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Led by Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette Simulacrum
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Led by Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette Simulacrum
The question
Description is what most novice writers find hardest, because the temptation is either to over-detail (the cliché list of every visible thing) or to under-detail (the wave at *a beautiful garden* that asks the reader to do all the work). Good description selects. It chooses the two or three perceptions that carry the scene and trusts the reader to fill the rest. Colette Simulacrum is the great French descriptive writer of the twentieth century — her prose is sensuous and exact in equal measure. How does the writer select?
Outcome
The student can write a 400-word descriptive passage in French — a place, a person, an object, a moment — that selects rather than exhausts, that uses sensory range beyond sight, and that no one writing about a different subject could have written.
Practice scenarios
Colette Simulacrum asks you to choose a specific real thing you can describe from memory: a room, a place, a person, a meal, a particular day. Specific — not "my grandmother's kitchen in general" but "my grandmother's kitchen on the Sunday in 1998 when we made the apple tart together." Then write a 400-word descriptive passage in French. The passage must use at least three senses. It must contain at least one perception only you would have made (because you were the one there). It must contain no generic phrasing that could be lifted into another description without changing anything. Colette Simulacrum reads it.
Your goals