Jan 21, 2013 / Topic Ideas

Writing Challenge: the Devil is in the Details

For some of us, blogging is personal. Others are trying to educate or entertain; many more are hybrids. Yet we’re all storytellers. Creative Writing Challenges help you to push your writing boundaries, show off your blogging chops, and, hopefully, spark more post ideas.

To participate, tag your post with DPchallenge or leave a link to it in the comments. (It would also be great if you could link to this post to encourage people to take part – the more the merrier!)  Your post should be specifically written in response to this challenge. We’ll keep an eye on the tag and highlight some of our favorite posts on Freshly Pressed on Friday.

No matter what you’re writing, whether it’s longform non-fiction essays, poems, short stories, novels, or memoirs, your powers of observation are critical to creating a scene in the reader’s mind, setting tone, and evoking the mood that helps to tell the story.

For example, you could write: “The dog ran across the street.” Every reader will picture a different dog and a different street in their mind. If you write: “The small, black, three-legged Chihuahua darted under a red Ford Focus and hopped across the wet cobblestone alley,” you create a more concrete picture in the reader’s mind. We can imagine a tiny dog, see it disappear briefly under a newer model red car, and follow it in our mind’s eye as it makes its way down the cobbles.

Let’s look at another example. You could write, “The man walked into a bar.” Or, you could describe the man more specifically as you imagine him in the scene, or document what you observe if the man is right before you: “The short, bearded man with red hair and Buddy Holly-style glasses strolled into the smoke-filled honky tonk and sat on an ancient wooden stool at the bar, the sound of peanut shells crunching under his boots.”

Each detail is like the stroke of a brush on blank canvas, filling in detail and completing the picture in the reader’s mind.

Your challenge this week is to practice your powers of observation. Take any person, place, or event, and write three paragraphs describing your subject in great detail. Here are three scenes to get you thinking — feel welcome to choose one or more of these scenes and riff off of it, or create your own:

1. A woman walks into a restaurant. Imagine this scene and capture every detail you can in a few paragraphs. Describe the woman: is she old, young, or in-between? What type of restaurant is it: fancy, casual, or a diner? What is she doing? Pack as much detail as you can into a few paragraphs that will help us imagine this woman clearly.

2. A boy plays in his front yard. You have three paragraphs to help us imagine this boy. What country are we in? Which details help communicate this? Is there an elm tree or an olive tree in his yard? Maybe there is no tree at all. How old is this boy? What color is his hair? What is he wearing? You get the idea.

3. Describe your writing space. Do you write on the couch? At the kitchen table? At a desk? In a restaurant? Describe your surroundings. What does it smell like? What is the light like in your space? What can you hear, feel, and see? You have three paragraphs to pull us into your space. Go.

As always, show your work: tag your post with DPchallenge.

Note that practicing observation is a great way to keep your imagination vivid and your descriptive powers sharp. You can choose any scene in the world and describe it in detail as a warm up to your writing projects. It’s a great way to bust writer’s block and ease into your writing goal for the day.

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  4. Reblogged this on Content Unknown and commented:
    Well this sounds interesting….

    I spent a lot of time reading up on how to improve academic writing before I started writing my thesis. It seemed that quite a few sources extolled the virtues of writing beyond the bounds of the academic arena (particularly in the form of free writing). I tried free-writing for a while, but the idea of fiction writing has long been of interest to me. I was therefore very intrigued by the following post I just stumbled across; designed to help people develop “the art and craft of blogging”. So for anyone who has an interest in developing their writing (of any variety) and a few minutes to spare for the cause why not read the following blog (see below) and give this short fun writing challenge a try. I will post my response to the writing challenge at a more humane time tomorrow.

    Best,
    R

    https://wordpress.com/dailypost/2013/01/21/writing-challenge-details/

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    1. Hi @sandraconner — all posts here on the Daily Post have comments set to close automatically two weeks after publication. Did you see a post that closed before then?

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      1. Yes, the post that went up dated January 20th said “Comments Closed” on the evening of the 20th when I went to post a link. I don’t usually have much time to take part in these challenges, but I wanted to start participating as much as possible, and that was the first one I’d done. It could be that it was a fluke, and that all the others have stayed open. I admit I just decided to put my attention elsewhere when I saw that it was closed so soon. I thought perhaps I’d misunderstood. But then I saw the invitation to post links again in the new challenge yesterday, and that’s when I commented about it. But if that’s not the norm, then I’ll try again another time.

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      4. instead of commenting here with your links, try putting a link to the challenge on your blog posting. this creates a ping back that works even when comments are closed. hope this helps.

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  30. Writing itself demands great attention to detail that I believe it is an exercise reserved for those who can be mindful of so many things. Let’s set aside the things, the people, the atmosphere, the activities or lack thereof that you want to write about and think about how many things you have to worry about already just writing — your tenses, the nuances attached to your choice of words, the transition and flow, subject-verb agreement, spelling, punctuation, etc.

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