Painting a picture with our words involves choosing strong words that help the reader see what is going on in the story. We want to show what is actually happening. For example, instead of writing she was frightened, you can write: she froze in her tracks, looked slowly behind her, wiped the sweat from her brow, and tensed her legs ready to spring away. Instead of He was shy, you could use phrases like peeking around the corner, with head down, glancing sideways, in the background, etc.
In class we rewrote several bland sentences, and made them more interesting by adding verbs that showed us what is going on. Then we used photographs to help us start a story, we used the person in the picture to create a character. We tried to imagine the situation around that person and his/her place within it. What is s/he thinking about? What does s/he care about? What are the immediate issues or problems in this persons life? What concerns are driving him/her? This activity helped us to dive in with descriptive words and showing what is going on to our readers.
The homework is to find photographs, magazine pictures, newspaper articles to use as story starters; using the questions from class to help develop a well rounded, believable characters. These story starters should show the reader the picture the story is based of through the writers words.
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