JC
When DJing, Andy C puts his whole heart into creating the most mind-blowing mixes. You should take the same approach to your creative writing. When you pack your prose with personality and passion, your writing hits way harder!
- MUSIC FOCUS: Andy C
- ACTIVITY FOCUS: Write a descriptive piece.
ACTIVITY 1
Read the short piece of descriptive writing inspired by the picture above:
The DJ
Sempiternal clouds, the colour of spider’s eyes, make any glimpse of Heaven impossible. It might as well not even exist. There’s no escaping Earth. Not tonight. As sticky as honey, the obsidian air clings to us. The hot blackness gulps. Sweating, we pray for a breeze.
Thud.
The noise arrives like an assassin. We hold our breath.
Thud.
The lasers strike.
Thud.
We start to dance in the fuchsia hail.
Thud.
A thousand hands reach upwards, needle-thin pink light zaps the surface of this arcane planet and the boom of hyperactive drum ‘n’ bass music turns the world inside out.
Fevered, we stare up at the sky. Like spaceships, the clouds are shifting. The coruscating, auroral moonlight makes us all gasp. Gates wide open, there it is. Where it’s always been. Heaven.
ACTIVITY 2
Write your own description inspired by one of the pictures below (or a picture of your own choice – you might want to choose an image that’s relevant to your own interests). If you choose the first picture below, you’ll find it is very similar to the photo we described above. You can borrow some of our ideas, just tweaking them so that they suit this new picture – or write something completely new.
You might want to follow our pattern of describing:
- The scene preceding the moment highlighted in the picture – what you imagine could have been going on just before the picture was taken.
- The middle part of your writing can then focus on the main picture.
- The last parts of your description can then focus on the aftermath – the scene you imagine might follow what you see in the picture.
When thinking about each of the 3 sections above, it might also help to impose a clear structure like this:
- Describe life in a negative way. Maybe you create a sense of things being dangerous or the feeling of people being trapped.
- The main event – as suggested by the picture – arrives. The positivity of this moment feels much more impactful as a result of the way it contrasts your opening.
- Finish with the aftermath. Use images that you used in your opening to create that sense of a cyclical structure, but tweak the images so they now feel positive rather than negative. Overall, you will have created a sense of journeying from bad to good, from sad to happy, from trapped to free etc.
Things you can always describe:
- weather
- sounds
- smells
- colour
You will certainly want to focus on these language and structural techniques:
- Cyclical structure – create that feeling of journey from start to finish e.g. from bad to good, from sad to happy, from trapped to free etc.
- Short, high-impact paragraphs
- Colour
- Varied sentence lengths – try shortening them like we have here to create a sense of increasing tension, excitement etc.
- Foregrounding different word types (interesting sentence starters)
- Imaginative similes, metaphors, personification etc.
- Ambitious vocabulary (see also sentence starters in green and colour words in yellow)
- fevered: excessive nervous energy
- sempiternal: eternal and unchanging; everlasting.
- arcane: mysterious, esoteric, and obscure, suggesting hidden or secret knowledge.
- auroral: adjective. of or like the dawn. (Often used in scientific context, but surely works as a creative descriptor too!).
- coruscate: verb. (of light) flash or sparkle. “The light was coruscating through the walls.“ “The sunlight coruscating on the surface of the water mesmerised her.”
- fuchsia: a bright purplish-red colour.
- hyperactive: unusually/extremely active
