Are you ready to enhance your description writing skills? In this video, I share two powerful exercises to help you breathe life into your scenes and characters—one involving locations and atmosphere, the other involving more abstract concepts like emotions and feelings.
Both exercises sharpen your focus on what truly matters and ensures your descriptions add heft and immerse readers in the worlds and stories you’ve worked so hard to create.
Hello, Jane Cleland here. “Can you recommend any exercises to help me improve my description writing skills?” Yes, I can think of two.
One, pick a fixed location and describe it from two different characters’ points of view. That’s interesting, right? It could be a gazebo, could be a beach, could be a grocery store. But let’s get to know the character by thinking about their perceptions, how they’re seeing this thing. I think that will help you home in on what matters to that person, and that’s how we want to write descriptions. It’s not that we’re writing travelogues, we’re not writing narrative essays. We’re wanting to use our descriptions to reveal character or move the plot along.
My second idea is a variation. Pick something you’re going to describe, and this could be an intangible—it could be, “I want to describe how his love for her is unlike anything he’s ever felt before in his life.” Come up with three phrases or words that describe it. Is his skin on fire? Is his heart in his throat? Is his ability to use words gone? By coming up with just three phrases—and you know, some of those may be trite, you’re not actually going to end up writing them—but it will help you understand what that experience feels like to him, which in turn will help you come up with an effective description.
I know you can do it. I’d love to hear your thoughts on how you improve your description writing skills. What exercises or prompts have you used? Put them in the comment section. I’d love to learn about what works for you. And if this video had value for you, would you like it? Would you share it? Would you subscribe to the channel? That opens up features that make things even more valuable for you. Thank you so much.
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