Descriptive Writing: Crafting Vivid, Immersive Scenes

More than mere window dressing, description is an essential aspect of any form of creative writing. It enlivens our stories and creates an immersive, “felt experience” for our readers. But many writers struggle with this important aspect of craft. How much description is too much? Or too little? How to write fresh, original, deeply sensory description that keeps our readers in our grip?

Carrying on from her previous class, Fast Flash Fiction: Writing Tiny, Beautiful Stories, Kathy Fish demystifies the process of description writing. Packed with concrete examples and practical advice, these ten video lessons provide you with tools for harnessing the power of the unexpected, thus creating striking and unique descriptions in your work.  

Throughout, Kathy will help you:

• Take a thoughtful, intentional approach to writing description.
• Incorporate sensory detail and the unexpected as a means of priming creativity.
• Identify automatic, overused, and unnecessary descriptions.
• Create a richly described, immersive scene or very short story. 

Plus, Kathy will provide you with excellent examples from published writing, including discussion points aimed at deepening your enjoyment and understanding of their notable descriptive aspects. 

This class is for writers of all levels who seek to sharpen their descriptive powers to enhance, enliven, and elevate their work. The skills acquired in this class may be applied again and again to creative writing of any form or length. 

Let’s get started!

• Introduction
• The Project
• Ways We Get Description Wrong
• Description Done Right
• Exercise #1: Inserting Sensory Detail
• Vivid Description vs. Flat Description
• Exercise #2: Inserting the Unexpected Detail
• Exercise #3: Interrogating Your Descriptive Word Choices
• Revising Your Scene or Very Short Story
• Recap: What Have We Learned?