Page 6 - How to Write Descriptive Text in a Very Good Way

Filtering descriptions through your narrator is not just about what this specific narrator

might notice. It’s about the narrator’s entire experience in the story and scene–who

they are as a character. Think about what their goals are, what their conflicts are, what
knowledge or expertise they have, or what physical or emotional state they’re in at the

time the scene takes place, and how they feel about what’s happening in the scene.
Describing details of your scenes is not just about setting the scene or helping the

reader orient themselves in it. That’s a huge part of it, but it’s also about orienting the

reader emotionally in the scene. That emotion and mood can be transferred to the
reader just by filtering your scene descriptions through your narrator, so make sure

your descriptions are delivering on that.

3. Think about who and what is in the scene

Orienting the reader in a scene is about much more than just the setting in

which the scene takes place. In fact, the setting itself is about so much more
than just the location. It’s the people in the location, the objects filling the

location, the way the people in the location interact with the objects, and the

emotions the location elicits from the characters interacting with it.
When we think about scene settings as more than just locations, our descriptions will

instantly become more vivid, immersive, and memorable because we’re attaching

them to something meaningful in the scene instead of just plopping them down
randomly somewhere on the page.

It’s often helpful to focus on one or a few key objects within the setting, and use that

key object to represent the location. Often, when we don’t focus descriptions on one
or a few representative objects, descriptions can feel all over the place, and it's hard

to choose what parts of the setting to describe and what parts to leave out. Choosing

one or a few “representative objects” to describe with more detail allows you to paint
a fuller picture with fewer words.

4. Use immersive worldbuilding
Worldbuilding is often thought of and brainstormed at the story level, but it plays

out in your individual scenes and paragraphs, where your characters are

actually in the world, interacting with it and engaging with it. You want to make
sure that all your hard work on worldbuilding pays off in your descriptions to

keep the reader locked into our fictional world page after page.