Segueing descriptive writing

Currently, I am working with Year 8s creating their own ghost or gothic horror story and again it has flagged a problem students have with descriptions of settings. Here's a typical example. 

Moonlight stared down on the street.  A path stretched ahead winding its way. Amongst the houses there was an empty corner. Empty apart from one figure.  The lamppost stood frozen stiff, thin and alone. A cat walked along the path. The house stared back with eyes so red.

Typically, students list everything and a setting becomes a visual description of item and object that is in the location. Now this alone isn't a major problem, if students effectively transition between the items effectively. Yet, many don't. For ghost stories, students describe everything that could be possibly creepy in a setting. Oh, if you are unlucky they will use the adjectives 'eerie', 'creepy' and 'mysterious' next to each object in the setting. They chuck everything at the reader with the hope that readers will be creeped out. 

This week the class have been rewriting their settings because they sat in the category of chuck everything at the reader. Prior to this lesson, we had been looking at atmosphere and how atmosphere is created implicitly rather than explicitly in writing. Along the way, I have distinguished horror writing from ghost stories simply by saying 'ah' and 'ooooh'. Added to this we've distinguished the structure of ghost story writing as 'oooh', then 'ooooooh' and finally 'oooooohhh?'. Or simply put as 'strange, stranger, strangest'. A simple way to get students to see that ghost stories are not about outright scaring, but a series of odd occurrences that build up.

With the Year 8 class, I broke down the original description to starting point, middle point and end point. 

Moonlight stared down on the street. 

The lamppost stood frozen stiff, thin and alone. 

The house stared back with eyes so red.

Then as a class we spent time looking at how we could transition between moonlight and lamppost and then lamppost to house. In our discussions we talked about music and segueing between one track and another and how DJs (get me down with the kids) segue between tracks by picking a similar beat or drip feeding one track on to another and fading the other one out.  

Moonlight stared down on the street.

It was looking, gazing, focusing on one thing. 

A lamppost. 

A solitary lamppost. 

The rest of the world was hidden under a blanket of oozing and spreading ink. 

The lamppost stood frozen stiff, thin and alone. 

Its meagre light battled against the majestic power of the moon, yet the oozing darkness held it back. 

Soft rays of light sheepishly slithered away from the post, defeated. 

Amongst blades of wet, cold grass the rays snaked and twisted until it hit something large and unmoveable. 

The house stared back with eyes so red.

  
The group and I attempted to polish it and look at paragraphing it. 


Moonlight silently stared down on the street. It was looking, gazing, focusing on one thing.

A lamppost.

A solitary lamppost. Like a lost child. Like an abandoned toy. Like a forgotten bag.

The rest of the world was hidden under a blanket of oozing and spreading ink.  
Empty blackness.

The lamppost stood frozen stiff, thin and alone. Its meagre light battled against the majestic power of the moon, yet the oozing darkness held it back. Soft rays of light sheepishly slithered away from the post, defeated. Amongst blades of wet, cold grass the rays snaked and twisted until it hit something large and unmoveable.
The house stared back with eyes so red. 



The group noticed that the transitioning between objects generated the most interesting writing for them. It was where the sparks of creativity came. The problem solving element of writing. How do we connect moonlight and a lamppost? How do we connect a lamppost to a house? As you can imagine, it sparked quite a bit of discussion and exploration. Some jumped the gun and tried to get a monster in at each stage, which we had them to rethink. We want 'ooh' not 'ahh', Tom.

Then, the group had a go at one of their own using the following points: 

The candle flickered in the wind. 

A pale bedsheet covered a sleeping form. 

The darkness under the bed opened its mouth. 

Here's one that the class created: 

The candle flickered in the wind.

Light danced across the room, like a graceful and slight young girl. 

It pirouetted across the floor amongst the unrecognisable objects

Often it skipped  and jumped over the larger objects and cast a shadow instead.

As the light dance in the wind, it briefly decided to use the bed, in the middle of the room, as it’s dancefloor.

A pale bedsheet covered a sleeping form.

Unaware of the flickering light.

Snuggled away from the light, the figure created their own cave of darkness.

Briefly, ever so briefly, the light tickled the figure’s face as it danced.

Still the figure slept. Still. Unaware.

The darkness under the bed opened its mouth.

The great thing about this approach, for me, was that it forced the students to be imaginative in filling the gaps and segueing from one object to another. The segueing created most of the atmosphere and automatically interesting choices of words and technqiues. The start, middle and end were just tentpoles for the larger thing. This is certainly something I am going to use with Year 11 for Question 5. 

Now it is your turn. How would you transistion between these three things? What would you put in the gaps? Answers on a postcard or Tweet. 

The trees swayed in the breeze.

The path snaked amongst the trees.

Amongst the natural sounds of the forest, I heard a branch snap. 

Thanks for reading, 

Xris