Page 5 - How to Write Descriptive Text in a Very Good Way

Tips to Improve Your Descriptive Writing

1. Orient the reader in every scene

As writers, we can easily picture where every scene takes place in our own

imagination, but sometimes we forget to actually put those details on the page
to help orient readers to where the scene is taking place. The scene-level

revisions are where you’ll want to go through your entire story, scene by scene,

and make sure you’re describing your setting effectively to orient the reader.

Orienting the reader in your story can look different depending on the genre, the writing

style, the audience the story is intended for, and even where the scene is placed in
the novel. Orienting a reader in a scene doesn’t have to be an extravagant affair with

lots of bells and whistles or long paragraphs of description. Some scenes and genres

may call for that, but some won’t. Sometimes it will only take a few sentences to orient
the reader in a scene.

For some scenes, the location is not that important to the scene, and a big, lengthy

description of the location will just detract from what’s happening in the scene and
slow it down. In these cases, make sure that you are giving your reader some type of

proper orientation, so the scene doesn’t appear to happen nowhere, even if that

orientation is only a few sentences or a few words long.

2. Filter scene descriptions through your narrator

When writing descriptions, sometimes it’s easy to get carried away and want to
write the most epic, beautiful, heart-wrenching descriptions ever. However, we

have to remember who is giving the reader these descriptions. Who is narrating

the story? Unless it's an omniscient third-person narrator, every story is told
through the eyes of someone in the story. So, how do they see the scene? How

would they describe it? If they’re not the type of person to notice the painting

on the wall or what type of flower is in the garden, or even know the names of
those flowers, it’s going to feel off-putting for your scene descriptions to

suddenly have every type of flower named or every brushstroke of a painting

identified. Always filter your scene descriptions through your narrator, so they
feel organic to the story.