Writing challenge: The Devil is in the details

Your challenge this week is to practice your powers of observation. Take any person, place, or event, and write three paragraphs describing your subject in great detail. Here are three scenes to get you thinking — feel welcome to choose one or more of these scenes and riff off of it, or create your own:

This is what I came up with. You can join in here.

2. A boy plays in his front yard. You have three paragraphs to help us imagine this boy. What country are we in? Which details help communicate this? Is there an elm tree or an olive tree in his yard? Maybe there is no tree at all. How old is this boy? What color is his hair? What is he wearing? You get the idea.

The little boy is playing in the front yard. His name is Dennis. Dennis is 10 and has a short buzz cut haircut, with a cowlick piece of hair, right in the middle of his head that won’t lay flat for anything. He is wearing thick black glasses with a piece of tape in the middle because he breaks them once a week. He has on blue jeans, with holes in the knees and dirty knees. He has on a plaid button down shirt, and dirty red shoes, that used to be white, but the red dirt stained them.

He lives in Oklahoma and his front yard has a big oak tree in the middle, that shades almost the whole yard. The roots are all over the ground, which makes it hard for Dennis to make his dirt roads to push his toy cars all around. Dirts roads weave around the tree and the front yard.

The cars are big plastic cars and maybe a dump truck or two, filled with the red dirt, dripping over the sides. He sits there and pushes the truck full of dirt over to another truck, sitting on the side of his plowed road. Making the roaring sound of the truck with his mouth and lifts up the truck bed and dumps the red dirt over the other truck. Then he has his GI Joe doll run around the truck and yells “Hey, what are you doing?”  He sits there for hours playing in the dirt with his toy cars.