Skills: Advanced Descriptive Techniques

Inventing Characters Read! Journal Word Notebook

Choosing Titles The Fab Four Golden Rules Generating Ideas Stealing Ideas From an Idea to a Plan Planning from a Picture Stories Based on a Passage Stories Based on a Sentence An Example of Good Planning

Describing a Location Longer descriptions Describing a character's appearance Dialogue Distinctive Voices Show, Don't Tell Characterisation: Shown Feelings More Characterisation Techniques Playing with Sentences Playscripts Action Suspense

What is story structure? 1 Exciting opening line 2 Set the scene 3 Talking and describing character 4 Characterisation 5 Suspense 6 Action 7 Cliffhanger Standing Out: How can you stand out from the crowd? Clever Clogs: Non-Linear Clever-clogs: Two perspectives Clever-clogs: Narrative voice Practice 11+ exam titles

Checking your story in an exam Redrafting = improving your story What if I run out of time in an exam? The Grumpy Examiner's Pet Hates

Year 2 into 3 Lemony Snicket After Harry Potter Must-Read Authors Spy Novels Horror Stories Classics Animal Stories Adventure Historical Fiction Myths & Legends Fantasy Family Stories & Comedies

Colour makes a location come alive. But do try and go beyond ‘Dracula’s red cloak’ or ‘black walls’. Why not use similes to help those colours come alive? Count Dracula’s ‘red’ cloak can be described as the colour of spilt blood (Yuck!).

You should also think about adding adjectives to describe the colour. Dracula’s ‘black’ walls can be a gloomy black, darkest black, night black, etc.

Think about the weather, time of day and the season. That cottage in the middle of the woods looks very different at midnight on a misty evening in December than it will at midday during the summer holidays!

Bad descriptions often read like you are staring at a photograph, or a painting; good descriptions are like watching a film.

Look out of your window. What can you see moving? Cars? A bird? A piece of litter carried on the breeze? Write a list of anything and everything you can see moving.

Now for something a little trickier. Look around your bedroom. What is moving here? You’ll have to focus. Is your bedside clock ticking along? Is a LED flickering on your Xbox? And is that an ant scuttling along your windowsill?

The best descriptions ‘zoom in’ like a camcorder. You wouldn’t want to watch an entire movie filmed from a camera miles from the action, would you? No, you want the camera to ‘zoom in’ on the action. You can do this in your descriptions! Imagine a ‘big tree’; in your imagination, zoom in on the caterpillar crawling across the crinkled autumn leaves. Then describe the scarlet spots on the caterpillar’s back.

Zoom in, and keep on zooming until you find an unusual or interesting image.

Hint: Victorian writers loved to spend absolutely ages describing locations. The great Victorian author Anthony Trollope once spent ten whole pages describing a garden! Ten! You simply won’t have time or space to do that in an exam.

You need to describe your location in five or six lines. Pick the most important part of the location, and then use our descriptive skills to bring it to life.

Last updated on August 13, 2007