Recently I let you know that I started an Instagram account in March (click here to see the announcement and a couple of my reels). If you’d like to follow me on Instagram, click here to be taken to my account @jessicabaverstock.
I love literary games and I love practicing describing things (got to keep those writing muscles sharp!). So I figured out how to put the two together for a weekly game on Instagram. On Mondays I upload a random photograph and encourage everyone to give me their descriptions of the photo. Then, on the weekend, I put up my description of the photo.
I try to write my descriptions with a strong opinion on the photo, usually the opinion of a character rather than my own. (For example, I love smoked paprika and add it to pretty much everything, which differs, as you will see, from the opinion below.) And I get really fun descriptions from people who see the photo on Instagram too.
Would you like to see what on earth I’m talking about?
Well, here are the first five photographs and my descriptions of them. If a photograph takes your fancy, throw your description in the comments. I’d love to hear it! And, if you’re into Instagram, hop on and join in the fun each week.
Smoked paprika is an angry spice. Not only does it completely hold on to its redness, but it tastes as if one is eating a wood fire laced with bell peppers. It is used when one wants to add a BBQ flavoring to an otherwise uninteresting and unpalatable meal, though its recuperative powers have been greatly overhyped.
The house was vaguely tuscan, by which I mean it had plastered terracotta walls positively dripping with overgrowth, that made the building look like sunshine was mandatory for its continued upkeep. The door and wood shutters were a seaside blue, which clashed with the vine-growing look of the building. Either one was by the seaside or one was in the hillsides. One could not be both.
The three-storey building was a mixture of visible stone on veranda and chimney and wood shingles everywhere else, as if a married couple had argued vociferously in front of the architect and the architect had sought to deliver compromise. What he (or indeed she) actually achieved was the look of someone who started building a castle and finished with a multi-story boat house. The fact that the building was located on a beach front, nestled amongst hardy overgrowth, completed the nautical effect and serves as a lesson to all of us that “compromise” is never a good word when creating living quarters (even if it is the key to living with the person within said living quarters).
The house was modular in appearance, as if two large, long wooden (or perhaps concrete) boxes had been delivered and placed side-by-side, their glass ends pointing towards the generous, but oddly Z-shaped pool. Then, when the luxurious and perfectly appointed loungeroom and master bedroom proved not enough for the residents, a whacking great crane must have come in and positioned the third box as a cantilever atop the building, so that one day, when the couple decided to breakfast under its shade, it could come crashing down upon them—a warning to all who would add third boxes to their two-box houses.
The first thing that struck one about the open-plan kitchen, dining, lounge was wood. Wood floor. Wood cupboards. Wood furniture. One would not be surprised if the family would next be adding wood to the walls and ceiling, so much did they seem to appreciate the material. The wooden floorboards were a vast array of different colors and placed so that no piece seemed to line up with any other piece, resulting in a kaleidoscopic effect that caused the eyes to swim.
The eyes could not rest on the kitchen countertop either since it was made up of a pale stone mottled with black speckles and smudges and blotches as if a kindergarten had provided its inmates with brushes and paints and told to have at the surface. The only positive one could say about it was one would never know when it was dirty—which was perhaps not a positive in a kitchen.
So you get the idea. If you want to throw your descriptive hat in the ring, hop on Instagram and join in!