This is an exercise I wrote for Ursula K. Le Guin’s Steering the Craft: A 21st-Century Guide to Sailing the Sea of Story (not sponsored). I record myself reading it on my YouTube channel here.
I highly recommend reading craft books *and doing the exercises!* to help your writing.
Exercise One: Being Gorgeous. Part One: Write a paragraph to a page of narrative that’s meant to be read aloud. Use onomatopoeia, alliteration, repetition, rhythmic effects, made-up words or names, dialect – any kind of sound effect you like – but NOT rhyme or meter. (pg 8)
Yellows and Reds
Sunlight filters through the canopy of yellows and reds, greens and browns. Golden touches of warmth upon aging little leaves.
Trees bid farewell to their sweet summer stems as gusts of wind snatch their harvest and fill the sky with yellows and reds, greens and browns.
Leaves skitter, skip, swoosh, and slide over cooling green blades, forming for the earth a patchwork of yellows and reds, greens and browns.
Gray shadows spread long and distorted over the fallen yellows and reds, greens and browns.
Soon silver puffs of freezing fury will bury the yellows and reds, greens and browns and mute the world to gray.
The trees will bow with the weight of white, while weeping for their waning ones. Embracing the bitterness of sorrow, mourning for all that is lost. Raging against this frozen force. Crumbling beneath its inevitable strike. Until…
Sunlight filters through the canopy of white. Golden touches of warmth upon struggling little saplings.
Trees bid welcome to their sweet summer stems as gusts of wind kiss the blossoms and fill the sky with yellows and reds, greens and browns.
I love this! The repetition is much more powerful than I thought it would be. It’s like a tiny new companion that takes my hand and innocently shares the wonders of the changing season. I can hear the leaves crunch like cornflakes under my feet, then hear how silent they’ve become when soaked. Bravo!
I love the alliteration, but also your use of color, like a great patchwork, Fall as a coverlet. Fall as an exuberant guest, welcome for the sigh of relief from the heat, but sometimes over-excited and chilly. Your description provides the warm blanket as proof against the extremes of this guest, yet also enhances his music and his art.