Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and the Challenge of Creative Writing

When it comes to descriptive writing, it’s a challenge to get students to actually describe. All too often, they will look back over what they’ve written and assume that they’ve described a scene so vividly that any reader will successfully envision what they’e written about. To get students to move past those assumptions, I put them in a situation similar to the prisoners in Plato’s famous “allegory of the cave.” It’s become an effective — and entertaining — key to unlocking their creative and descriptive abilities.

Without belaboring the actual allegory, let’s get to the set-up. In the back of the classroom, I sketch a series of random images — an esoteric collection of the arcane and archetypal such as the one below. After covering that, students sit in pairs, one facing the image and one facing away. The student facing the image will have to describe it to the other, and here’s the catch: the describers cannot use their hands. Just words. The “artists”, so to speak, can ask questions, point to locations on the page, erase — anything that helps to draw — but they cannot turn around. They are, like Plato’s prisoners, bound to their positions. The students’ attempts at drawing what is described parallels the prisoners’ attempts at naming the shadows that flit across the back wall of Plato’s cave. Similarly, the students’ attempts at describing parallel the puppet-showmen’s role, casting those fleeting shadows.

An example of the kind of mashup-montage students will attempt to recreate.

The students describing the image on the left frequently started by asking their partners draw the staircase — this however, led to staircases going the wrong way. Others started with the number three but were dismayed to see casual threes of the sort anyone would just scrawl. Over and over again, describers were flummoxed as their attempts to describe faltered. They thought they were being clear and specific only to realize how incomplete and generic their descriptions were. Some students did start to figure out how to better-guide their partners in drawing the image that they themselves couldn’t see.

When we debrief, students admitted that their descriptions were not nearly detailed enough. Worse, their partner’s points of view were literally opposite — facing the other direction, up was down, and left was right. Students will occasionally draw a mirror-image of what’s on the board. When we talked about what did work, one student said that “I couldn’t get my partner to draw what I wanted until I started giving them details.” Another mentioned that what worked was “comparing things [on the board] to things we both knew, like ‘a triangle without a base’ and ‘upside-down parallelogram”. As we discussed this, students agreed that using generic words like “sailboat” or “mountain” left artists with too much to interpret and they would rely on their own perception of what these look like. A description like “an upside parallelogram that is about three inches wide on the bottom and a little wider on top and about an inch tall”, though clunky, provided the specificity that the artists needed.

Not too shabby, all things considered…

Having done this once to start the school-year, students learn more about what works: specificity, creativity, examples, comparisons, and figurative language feature heavily. They learn that their own minds will project onto the page, but this differs from actually providing that information to their readers. We periodically return to this as a game, and students enjoy the competitive collaboration — who can produce the most-accurate drawing?

Transferring that skill from this ungainly environment to the writing process provides a richer frame of reference as we peer-edit and revise. The students have had a shared experience of feeling frustrated, both when they struggled to describe and to envision, and this seems to help them when they write and revise. At a risk of going to the cave once too often, they start to crawl towards the light, and their writing starts to show some really rich, interesting description. I just hope I’ve managed to do the same here…