What were the results of the assignment to describe a room in my house? Generally speaking, I did just fine. With a caveat, but I’ll get to that later. The assignment was very simple and making a mess of it would have been very difficult, but there were a few revealing factors that marked significant differences between the writers. Some of the writers couldn’t help themselves, and instead of ‘clinical’ descriptions, they leaned heavily towards literature. But the most impor

In the last post I wrote that I would tell you how the ‘clinical’ writing exercise went, but before I do that I should describe the writing process because it got me thinking… When I write descriptions in my stories, I search around in my mind for the visuals which I then translate into words. This is probably why many of my descriptions don’t contain enough details in general (which isn’t always a problem) and are especially lacking when they are needed to orient the reader

The first class was getting to know each other; names, brief histories, course ground rules (we are not here to write a magnum opus!), etc. The first exercise was ‘clinical description’. The idea was trying to capture the person in front of you without using prose or fancy images to evoke feelings. So it was just a matter of describing features. At first, I thought it was a pointless exercise until I found out that I couldn’t get it on my first try. My first attempt resulted