An ability to describe things in the world is a basic creative writing skill you can isolate to learn much as an artist learns by, say, sketching a bench or trees in a park. It requires sustained practice and it's easy to tell who hasn't done it.
Comments
Log in with your Bluesky account to leave a comment
Agreed. As a real life example, I gig drive food delivery, and it is astonishing that people don't know how to describe their house location - or that they need to, especially when the house and mailbox have no numbers.
Honestly Bluesky’s alt text expectation has been an interesting exercise in this. Trying to add context to a photo and include just enough detail has been such a challenge for me. I do write, but more poetry and lyrics in which I’m not that concerned with clarity.
Social media has not helped my tendency to sketch ideas instead of telling a story. Not that ideas can’t be narrative. But honing whatever this thing is with reps works against describing things in the world I think.
I feel like its the difference between 'talking to' someone and 'talking at' someone. The latter is off-putting and unpleasant (reminds me too much of church when I was little) but the former invites the listener to be a part of something. It's welcoming and inviting.
It is, and I think I could just set my metric for pedantic, but I also teach and write academic stuff so that geiger counter is, um, maybe a little busted for me.
i remember one workshop where describing a tree was important to the story and it wasn't working and i asked the student if they had gone right outside and word sketched the tree there or close observed any tree... and no they hadn't.
So many readers have only read books that rely on info dumping that they have lost the patience to allow the world to unfurl around them as part of the narrative. They want to know it all upfront and lose the mystery and enchantment of a story that shows rather than tells
As a 53-year-old musician who’s trying to give creative writing the same level of patience and energy I gave to music, I feel this hard, every day.
I want story, I want characters.
I need time.
Comments
Tough realization. Chin up, Vadnais.
The thing I learned the most from was writing descriptions for places and all the possible weather conditions there.
I want story, I want characters.
I need time.