Deliberate Practice is the path to mastery: breaking down an art, sport, or craft into individual skills and training each of those skills independently.
Continuing on my Deliberate Practice Drills for Fiction Writing series, I present a drill designed to help focus descriptive powers.
Set a five minute timer (or if you’re really fast, two minutes). Look around, pick and object, describe it:
- Capture the look of it as fast as you can
- If you have to, instead of describing the whole object, focus on one detail
- Stories are emotional journeys; every object in fiction should have some emotional impact on the reader, so try to realize some emotional truth, shade the description with an emotive tone, or even personify the object.
- Keep it short, one sentence to one paragraph, and definitely no more than three paragraphs even for the most complex scene.
- Repeat this at least 3-5 times in one session.
Tips
- This is not about writing a story. You do not need characters, setting, pr any sort of plot… Unless you WANT them 😉 Be true to the paragraph. Don’t hold yourself back.
- If you get done in time, feel free to go back and tweak it a little. Play with the words. But move on when the timer goes off.
- It doesn’t have to be good. This is about practice, about learning. About developing skill. My example below I am torn about: Is it good? I don’t know. It is as good as I can get it within the confines of the time limit, but that is all.
Example
He sits at his desk and stares hopelessly at the mousepad. The mousepad is him. Worn, faded, bulging in the middle. He remembers it once bore a Picasso sketch of a bull charging, but every trace of it is gone, worn away by time and stress like the man’s hair.
Advanced Tip
Instead of just doing objects, try doing the whole room or a person.
More to come!