Describe
Describe
Feeling stuck on the details? Describe is a way to very quickly get inspired with some super detailed descriptions of… whatever it is you highlighted. Describe will provide responses broken out by the five senses (Sight, Sound, Touch, Taste, and Smell), as well as a couple of metaphors. Like other features, you’ll find the results in the History column on the right.
To use it, highlight a specific word or phrase and click Describe. It often works best when highlighting a short-to-medium length phrase within a paragraph. But it can also work at the paragraph level, if you’d like descriptions for a broader set of objects in your scene. Writing a Young Adult novel set in a High School? You might not be thinking about how the smells from the gymnasium intrude on your hallway scenes, but Describe will.
Maybe after that you don’t ever want to know what something smells like. In that case, click the 🔽 toggle on the Describe button to select the senses you’d like Describe to respond with when you use it. Turn as many on or off as you like.
Note: Describe looks at the paragraph where the highlighted phrase resides, as well as up to 200 words prior to the selection.
While the visuals in the video above are sort of essential, a transcript of the Describe video above is available by expanding this toggle.
Welcome back to our Quick Start series. Today we're exploring the Describe button, a tool that can add depth and detail to your writing with ease.
Sometimes as writers we know the impression we’re trying to create, but we have a difficult time finding the exact words for it. The Describe button provides instant suggestions for sensory descriptions and metaphors for anything we’ve highlighted.
To see what I mean, just click the dropdown arrow to the right of the Describe button. When you do, you’re presented with a list of toggles—one for each of the senses that Describe can output. You can certainly leave them all toggled on, but you can also toggle off the options you know you won’t use. Say your young adult novel has a scene in a locker room—you could go ahead and toggle off smell, for example. Doing so will prevent the AI from generating that sensory detail until you toggle it back on—and it will save you a few credits in the process.
Once you’ve identified a section of your text you’d like enhance with some sensory detail, highlight it and press the Describe button—either from the Selection Menu or the Toolbar. A card will be created in the History column on the right for each of the enabled senses. So you can see here that we have sight, touch, taste, and so on.
Now since Describe works a bit differently than either Write or Rewrite, you probably won’t use the card’s Insert button to insert the entire text of a card. Instead, you can simply highlight what works for you, and then Copy and Paste whatever you like into the body of your document.
As with all cards, you can also Star any of these descriptions to refer back to later.
One final note on Describe. Like the other tools we’ve mentioned, Describe only works on selections made within your document’s editor. That means—as of right now—you’re not able to use the Describe button on something in your Story Bible fields. Not directly, anyway, since you could simply copy paste the thing you’re trying to get descriptions of into your editor before clicking Describe. Just be aware that if you get this error, that’s why.
That about covers it for Describe. Let us know what questions you have in the comments, and join us next time when we look at Brainstorm.