Description of Setting Through Your Character’s Experience
Even the most ordinary places can be extraordinary. This is especially true when the description unfolds through your character’s emotions and senses.
When we catch a certain smell, it can catapult us back in time, awaken our memories. Think of a Pine forest, salt air, hyacinth, garbage can in the alley. I bet you could smell those right away. Rely on sensory details rather than long descriptions. The experience of your character through emotion and senses will evoke a strong sense of place.
Other characters will react differently to the place. One may be relieved to be home, someone else could find the town run-down or eery. You can use dialogue to express different points of view about a place.
Different times of the day, seasons and weather transforms the mood of a your setting. A certain light could heighten a feeling of other worldliness.
Here’s a description of an event when I was ten:
Graced with a full moon illuminating the ice, a crowd of families sat on the rocky shore lacing up their skates. From small wobbly ankled children, to cautious grand parents, we glided over flawless glass. At first the air filled with only the sounds of skates, everyone hushed in the moonlit world, dancing with our shadows.
Thereafter the pond echoed laughter and children shrieking in that way that they do. A fire blazed in the middle of the pond. Why doesn’t it crash through the ice? I wondered. At first I hung back, afraid of falling through, but when the family in charge produced marshmallows, I took a chance.
The event is described through sight, sound and the emotions of wonder followed by uneasiness at the fire on the ice. -And hopefully tweaked a memory of community, winter fun and wonder for the reader.
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