Creative Writing For Dummies, 2nd Edition

Chapter 7

Describing Your World

IN THIS CHAPTER

Appealing to the senses

Using metaphors and symbols

Making your setting come alive

Descriptive writing is one of the fundamentals of all creative writing. Whether you’re describing nature in a poem, a place in a piece of travel writing, objects you remember in an autobiography, or creating a setting in a novel, you need to find ways of communicating what things look and feel like, so that the reader can see and feel things as you intend.

Yet describing things effectively isn’t easy. You may fall into the trap of using clichés that fail to awaken the reader’s imagination, putting down clunky metaphors and similes that fail to communicate meaning or writing long passages of description that just slow down the plot. You need to fight any tendency to be lazy so that you look at and describe things clearly and in a fresh way.

Used well, descriptive writing can transform a narrative, make a poem sing, add to the reader’s sense of realism and authenticity, and make both real and imaginary characters and settings vivid and compelling. In this chapter, I show you how.

Recognizing the Power of Description

One of the most astonishing aspects ...