Today, in Creative Writing Camp, we focused on writing vivid descriptions, blocking, and internal reactions. Then we combined them all into different writing exercises and scenes. The big idea here is every word should do multiple jobs. If you describe something, there should be a reason it’s described and that description should tell you more about the character, their state of mind, the world they live in, and the emotional tone you’re trying to hit all at the same time. We use the pyramid of abstraction as our foundation for this exercise.

After lunch, the students did some people watching and wrote descriptions from the perspectives of different characters before breaking up into their workshop groups. Click on the slideshow to follow along!