Post: Improve your descriptive setting skills

setting

Descriptive language is an integral component of fiction novels. As a fiction writer, one of your primary goals should always be to make your readers feel as though they have stepped into another world – the world inside your story. Writing descriptive settings can be challenging. It can also make the difference between people wanting to keep reading or setting a book aside before they’ve completed even a single chapter. 

If you’re an avid reader (which, hopefully you are because all writers should be avid readers) you’ve no doubt read books with wonderfully-described settings as well as stories that sort of left you hanging to create imagery in your own mind. It’s okay to leave a few details to a reader’s imagination. It’s not okay to make readers create every scene in your book on their own. That’s what you’re for as the author. Keeping several things in mind can help you improve your descriptive setting skills. 

You can use real life locations to help you describe settings in a fictional story

Many writers create fictional characters by compiling various attributes and behaviors of people they know or have observed in real life. You can also use real life settings to help you describe the fictional places in your book. Perhaps you’re writing a love story with a scene involving a picnic by a lake. Before describing the setting, visit a lake in person. It’s even better if you can visit a lake where people are enjoying a picnic! 

Use the sights and sounds and scents that surround you at a real-life lake to spark ideas to help you create a fictional lake in your story. You can use many types of locations, from old buildings to abandoned ruins or a restaurant, theme park, etc., to spend time observing colors and textures, architecture, and the overall ambience of a place to provide inspiration for the make-believe places in your novel.

Take advantage of figurative speech, such similes and metaphors

You could write that there was a massive tree growing in a forest. It might be more fun to say that there was a tree that stood as a giant with bare limbs that stretched and twisted and curled like the tentacles of a massive octopus, seemingly ready to reach out and grab anyone who crossed its path. 

Using figurative language to describe a setting gets the wheels turning in a reader’s imagination. Personification (giving human-like qualities to a non-human object or being) helps bring a story to life. Using the example of the tree mentioned in the previous section, it’s one thing to imagine an enormous tree in a forest. It’s quite another to picture that same tree as though it were a living, gigantic sea creature! 

Help your readers experience a setting

Descriptive settings require focus and detail that help make a particular place or scene in a story ignite the senses of a reader. You can describe a sitting room with a fire lit in the hearth. Your story will really come to life if you go a step further and add details about the crackling sounds the fire is making or the aroma of the smoke wafting through the air, or you could even mention the chill that followed your character through the front door so that everyone in the room pulled their shawls a bit tighter around their shoulders. 

Take time to insert yourself into your story before writing descriptive settings. If you were stepping into a scene in your book, what would you see, hear, smell or feel? Well-written imagery will make your readers (or copy editors who may be reviewing your manuscript) want to keep turning pages.