My Homework

As part of our work on the anthology project, the mentors have agreed to do assignments along with the students. This is our first assignment: Your mission for this week is to craft a character word portrait using the powers of description and the details we talked about in our last session. The portrait should be at least a long paragraph with juicy, sensory details. Write descriptively and honestly.

My response is below. I would also be interested to see word portraits from other bloggers. I had fun with this because usually my posts are informative or have some kind of narrative, but this time I enjoyed focusing only on description.


Portrait: My Son Ben

Words work better than pictures if you want to depict a toddler. Some things about my son Ben are constant—his big blue eyes, his crooked home haircut—but mostly he’s a blur, made up of shifting verbs. He runs on the playground, shrieking happily. He solemnly eats chocolate chip cookies until his face and hands are smeared with chocolate. He stomps after the cats, and when we give him a time out for it, his face scrunches with anger and he shouts, “No! I don’t want a time out!” When we tell him he can’t go outside when he wants to, he cries—open-mouthed, red-faced crying that only lasts a few minutes. And he jumps—vigorous, two-footed jumping that makes the floor shake.

Describing him in words lets me move from setting to setting. How could I choose one? First, I can picture him at day care, sitting in a little seat at a low table, having toast for breakfast with all the other toddlers—then he’s running down the nature trails at Powder Valley, pausing only to pick up a stick or a bright leaf—then he’s at the mall play area, dashing over to give me a hug before going back to his games—and then he’s cuddled up under blankets in his crib with a book open on his lap, “reading” to his stuffed animals.

Next month I’ll take Ben to J.C. Penney's to get his holiday portraits done. I’m sure they’ll look nice, and I’ll put some in frames in the hallway—but when I pull the two-dimensional prints out of the envelope, I’ll know that there are many parts of him the camera couldn’t capture.