Pebblepup's Writing Den

Where do you live? If you want an exercise in writing descriptions, try this one. Try describing your hometown, your house, bedroom, kitchen. You choose it.

I live in a townhouse. The front door opens to the base of the stairs. To the left as you come in, is the living room with two double hung windows looking out to the parking lot. Through a doorway towards the back, is the kitchen where there’s a patio door leading to a small patio.

The sink faces a double hung window overlooking the patio. Beyond the patio is a common green space between our building and other across the green area, with a tree. The stove is to the right, if you are facing the sink. The stairs to the basement are to the right of the stove as you face the stove. There’s a washer and dryer in the basement. The basement also has storage.

If you go back to the living room, and go up the stairs opposite the front door. At the top of the stairs is the bathroom and two bedrooms.

That’s where I live. It’s not the best description. I’ve given you no sense of the decor. So that’s what you need to do. Describe the place where you are. That’s the exercise.

You can do this several times. You can work on describing your home or a room in it. That’s the simple form of this exercise. You can be as detailed or sparse in your descriptions as you like.

Once you’ve mastered describing your home, you can start describing your dream home. Or you can describe your spouse, siblings or friends.

Do you have a pet? Describe it. That’s the beauty of this exercise. You can find many versions of it. Once you do that, you can describe your characters and story locations better.

Once you have done all that, there is another description you can work on, for example, the weather.

My basic idea is to take anything in your life and describe it. Describe your morning routine. Do your best to make people see what you see, feel the things you feel, taste what you taste, hear what you hear. You get the idea. Take the time to notice what’s around you.

That’s the exercise in this blog. Ssit down, look around you and escribe what you see, feel, taste, and hear. You can do it wherever you are, whenever you find the time. It’s not a glamorous exercise, but it will make your stories pop out and believable later on.

Writing needs practice, like anything else. So practice. Describe the things around you. You can concentrate on each sense in separate descriptions if you like. It doesn’t matter, it’s only practice after all. So look around and write descriptions.