- Describe a barn from the perspective of a man whose son has just died in a war. Do not mention the son, the war, death, or the man.
The barn creaked in the vicious winter morning. Its timber beams groaned, grief stricken from the pain of carrying the load of the roof but its howls masked under the cloak of a wind gust. The animals had risen, roaming the fields just before sunrise and the hay they’d left had scattered like shrapnel across the earthy floor. The smallest foal, born with jet black fear in his eyes, had begun the morning slowly, rubbing up against the bones of the barn, sensing a change in the mood. It had been a damp night and the wound in the roof – which would likely never be fixed now – had leaked rain water transforming the barn’s musk into a tang of rust, like the metallic smell of blood.
Truth be told I’ve not read The Art of Fiction and this exercise was taken from the brilliant WriteWorld site. I loved this activity. As a writer I probably don’t spend enough time thinking about and writing about a setting and this exercise was a really worthwhile activity to practise a concurrency between setting and mood.