This started life as an entry in my journal. Some context is necessary if you aren't me or a student in Team Run DMC. That context is here. We're currently on Step 9.
It turns out I do not yet know how to teach the art of writing descriptions in fiction.
I planned today's lesson because I noticed a tendency for people to "tell, not show" in their stories. So I wanted students to take time to focus specifically on writing vivid descriptions of setting, character, and action in their stories.
Well, the impetus was unimpeachable. The execution wasn't so hot.
I started out (in the second class - the first class had been even worse and I won't go into it) with students highlighting the descriptions in their drafts in three colors: "descriptions of character" in yellow, "descriptions of setting" in orange, and "descriptions of action" in pink.
I then told students to look at what information they provided about each. This was the wrong move. I was conflating description with conveying information - which was an especially egregious mistake since the problem I'd noted in students' drafts was that they were doing too much "telling" (in other words, "conveying information") rather than "showing" (in other words, painting a picture in the reader's head).
Here's what I should have done:
First, students identify a "golden description" from their piece (or at least their favorite description, if they don't feel like any are "golden" yet). They give it a star.
Then, students, identify a description that feels a bit bland to them, and that they want to make more vivid. They draw a piece of white bread next to this.
Students share their "golden" and "bland" descriptions with there table, and the full group hears a few golden ones.
Now that this is done, the students take some time to analyze where each color appears in their text, and how much of each there is. I could break this into four specific questions:
- Which color is there most of at the beginning of your piece?
- Which color is there most of in the middle of your piece?
- Which color is there most of near the end of your piece?
- Which color is there the most of overall?
This could go in "Write Club" notebooks, but also would work as a graphic organizer, either on paper or as a googledoc.
After that, students could highlight descriptions in their "mentor text" science fiction short story the same way (which would mean they would all need to have a specific science fiction short story that they were using as a "mentor text", which would have also been a good idea!).
They then identify a "golden description" of character, one of setting, and one of action, in their mentor text, and share this with their table (it'd be good for people to write these on the whiteboard too. We haven't done enough graffiti discussion in a while).
Then they fill in the same four questions about their mentor text (these could be side-by-side on the graphic organizer):
- Which color is there most of at the beginning of your piece?
- Which color is there most of in the middle of your piece?
- Which color is there most of near the end of your piece?
- Which color is there the most of overall?
This analysis would be less critical than the identification of the "golden descriptions", and I wouldn't want to spend too long on it, but I think it would lead to some interesting insights and conjectures.
The key thing (and the part I often struggle with most) is to identify the characteristics of the "golden descriptions" that make them so effective. One question I've used in the past is "can the reader draw what you're describing, based on your description?" This is helpful for "showing, not telling", but less helpful for economical description using a single telling detail, and not at all helpful for metaphor and simile. It might be that what would be most helpful for this would be to start developing a taxonomy of "golden descriptions" over time. It might be that coming up with "categories" of descriptions is as helpful as coming up with "characteristics.
So I'm not sure how best to identify the characteristics of these descriptions in such a way that students can put those characteristics in their own work and then easily check to see whether their work has them. This is something that Ron Berger makes look easy, but which I continually struggle with.
However, students did this lesson and then just had time to work on making their descriptions more vivid based on the golden descriptions they identified in their mentor texts, it would be a huge step forward from what happened today!