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#staryacademy

✍️RECREATE A SCENE, DON’T DESCRIBE IT

Your reader will experience the reality of a setting only if you have experienced it for yourself, even if only in your imagination. If you are writing about your first day at school, you need to return there in your memory and see the red plastic chairs, and smell the Plasticine and gravy, and hear the sound of a boy crying for his mother. Revisiting the past may be uncomfortable, but if you want a setting with depth, you need to go into the discomfort. Recreate a scene, don’t describe it. Inhabit it, don’t write around it. Once you have set the scene in your own mind, then you can be more conceptual, talking about your feelings and the thoughts you were having. Only then will words like ‘classroom’, ‘afraid’, ‘why is that boy crying?’ really hit home with the reader.

What the reader is seeking to do is vicariously experience what you are evoking: excitement in a thriller; romance in a love story; tangibility in terms of the setting. If you want to communicate this experience fully, the readers will, in effect, have to sit in the red plastic chair with you. This means supplying them with sensory clues so they can make it real for themselves. As simple as that.

We can’t communicate something which the readers haven’t already experienced. Try describing ‘blue’ to a blind person. The way verbal communication works is by supplying clues which set off a process within readers, in effect reminding them of something they have already experienced. In this way, they will be able to think themselves into your skin because they will compare your experience with something similar to their own. Even if we’ve never sat in a red plastic chair, most of us know ‘red’, ‘plastic’ and ‘chair’.

Source: Writing a Novel and Getting Published by Nigel Watts