I confess: after years of writing scripts, my ability to write good descriptions has diminished. As scriptwriters all we have to do is write, "Interior. Fancy restaurant - Day, and the set designer takes care of everything else. Obviously that's not good enough when writing prose. So how can we improve our ability to write descriptions?
One good strategy is the Concentrated Attention Span Exercise. It takes only one minute but it's good to do it several times a day:
Wherever you are, take one minute to jot down everything you SEE, HEAR, SMELL, TASTE and FEEL. Seeing and hearing are obvious. What I mean by "feel" simply is what feelings do any of these sights and sounds prompt in you?
Don't worry about making this readable by anybody but you. You're not writing to be read, these are notes and in fact the notes are not as important as what you'll gain simply by doing this.
I'm sitting in my home office at the moment. What I HEAR includes: a bird singing, the rush of traffic on Gower Street, a clock ticking, a horn beeping, my ears ringing, my own breathing, brakes, an ambulance siren… (for this one it can help to close your eyes).
These are not good descriptions yet--we're just on step one: making a habit of being aware of what's around us that we might choose to describe.
In the next post we'll look at how to go from awareness to description.
(Find more writing tips galore in my book, "Your Writing Coach," available from Amazon and other online and offline booksellers.)
