During my Freshman year of college, I was sitting in my first creative writing class when the professor told us to pull out our pencils and notebooks. (Because it was 1996, and we still kicked it old-school back then. Yes, I’m old. Ish.) He told us to look at the clock on the wall above the chalkboard. (Old, remember?) It was a standard classroom clock, the kind that had been hanging in every classroom in which I’d been taught since kindergarten. Black rim, white face, black numbers and minute marks, black hands with a red second hand that tick, tick, ticked. Nothing remarkable about it. But he wanted us to list 100 things about it. One hundred ways to describe a standard classroom clock we’d all seen a thousand times.

It was an exercise in observation, and it was a good one. It taught us to look beyond the obvious and get down to the nitty gritty details. It was also woefully incomplete, at least for any writer hoping to remove beyond Creative Writing 101. Why? Because it isn’t enough to know how to describe your clock. You have to know what makes your clock tick.

Writers describe clocks all the time. Their characters are clocks who are wearing clocks, living in clocks within clocks, interacting with clocks, desiring clocks, and hiding from clocks. A clock can be anything. It’s a character, clothing, setting, world, relationship, desire, goal, complication, or one of a million other things. And the writer knows everything there is to know about it. (Or at least enough to make it seem that way.) Writers can describe clocks for thousands of pages — but if they do, they’ll never get around to telling the story.

It isn’t enough to know how to describe your clock. You have to know what makes your clock tick.

They have to know what makes the clock tick. They have to know how to separate the significant from the insignificant.

Time for a writing exercise.

1. List 100 descriptors for this clock. Yes, you’re going to have to get down to the nitty gritty details. That’s the point.

2. Decide what you’d really want to convey about this clock to someone who has never seen it – or maybe even any clock at all.

3. Determine which descriptors convey that message. Hint: It won’t be all of them. That’s the point.

Master that, and you’ve mastered the clock.

~Melanie