Daily Themes 5: Description
Spending time on the surface level.
Today’s installment of Daily Themes is about description. Previous lessons have been on metaphor, syntax, sound, and beginnings.
Before we begin, a few notes:
Observations on the surface level can help you access a deeper reality.
When setting a scene, a helpful guideline is that you should appeal to three senses. What does the cabin smell like? Are the floorboards creaking? Did your sock get caught by a nail?
Verbs are often better at describing than adjectives.
Sometimes a person/object/place is the opposite of what the surface may indicate. In these cases, you can use The Flip: set up a physical description that suggests one interpretation, then subvert it.
Each theme should be between 250-300 words. If the prompt has two parts, split the word count accordingly.
Paid subscribers to Ad Hoc get access to all 5 writing prompts, as well as my responses to each of them.
An Appetizer from Joan Didion:
I was in love with New York. I do not mean ‘love’ in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and never love anyone quite that way again. I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for a while. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out of the West and reached the mirage. I could taste the peach and the soft air blowing from a subway grating my legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume and I knew that it would cost something sooner or later—because I did not belong there, and did not come from there—but when you are twenty-two or twenty-three, you figure that later you will have a high emotional balance, and be able to pay whatever it costs…
Prompts:
Visit a room that you’re not already intimately familiar with (as in, not your dorm room). Write a descriptive theme that includes at least three sensory details
Next, research the building in which the room from #1 exists, and write a new descriptive theme of the room that includes at least three sensory details and at least three historical/architectural details.