Challenge 371

[romanajo123]

It’s official: the dog days of summer. 

For this challenge, describe your characters trying to beat the heat.  Bonus! Tru using imagery if you can, not just that the reader can visualize it but use all the senses. 

Comments

[shivver]

This reminds me of this writing workshop I went to at Gallifrey One, back in 2015 I think. It was given by a successful published author who attends the con every year. I'd just started writing fanfic and was trying to learn how to write, so I jumped on it, expecting that it was going to focus on how to write for DW and sci-fi (since we were at a DW con, after all).

Well, I was wrong. Note that this was a workshop that was supposed to run for two hours and didn't specify how much experience you should have (beginner or whatever). It turned out to be the basics of writing. She talked for an hour on "show don't tell", use all your senses, write actively - you know, all the stuff that you'd cover in the first three-month creative writing course at a community college... but in an hour. I was a beginning writer at that point and already knew all this stuff, just from googling "how to write".

Then she spent another fifteen minutes telling about how to go about getting published (remember, to a group of people she'd just spent an hour teaching the *basics* of writing to), then told us to spend half an hour writing a scene (I don't remember the prompt) where we focus on describing using all of the senses.

(I will honestly admit that I got very little done in that half an hour, because it just didn't make sense for the prompt, whatever it was, to focus on sensory description.)

Then, when we were done, she had all of us read what we wrote out loud. (Luckily, she got to me last and we ran out of time, so I didn't have to read mine! :P ) And wow, talking about purple prose, that was blindingly violet. But that's what she told the class to do, to painstakingly describe all the senses. I remember one person spending an entire paragraph describing the scent of the cleaning liquids in the janitor's cart. :P

That was such a waste of two hours that I could have spent better anywhere else in the con. Anyway, yes, it's good to use all the senses in description, but only when appropriate and don't overdo it. :)