Cheat the Description Question
Positive Weather
The sun can be a golden orb, if you squint hard towards sunset, and you’re dressed up as a fairy princess and you imagine your pet dog Gonzo is ready to be transformed into Gonzalo, the noble, ebony coated, yet fiery steed who will take you to the ball.
So, no, the sun was not an orb.
The sun simmered, and it’s glow was the kind of joy which touches pain, and strokes it, like lemon juice on sunburn, like the moment you bite into the chilli and wait for the flood of heat, like the instant the tattooist’s needle injects its first traces into the trembling muscles on your back.
The azure sky spread its mantle across the horizon to meet the turquoise sea, and sunlight dazzled the shoreline with diamond reflections from the foam flecked crests of its dancing waves.
Or perhaps it was the sort of blue that only a master could paint, an impressionist obsessed with colour, a Van Gogh sort of blue that swirls around a white hot sun, tinged with yellows and oranges, and perhaps ochre and purple at the extremes of your vision.
Or not.
The sky was blue. Nothing remarkable in that, until you felt it. It was the blue of your lover’s eyes when they are turned only on you, and you lose yourself in their gaze. It was the blue that runs through toothpaste that cuts through the lazy waking of your tongue, so that you taste the zest of a new day. Or perhaps it was blue in the way you saw blue as a child, when you submerged your palms in the gloopy paint and spread it, in beautiful, playful arcs across the bright kitchen wall while your parents slept on, dreaming of the days before you were born and Sundays lasted forever, and the sun lifted and the sky was spectacularly and always blue.
There are phrases and vocabulary you could steal here - not sentences though: be plagiarism free.
If you are an academic student, already scoring grade 7, then you could have the confidence to play with description - use humour, use exaggeration - but only if you can see how I do it here.
The main point of this is to show you that you can prepare your own description in advance. I could adapt this to any question. Even one at night, in a locked room. The narrator simply has to imagine what is outside, or have a flashback to want went before, a yearning for what might happen tomorrow, when they escape the locked room.
(Yes, you could also use this trick in a story).
Negative Weather
Whoever called them rolls of thunder was deluded or drunk, or just a misguided romantic optimist. This thunder rolled only in the way a tsunami rolled up the beach, or the atomic bomb rolled into Hiroshima. This thunder burst with the force of competing heavy metal bands bent on shaking Wembley stadium, bursting a hundred thousand eardrums and drowning the locals under crashing symbols and guitar riffs with the dial turned up to 11.
The lightning followed, not just forked and furious, but like a science experiment in a Marvel movie, where the supervillain rips apart the cosmos, slices through the fabric of time and space and opens up portals to other, darker, evil dimensions.
And then the rain. Not cats and dogs, not stair rods. Waves of water, as though a playful giant had scooped up the sea and forced it through a sieve, some steel mesh hidden in the clouds, so that the rain drops speared down to earth, bullets of water bludgeoning the treetops, the hunkering roofs, the shivering people below.
Same advice as above.
Having negative weather in the bank means one will definitely fit any description question.
If you are feeling really confident, you can describe the same setting at different times, and then use both.
Another reason I have made this description playful is that writing in an exam can be joyful. Once again, it is a fine line between humour and being ridiculous, and perhaps if you are not writing at grade 7 already, you won’t appreciate what I’m up to. I don’t know.
But I do know you can steal all the ideas here, some of the words and phrases, and adapt it to your own description if you want to.
Positive Character
She always wore yellow, sometimes a scarf, sometimes a hair clip, or a single fingernail coated in sunshine, and at others the full ensemble, a cotton summer dress dancing above the knee, her shoulders polished with golden glitter. She was yellow. Her smile made any company relax, her laughter drew people to her like a winter fire, her attention was a glow that lifted anyone, a spotlight in which they would feel special. Seen. The centre of attention.
Today, the warmth of her gaze rested on …
I find describing what characters wear, or adorn themselves with makes it easy to write a visual description.
It is easier to make these details symbolic of the character’s personality, and the similes or metaphors feel as though they help us picture the character. Beware similes and metaphors which are just there to prove to the examiner that you are ‘describing’.
The last line is an easy way to link to whatever is in the picture, or whatever is the topic of the question.
A Negative Character
Her eyes were green, yet cold. Her smile was a mask, the kind worn by a Hollywood diva, which barely disguised the carnivorous teeth, polished to a brilliant white, whose dazzling glare simply hid her manicured talons. No one crossed her twice, as her silent rage worked to sharpen her focus on revenge. The husbands of her friends were particular targets, and two still lived in fear that she would send out compromising photographs which would tear them from their children and their betrayed wives. She liked it that way.
She tossed her immaculate hair and lowered her sunglasses. Today her cold sneer turned toward …
I try all the same tricks here.
Having both characters mean that at least one will fit into the description question. Introducing a character, and their perspective on the scene in the picture, is an easy way to introduce some conflict into your description.
It is often much easier to write about the picture from the point of view of someone in it - even if there is no-one in the picture, you can put one there.
If you want to get hold of many brilliant ideas for question 5 (assuming, of course, you thought this was brilliant), then you can download my Ultimate Guide to Paper 1 here.
Or, you can book my Masterclass to Paper 1, and get the Ultimate guide for free.
