This is one of the possible [[assignments for fiction]] you can choose. *(Potentially T1: Writing; T2: Reading; T3: Language)* **Start out by describing the heck out of something.** Something big, something small; doesn’t matter. Just really *see* it in your mind, really *feel* it, and then let ’er rip. Just pour out the words. Keep it going. Make a multidimensional model of it for us out of words. Think you’re done? Go back and zoom in afresh on a different part. Why? Just because it’s fun and good exercise. But also, you might get lucky. Maybe your intimate, expansive, exploratory description will lead you somewhere, possibly somewhere unexpected. What’s the point? And by point, I mean the “period.” We don’t always use “descriptive imagery” just to prove that we can or to be “more creative.” Sometimes it builds up to something. [Here is a great example](https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-eng-101-college-writing-i/chapter/frederick-douglass-ash-cake-and-the-rich-man/). Douglass’s lavish description of the opulence of “the great house” keeps piling on the layers, until we are fairly buried in rich detail. And then what happens? What is he building up to? That [[structure in fiction|expertly crafted structure]] reminds me of [Mark Forsyth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elements_of_Eloquence)’s description of periodic sentences: > The little dot at the end of a sentence is either called a full stop or, if you’re of the American persuasion, a period. In fact, Americans rather like saying the word *period* aloud in order to add emphasis, as in, “You can’t do that, period!,” or, “We’ll wait a certain amount of time, period!” This all goes back to the notion of a period as a complete cycle of time, and thus a complete, or periodic, sentence. > The period is one of the most complicated and convoluted concepts of classical rhetoric. Nobody in the ancient world could quite decide what it meant, but they were united in the belief that it was terribly, terribly important. Fortunately, in English we tend to take a much more limited view and the periodic sentence is simply a very big sentence that is not complete until the end. > Now you might think that no sentence is complete until the end, but you’d be wrong. That last sentence *could* have finished at the comma, the *but you’d be wrong* was not grammatically necessary. In fact, if you’d got bored halfway through, you could have put this book down and gone off to make a cup of tea with no syntactic shadow hanging over you. The same cannot be said of Rudyard Kipling’s poem “[If](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46473/if---).”