From the Archives: Five 2 Word Exercises for Practicing Seeing as a Literary Artist in the Airport (or the Mall or the Train Station or the University Campus or the Car Wash, etc.)

This blog posts on Mondays. As of 2019 the second Monday of the month is devoted to my workshop students and anyone else interested in creative writing. You can find my workshop schedule and many more resources for writers on my workshop page.

We have a ways to go still, but the end of the corona virus shut-down is on the horizon! In that out-and-about spirit, here is a post with some of my favorite writing exercises for making good use of your time in airports, train stations, and more.

Five 2 Word Exercises for
Practicing Seeing as a Literary Artist
in the Airport (or the Mall or the Train Station
or the University Campus or the Car Wash, etc.)

Originally posted on Madam Mayo blog, October 10, 2016

Wherever there be a parade of people, there’s an opportunity for a writerly exercise. This is a quick and easy one, or rather, five. The idea is to look– using your artist’s eye, really look at individuals and come up with two words (or 3 or 4 or 7) to describe them.

Yep, it is that easy.

It helps to write the words down, but just saying them silently to yourself is fine, too. The point is to train your brain to pay attention to detail and generate original descriptions. This helps your writing reach beyond stereotypes (e.g., she was a short Asian woman or, he was a tall black man, or she was a blonde— and other such staples of workshop manuscripts) and so offer your reader something more original, more memorable, and definitively more vivid. “The vivid dream,” that’s what it’s all about.

So, there you are in the airport and, as some random person walks by:

1. Come up with one word to describe the shape of this person’s hair; a second word (or two) for the color of his or her shoes, naming a food item of that same color. For example:

knife-like; chocolate pudding

Now I have the raw material to string together a brief but extra-vivid description, for example:

She wore a knife-like bob and slippers the color of chocolate pudding

Again, find one word for the shape of the hair, and one word for the color of the shoes, referring to a food item.

curve; pork sausages

His head was a curve of curls and he wore pinkish clogs, a pink that made me think of pork sausages

sumptuous; cinnamon candy

She had a sumptuous Afro and sandals the red of cinnamon candy

stubbly; skinned trout

He had stubbly hair and tennis shoes the beige-white of skinned trout.

(Is “stubbly” a shape? Oh well! Don’t tell anybody.)

By the way, it doesn’t matter if the words you come up with are any good or even apt; the point is to practice coming up with them. (Why the color of a food item for the color of the shoes? Welllll, why not? Make it the color of some sand or rock, whydoncha.)

2. Is this person carrying anything? If so, describe it with one adjective plus one noun, e.g.:

fat purse

She carried a fat purse

lumpy briefcase

He leaned slightly to the left from the weight of a lumpy briefcase

crumpled bag

She clutched a crumpled bag

Dixie cup

On his palm he balanced a Dixie cup

3. Gait and gaze

loping; fixed to the ground

He had a loping gait, eyes fixed to the ground

shuffling; bright

She had a shuffling gait but bright eyes

brisk; dreamy

Her walk was brisk, her gaze dreamy.

tiptoe; squinting

She seemed to tiptoe, she was squinting at the monitor

4. Age range

older than 10, younger than 14

perhaps older than 20

I would believe 112

obviously in her seventies, never mind the taut smile

5. Jewelry? Tattoos?

a gold watch; a silver skull ring

feather earrings; a toe ring

eyebrow stud; hoop earrings

a wedding band on the wrong finger; an elephant hair bracelet

a tattoo of a bracelet

When you sit down to write you certainly do not need to use all this detail; again, the point is to generate it in the first place.

(How then to select detail and discard clutter? That would be a separate blog post. See On Respecting the Integrity of Narrative Design: The Interior Decoration Analogy.)

So with the benefit of this wild mélange, here’s what I came up with for a fictional character:

She wore a knife-like bob and slippers the color of chocolate pudding. She carried a fat purse. Her walk was brisk, her gaze dreamy. Perhaps she was older than twenty. She had a wedding band on the wrong finger and an elephant hair bracelet.

Hmmm, maybe that’s the opening for a story. Or something.

By the way, if you’re stuck standing around in an airport, or some such place / situation, these little exercises, silly as they may seem, are better for your writing game than ye olde pulling out the smartphone. The former trains your brain to do what a writer naturally does. Scrolling and clicking gives you the shallows, and so makes writing increasingly difficult.