The Detail Game

This idea came from Peter Elbow and Pat Belanoff's Community of Writers, and I've used it in developmental writing classes elsewhere and in CSU's CO150 class to get people used to class participation and utilizing descriptive detail.  It's fun and always gets everybody involved -- the wilder the class gets with their ideas, the better.  It gets them to look at an object and practice using descriptive detail -- stress the five senses -- to reveal something about the object to the audience.  You bring in an object from home, the odder the better, and have them come up with as much description as they can about it -- you can often have them launch into narrative by beginning to build a story around it.

Setting Up the Detail Game

Pick an object from home that's somewhat unusual to draw their attention and to get them observing and describing creatively. (The best object I ever brought in was a green plaster mold of someone's very crooked teeth, but I was lucky enough to have a roommate with a large stock of odd objects like this).  Start passing it around and, going from person to person, have each say one thing that describes the object.  At first you'll get boring things like the object's color and its size, so stress the idea of the five senses: what does it feel like if you touch it?  Does it have a smell?  Taste?  Sound?  As you get to the middle of the class, ask someone to put the object somewhere to establish the idea of setting.  What's it doing there?  Or maybe think about who the object belongs to, and build from there.  In a class of VERY reluctant writers, those green teeth produced a great story about a poor woman who was battered by her nasty husband and decided to burn down the house and run away to a swamp to hide.  Let them have fun with it and they'll probably surprise themselves with what they come up with, especially as they often begin to try to top one another with the weirdness of their contribution.