3. Good creative writing requires good description.

Include all 5 senses: sound, smell, taste, touch, sight. Choose a place well-known to you. Write a one paragraph description of a place.

Writing exercise 1-Sight

Make a list of everything that can be seen in the setting. Don’t worry about sentences. Remember to include color, shape, size, etc.

Writing exercise 2-Sound

Make a list of everything that can be heard. Birds, conversations, shoutings, whistles-everything. Then imagine the quite sounds: papers or leaves rustling, whispers.

What would a person be able to hear if the louder noises vanished?

Writing exercise 3-touch

What do things feel like? Go back to the list of what can be seen and describe the texture of them. Since the reader won’t know how soft is soft, this is the place to use similes.

Writing exercise 4-Smell

The sense of smell is very powerful, but is often forgotten in fiction. With closed eyes, picture the setting. Now shift focus from what can be seen. What smells are there? Pleasant? Nasty? Separate them out to see where they come from, then make a list. Describe.

Writing exercise 5- Taste

Taste is often left out unless the character is eating something. But taste is tied directly to smell. Using the list of smells as a reference, write down the taste these things would leave in a character’s mouth. Sweet? Metallic? Sour? Oily?

Students choose a character and rewrite the description from his or her point of view, using all 5 senses.

Long stretches of description in fiction overwhelm readers, so decide which items to include, depending on which things are important to the character.

Steps in the writing process

(lessons 3-4)

There are three steps in the writing process: pre-writing, drafting, editing, proofreading.

Pre-writing

Students choose a topic and think what they will write about the topic. Students decide which of the ideas they want to use and where they want to use them. They choose which idea to talk about first, which to talk about next, and which to talk about last.

Drafting

Students write their paragraph or essay from start to finish. They use their notes about their ideas and organization.

Editing

Students check what they have written. They read silently to themselves or aloud, perhaps to a friend. Students look for places where they can add more information, and check to see if they have any unnecessary information.

Students ask a classmate to exchange texts with them. Getting a reader’s opinion is a good way to know if the writing is clear and effective.

Students rewrite the text making improvements to the structure and content.

Proofreading

Students read the text again. They check their spelling and grammar and think about the words. Students make final corrections.

Pre-writing: getting ready to write

Before you begin writing, you decide what you are going to write about. Then you plan what you are going to write. This process is called pre-writing. Prewriting helps us to get our ideas on paper, though not usually in an organized form.

Some of the most common types of pre-writing techniques are: free writing, brainstorming, clustering.

Free writing involves jotting down on paper all of the ideas you have on a particular topic. You are not worried about complete sentences, proper spelling, or correct punctuation and grammar. Instead, you are interested in “dumping” all of the information you have on paper. You should write everything that comes into your head—even if it doesn’t necessarily make sense yet. Give yourself a set amount of time (maybe five to ten minutes), and write down everything that comes to mind about your topic.

Much like free writing, brainstorming involves capturing all of the thoughts, ideas, and fragments in your head and writing them down on paper. Often, brainstorming looks more like a list while free writing may look more like a paragraph. With either strategy, your goal is to get as many ideas down on paper as you can.

With clustering(mapping) technique, you start with a circle in the middle that contains your main idea and then you draw lines to other, smaller circles that contain sub-ideas or issues related to the main idea. Try to group like ideas together so as to organize yourself.

Note: After you have gathered plenty of ideas, choose which ideas are the most interesting and which are the most relevant to your topic. Cross out the sentences or parts of sentences, cross out circles in a map that aren’t related.