Daring Description
Can you weave spells which bring characters and objects to life in your reader's imagination?
Naming, alone, isn’t enough.
If we’re writing about a thunderstorm, how can we make a reader feel the thunder boom, feel the lightning flash, make them want to take shelter, and then realise they’re safe - that it was ‘just’ a piece of writing?
That kind of descriptive writing is spell-binding.
And to make descriptive writing spell-binding, writers need to know how to cast spells.
This month’s writing competition invites you to use your powers of descriptive writing creatively in an original piece inspired by Carol Michelon’s illustration for the section on description in my forthcoming book, Master the Art and Craft of Writing.
When you look into the flames, what might you see?
When you gaze up through the telescope what might be revealed?
What could be written on the scroll? What details recorded on the index cards?
And what spells might the floating inscriptions contain to bewitch you?
Submit an entry and you could be the lucky winner of a $10 Amazon gift voucher. The first fifty entrants will receive a free copy of my forthcoming book, Master the Art and Craft of Writing, and every entrant will receive a free sampler of writing exercises. What do you have to lose?
As this is both a course and a competition, here are some tips and hints to help you.
If you want to grab your readers’ attention, and bring something to life, start by getting to know it … comprehensively.
There are frameworks to help you do just that. De Bono’s Thinking Hats, for example, or Kipling’s honest serving men. Goethe goes further, by describing four stages of engagement: detailed observation, imaginative engagement, receptive revelation, and holistic unification (becoming one with the object of contemplation). Each framework can be empowering; each has its limitations. Many of these are covered in the exercises for descriptive writing in Master the Art and Craft of Writing.
One of the most powerful and one of the easiest frameworks to bring things to life in you - so that you, in turn, can bring them to life in your reader’s imagination - goes back nearly 2,500 years, back to the time of Aristotle. We don’t know whether he first came up with it or whether he was the first (as far as we know) to put it in writing. What we do have is his framework: The 10 Categories of Being.
Aristotle’s Categories are best used to describe an object in a ‘frozen moment in time’ or what I call a ‘picture postcard moment’ in a character’s life. The more specific the moment, the better the description will be.
By engaging with this exercise, which is one of several frameworks for descriptive writing that features in Master the Art and Craft of Writing, you’ll discover the power that Aristotle’s Categories of Being have to bring your descriptive writing to life.
Imagine a character – any character – in a specific setting at a specific ‘frozen moment’ in time. They could be in mid leap; they could be just about to step over a threshold; they could simply be caught between in-breath and out-breath while asleep; or they could have been captured during a moment of stillness. Hold that image in your mind and describe the following things about your character exactly as they appear at that ‘frozen moment’. Start by jotting down key words and phrases, using this as first and foremost as a thinking exercise.
1. Substance – the essence of what you’re describing.
2. Quality – any qualities that make them distinctive – colour, texture, shape, material.
3. Quantity – anything you can count or measure – ideally described without reference to an external unit of measure.
4. Relationship – anything the substance connects to – profession, family, hobbies, clubs, educational links.
5. Where – where the substance is in space.
6. When – the moment in time in which you’re describing them – this can be very precise, but it will also have a connection to a time of day or night, a day of the week, a month of the year, an early, middle, or late part of a season, a decade, a millennium, an age, and an era.
7. Being-in-a-Position – what position the substance is in.
8. Having – what the substance may have that could be taken away from it without changing who or what they are – clothing, jewellery, accessories, belongings, even nationality and emotional or intellectual states fit into this category.
9. Active or Action – what the substance is doing.
10. Passive or Passion – what is being done to the substance – whether that be a provocation or an intellectual or emotional state, or a physical act the substance is on the receiving end of.
Try a few, then condense your notes into a powerful piece of descriptive writing. Use it in your entry for this month’s competition and see what happens.
This month, your task is to produce a piece of descriptive writing (in no more than 250 words) inspired by the illustration above by the talented illustrator, Carol Michelon, which includes at least one full 10-category description.
Full rules here.
Deadline: Midnight on Thursday 25th August 2022 BST
Upload your submissions here and share them on social media with the hashtags #unknownstoryteller #carolmichelon #leonconrad #artandcraftofwriting
This Course and Competition is part of The Unknown Storyteller project, focusing on the art and craft of how to tell a story. Master the Art and Craft of Writing is the counterpart to Story and Structure: A complete guide. The book explains how to structure the story you want to tell in the first place and will help you shape great stories to tell.
Signed limited edition hardback copies are available from 10 August. The paperback edition will be available from 1 November. Order your copies here.
Stay connected! 🔗
Substack: leonconrad.substack.com
Medium: Leon Conrad
Twitter: @TradTutor
Facebook: @WhyDoesStoryStory
Instagram: traditionaltutor
Website: leonconrad.com