Online Writing - Steering the Craft, Exercise 9 Part 3

We are working our way through the excellent writing exercises in Ursula K LeGuin's "Steering the Craft". The exercise is below, but she provides so much more in the book - do what you can to locate the book at the library, on alibris.com or Amazon, etc.

This month is Exercise 9, Part 3: Implication
Each part of this should involve 200-600 words of descriptive prose. In both, the voice is either involved author or detached author. No viewpoint character.
Character by Indirection: Describe a character by describing any place inhabited or frequented by that character...(The character isn't present at the time.)
The untold event: give us a glimpse of the mood and nature of some event or deed by describing the place where it happened or is about to happen. (The event doesn't happen in your piece.)
You aren't to say anything directly about the person or the event, which is in fact the subject of the piece. This is the stage without the actors on it; this is the camera panning before the actions starts. And this kind of suggestion is somthing words can do better than any other medium, even film.
Use any props you like: furniture, clothes, belongings, weather, climate, a period in history, plants, rocks, smells, sounds, anything. Work the pathetic fallacy* for all it's worth. Focus on any item or detail that revels the character or that suggest what happened or will happen.
Remember, this is a narrative device, part of a story. Everything you describe is there to further that story. Give us evidences that build up into a consistent, coherent mood or atmosphere, from which we can infer, or glimpse, or intuit, the absent person or the untold act. A mere inventory of articles won't do it, and will bore the reader. Every detail must tell.
(Note: In descriptive writing, give a thought from time to time to the sense other than sight. Sound, above all, is evocative. We ahve a limited vocabulary for smell, but mention of a certain scent or stink can set a feeling-tone. Taste and touch are forbiddent ot he detached author. The involved author can go around telling us how tings feel to the hand, though I don't think even an involved authore gets to actually eat the fruit that looks so fresh and delicious, or has gotten so moldy, in the shining or the dusty wooden bowl... But if a character in the story is telling it, all senses can come into play.)

*Pathetic fallacy: A phrase, too often used condescendingly, to describe a passage of writing in which the landscape, weather and other things mirror or embody human emotions.

Have fun with it and we will see you soon!