Journal Prompts: Describe, Describe, Describe Those Feelings

This journal prompt involves describing an event that has evoked some sort of an emotion in you.  All writing, especially writing done by beginner writers, should be as emotionally engaging as possible.  It should make the readers shiver, or evoke some similarly strong response, since you are new, and not yet established and you need to convince the readers to give you the benefit of the doubt.  You must make them “feel” the story.

A great way to practice describing feelings and emotions is to keep a journal in which you recount an event from the previous day which has triggered some sort of an emotion in your, whether it was anger, joy, sadness or something less conventional like pity, self-consciousness, jealousy or whatever. However, when doing this exercise DO NOT name the emotion that you are describing or analyze it in depth.  Simply record or describe it through the five basic senses of sight, smell, taste, touch and hearing.  In other words try and convey the emotion entirely through just describing a scene, an event or an occurrence.  It will be difficult at first, you will want to simply state your emotions and feelings, but with time you should learn how to very effectively describe emotions in that way that readers love.  You will be able to make them “feel” the story.

You can do this in the evening on the same day or in the morning the next day, whichever you prefer, and can easily be combined with the first journal prompt featured on this blog, namely Journal Prompts: Write in the Morning.

Adapted from:

From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction by Robert Olen Butler

Tagged as: creative writing exercise, Creative Writing Exercises, Creative Writing Ideas, Creative Writing Prompts, Journal Prompts