Creative Writing Exercises: Writing Powerful and Meaningful Descriptions

The aim of this creative writing exercise is, as the title suggest, to help you hone and perfect the skill of describing things, people, or places, in fiction. As you probably already know it is descriptions that have the ultimate power in transporting the reader into the fictional world that you are creating. But it is often not enough to to just describe everything in great detail and hope it will be enough, because the best descriptions are unique to the type of story you are writing, the character whose point of view you are telling the story from and the type of tone and emotion you are trying to evoke in the reader. But it all starts with the skill of describing and this is what this exercise will try to teach you.

Take your journal and go into your living room. Sit down on the couch and look around the room. Start describing everything you see in the room write full and jointed sentences as though you are writing a story and this is a scene in it. Going from left to right form the position you are sitting describe what you see in full a even flowery detail, but do not embellish, simply record it. You might want to write it all from a point of view of a certain character viewing this room and try to alter to descriptions to fit with their current state of mind and emotion. Do this for every room in the house, then perhaps branch out to a nearby park or a street in your town. If you do this exercise consistently and pretty soon you will have a store of descriptions to draw upon when writing actual stories, which will be fuller and more vivid because of it.

Stay creative!

Other creative writing exercises:

Creative Writing Exercises: Starting a Story
Creative Writing Exercises: The Differences of Style, Tone, Voice and So On
Creative Writing Exercises: Create Your Own Character

Tagged as: creative writing exercise, Creative Writing Exercises, Creative Writing Ideas, Creative Writing Prompts, How to Write More Descriptively, Journal Prompts