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Bring Setting and Description Alive In Your Fiction and Capture Readers’ Imagination
It’s a strange thing, but I find writers of contemporary novels struggle the most with setting and description. It’s as if because they’re writing about the world around us today, they think the reader will know what they’re talking about. Despite Google Earth and all those films and TV shows, nothing could be further from the truth. Here’s how to learn the lessons that fantasy and historical writers know.
The settings in your novel will benefit immensely from being unique, and from you taking the time to work on them until they evoke strong images and sensations in the reader’s imagination. Michael Connelly, crime writer, talks about the “telling detail”. You don’t have to overload your paragraphs with lengthy descriptions; rather, you write a lot in your first draft, or perhaps leave a gap and a note, and then choose and craft those details that will bring your story alive.
How do you do this? By focusing on one aspect at a time. What world are we in? What makes it different from anywhere else? What makes this character stand out? How can you describe them in two or three sentences, in a way that creates a picture? Look at your favourite novelists and see how they do it. Reading as a writer can teach you a huge amount. Here are two examples, one of character and one of…
