Thursday, November 06, 2008

A wild and wooly gallop

Challenge: to use as many descriptive words as possible. Play with them. Don't edit. Let the words flow.

While writing books will admonish you not to prop up weak nouns and verbs with modifiers -- eg, don't "walk quickly": stride, jog, prance, gallop, march, pace ... -- modifiers can bring life to a concrete noun. Hair is just hair, but "a white poof of lamb's wool that rested atop his head" is an image (and 9 more words for NaNoers ;-)

Try the exercise on some mundane words and see if you can paint a picture. (And a picture is worth a thousand words!) Feel free to use any words you want, but here's a sample to choose one or two from if you'd like to get started writing rather than thinking up words.

spaghetti
cat
cavern
path
candle
tattoo
truck
blanket

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