Writers! It’s really satisfying, I found.

Here’s mine inspired by the word wart.

The plump Queen had a wart on her bottom. So embarrassing. Especially when she sat on her throne and cried, “Ouch!” Her round cheeks blushed cherry red, her round mouth resembled a doughnut and her round eyes opened as wide as two apple pies. She heard everybody giggling quietly.

Happy Writing Everybody, 

LINKING THE ARTS

The Queen, trying her best.

A Favorite Word: Evoke, as in to summon or suggest. This is one of the jobs of our muse.

A WRITING BLOG About Playing Around with a Story Line in Different Literary Genres and Different Literary Categories

Writing Leap #27

Hi Writers,

The Prose Poem

It’s written as prose but reads like poetry. 

You can sit down and dismiss traditional poetry rules.  Like metered rhyme and specific groupings of words. 

There’s an emphasis on the narrative but the prose poem helps itself to the techniques of poetry like vivid images, heightened emotions and fragments.  I often find writing in fragments frees up my writing.  In the editing process I may change them to sentences or not.

I remember grade school when we were not allowed to use sentence fragments in prose.   We ignore that teacher.

What’s the difference between prose poems and free verse, I wondered?  Typography it seems.  Free verse tends to look more like a poem on the page with shorter lines.  Prose poems often, not always, go from one side of the page to another—like prose!

So Writers.  Have fun with fragments and write a prose poem. 

You can try this story line

Heaven

Here’s Mine.

The Twelfth of August Every Year

Happy Birthday my beloved Auntie

Up there in Heaven for a long time.  One hundred plus plus plus years old.

In the way of angels are you aware how your ever-flowing love was the sunshine to my blossoming?  Still is.

When I’ve floundered about who I am

I remember and feel your loving hand holding my child’s hand

Giving me grown-up manicures.  Talking to me with tenderness about my Cynthia-ness. 

I become happy with myself.

There were a never-ending collection of little moments, some faded in detail

That became huge with the love that created them.

You found me beautiful early editions of War and Peace. 

All leathery, book-musty and tissue-papery.   We both loved books.

You knew my passion for this Russian story.

How excited you were to find the grown-up me the entire collection of My Book House.  Fairy Tales you had read to me over and over long ago. 

I was Dolly in the Grass or Snow White.

You insisted.

My adored Auntie Ceil.

I feel who I am, Auntie, because you felt who I was.

And most of all, you told me.

Happy Writing Everyone,

 LINKING THE ARTS

A Prose Poem by Walt Whitman  (first two stanzas)

From A Family of Poems, compiled by Caroline Kennedy, 2005

Afoot and light-hearted, I take to the open road,

Healthy, free, the world before me,

The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.

Henceforth I ask not good fortune, I myself am good fortune,

Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,

Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms,

Strong and content, I travel the open road.

A Word

 Many of us might say the best word in the dictionary is LOVE, here thought  of as ever flowing generosity of spirit.

A Painting

Perhaps all paintings can be considered prose poems.  Vivid imagery, carefully chosen details, flexible techniques.

Here’s a watercolor my Auntie Ceil brought me back from Paris when I was sixteen.  She had asked the artist to paint in a young girl—me.

A WRITING BLOG About Playing Around with a Story Line in Different Literary Genres and Different Literary Categories

Writing Leap #26

Hi Writers,

       Specific details open up larger worlds.

       Generalizations do not.  And they are no fun to write or to read.  They leave no room for free floating associations.  Readers glide over them and forget them a second later.

       Generic descriptions kill deeper responses to our writing.

       A writing teacher once told me, “Don’t write, ‘She wore jeans.’  Write  ‘She wore old cut-off jeans that were tight across her tush.”  Now that’s a comment that has stayed with me for twenty years.

       Specificity.  Could this be the golden key that unlocks our imaginations and the imaginations of our readers?

       Go ahead, writers.  Have a good time with specificity in your fiction, your essays, your descriptions.  What details in your world have struck you lately?  From a book?  A conversation?  A film?

The Story Line is:

I Notice, Therefore I Am!

(Please pardon the ridiculous pun.)

Here’s mine.

      Did you hear President Obama’s recent speech on racism?  Politics aside, he used specifics that for me pierced like a laser.

       He was crossing the street one night and passed a parked car with people inside.  He heard the click of the locks as he walked by.  He was a United States Senator at the time.

       I imagine how that must feel and I am sick.  I realize this would never happen to me.

       He was followed in a store by some stranger, “keeping an eye on him.”

       I imagine what this must feel like and I am sick.

       He was in an elevator and saw the lady next to him hug her purse in tighter and look away.

       I realize this will never happen to me.  For several moments I “become” that man in the elevator and I feel sick.

       Specificity.  It’s the writer’s magic wand.

Happy Writing Everyone,

LINKING THE ARTS

A Poem

Have you ever noticed how poets use specificity instinctively?

William Carlos Williams

                so much depends

                upon

                a red wheel

                barrow

                glazed with rain

                water

                beside the white

                chickens

You’re there, right?

A Painting

Appraisal, 1931 by Grant Wood

To me this painting is wonderful to look at not only for its artistic merits but for the clarity of the narrative.  It’s so evocative of the American farm because of the artist’s attention to specifics.  The furs, the hat pin, the jeweled bag, a city lady perhaps.  In contrast to the wool cap and rough jacket of the farm boy holding his speckled hen.  A few visual details and the whole story is there.  The viewer is there too.

A WRITING BLOG About Playing Around with a Story Line in Different Literary Genres and Different Literary Characters

Writing Leap #24    Describing What You See

Hi there Writers,

You are the experiencer who gives your reader details of what you are seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling physically and feeling emotionally.  Description creates a mood, a tone, so your reader drinks in what you do and gets lost there.  That’s your gift as a writer to your reader.

Pick anything!  How does it strike you?  Write that.  It’s the best practice for your fiction and non-fiction as well.

The Story Line is:   CONTENTMENT

Here’s mine.

The Linden Tree

Remember what it felt like when you were a child and you  found your own hiding place?  A place where everything around it disappeared?

There is a very old linden tree that looms high among the maples and beech at our local nature center.  The other day I leaned against its huge brown trunk and left the nature center for linden tree land.

It was droopy hot outside with a blinding sun.  But under the thick branches that sprawled forty feet across and eighty feet high it was dark-green shady and as refreshing as a glen after the rain.  Many of the branches hung down to within a few feet of the ground.  This linden has been growing for over one hundred years and may even keep on going to one thousand.   It was secluded under the tree.  Private.  It was magical. 

Clusters of heart shaped, slightly lopsided leaves dangled off graceful stems.  I took my sketchpad and drew the tiny sawtoothed edges and the little point at the tip.  It’s the end of June and just past the time when the star-shaped flowers bloom and perfume the air with a mighty fragrance of honey and lemon peel.  I missed that, darn it.

But hanging from the stems along with the round love leaves were long, very narrow yellow-green leaves, like wings, in clusters of two.  Growing out of the center of the leaves were threadlike stems that split into a V, where two pea-sized white nutlets were thinking about dropping to the ground and starting new linden trees.  Unless they decide to let the chipmunks and squirrels enjoy the seeds inside the nutlet for tea.

It was hard to leave.

LINKING THE ARTS

Painting:  In the Shade of Linden Trees by Apollinaris M. Vasnetsov, 1907

Book: Charles Dickens is known for glorious descriptions that create images in your mind where you can go and hang out. One of my favorites: