KEY CREATIVE WRITING SKILLS
Describing a setting in vivid detail
If you can learn to describe settings well, it will make a huge difference to the marks you get at both KS3 and GCSE. There are many different ways that you can do this, and few of them are easy, but this is another skill you will need to become proficient at if you want to succeed in your creative writing assessments. This guide will provide a series of tips for how to do this.
Contents of this guide
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Why you must describe the setting
In any piece of creative writing, you need to help the reader form a clear picture in their imagination. This is where the story takes place, after all — in the reader’s imagination. For this reason, you need some description of the setting to situate your reader. You may have a clear sense of where your story is taking place, but the reader won’t, unless you tell them. Without this, the characters and events in your story will be left floating in an empty void in your reader’s imagination, which makes everything in your story feel less grounded and real.
Of course, this doesn’t mean you need to describe your setting in long, boring paragraphs, but the reader needs to be given enough specific information to picture your setting or settings somewhat clearly, including how they change throughout your story. This is what it means to make a description vivid.
If this wasn’t reason enough to include some description of the setting, it’s also the easiest way to include big, complex sentences and lovely, ambitious vocabulary, which will help you to get the higher marks, especially at GCSE. This guide will take you through some tips for how to do this.
Convey the basics - be clear about where we are
Above all, your description of setting needs to convey the basics. It needs to situate the reader. Where are we?
Here are some questions you might want to consider for this. What time of day is it? If it’s a room, what room? What furniture? What lighting? What other stuff is there? What other people are there? If it’s outside, what kind of environment is it? Rural, urban, crowded, empty, clean, dirty, etc? What is the weather like? Are there other people around?
You don’t need to use fancy vocabulary or poetic similes to convey this aspect of your setting — you just need to be clear about where the characters are. It’s barely even description at this point — it’s just stating a few facts so the reader has a sense of where the story is taking place. This should be your first priority when describing the setting, and it supersedes all the other things. You absolutely must do this, no matter what. And, fortunately, this part requires no talent at all, which is why it’s the first thing in this list. You just need to include some simple, clear details.
Here are a few examples of this — they’re mostly one sentence long.
Descriptions conveying the basics
They left the ruins and now, before them and on either side, there was nothing but flat hard sand, more reddish than brown and sprinkled with small flat stones.
She stood at the window, unhappily eyeing the street. The view of semi-detached Notting Hill villas and leafless little trees was very familiar to her now.
She woke to the dim stillness of the aircraft cabin. It was night and the main lights were switched off. Stretched out on her nearly flat bed, she was able to see, from where her head was, her neighbour’s screen. He was watching a film.
The remainder of this guide will focus on various ways that, having conveyed the basics, you can make your descriptions of settings more vivid and, thus, more sophisticarted.
Make your description vivid
To describe a setting well you should focus on making it vivid. This means making it easy for the reader to picture clearly in their mind. The trick here is observation. Include little details which help to bring the scene to life, to make it feel particular and real — to add verisimilitude, in other words.
The easiest way to do this is to think of similar settings that you have encountered in your own life and to include the small details from those settings in your story. Look around the room you’re in now and notice what you can see. Sofas, tables, bookcases, rugs, clocks, TVs, speakers, pictures on the walls, cushions, discarded clothes, bills lying on surfaces, chargers, headphones, children’s pictures, dirty mugs, extension cables, ornaments, umbrellas, games consoles, shoes, stains on the walls, peeling paint, cobwebs, etc.
I bet there are lots of little things, if you really pay attention. And you just need to include a few of these little things to make your description vivid — a few small, interesting details that give the reader a flavour of the specifics of your setting to make it feel real.
Not just a generic bedroom, but this specific bedroom. Not just a generic park, but this specific park. Not just a generic classroom, but this specific classroom.
Here’s an example from a novel by Patrick O’Brian:
Vivid description example 1
Further ahead he could see a small town. To the left there were groves of date-palms, apparently springing directly from the sand, and to the right was the turquoise-blue dome of a mosque. White walled, flat-roofed houses surrounded it.
One way to assess whether your description is clear, specific and vivid is to ask how well somebody could draw it based on what you have written. How close would their drawing be to what you’ve imagined? Of course, it’s never going to be spot on, but could they at least draw something close to what’s in your head? If so, then your description is probably clear, specific and vivid. If not, then it probably isn’t. The example above should pass that test quite well.
Below is another example from the same Patrick O’Brian novel, this time of an interior, that is also vivid and would give someone a good chance of drawing it:
Vivid description example 2
They walked into a large dim high-ceilinged room with a fountain in the middle; a broad padded bench ran round three sides, under latticed, unglazed windows, shaded with green fronds outside; and on this bench, cross-legged, sat two or three small groups of men, silently smoking hookahs or conversing in low voices.
Using vivid description to ‘show’ plot – the crime scene approach
Passages of vivid description can also be used for ‘show don’t tell’. This method is sometimes called environmental storytelling. Here you are deliberately describing the setting of your story in such a way to ‘show’ your reader something about that has happened earlier in your story. Your description is not just there to help the reader imagine the events more clearly; it is ‘showing’ the reader something about what has happened in the plot, or at least hinting about what might have happened.
You can think of your description as a kind of crime scene which is littered with clues about how the crime was committed, except it’s not a crime (maybe it is a crime) — it’s just whatever happened earlier in your story.
Here are some examples of this. In each case you should be able to figure out some kind of event that has happened in the story prior to the protagonist’s arrival.
As Adam walked into the classroom, he could see Peter Hayes lying on the floor in the corner. Three desks were stacked on top of him, and his belt was tied to one of them with what looked like another boy’s belt. There were a selection of books, both exercise and text, scattered around the room, and on the whiteboard the word ‘LOSER’ had been written in huge, black bubble-writing. “Are you alright, Pete?” Adam asked, tentatively.
When Paula arrived home, she was shocked to find the living room in disarray. The Christmas decorations had all been ripped off the wall, and both sofas had been dragged into a V-shape in the centre of the room. At the heart of the V there was a pile of discarded wrapping paper, and on its summit, wearing a miniature Santa hat, was Diana’s favourite teddy bear, Chippers. His throat had been hideously cut with a knife and the fluffy white stuffing was bursting out. He was holding a post-it note which read: “Christmas is dead.”
The office was not what Palvashay had expected. The desks were arranged in geometric lines, equidistant from one another, and all of the other staff were wearing what looked like identical clothes: white shirts and black skirts, like a kind of uniform. Nobody was talking; they were all transfixed by the screen in front of them.
'Showing' setting through action - a way to maintain pace
Description of setting, essential though it is, can often slow a story down. It can mean the action has to pause while the setting is described. At times, this is just what you want. You want to slow your story down, so some description of the setting does the job nicely. However, sometimes you want to tell a part of your story with pace, and including static descriptions of the setting will slow it down too much. Rather than leaving out the description altogether, though, you can use ‘show don’t tell’ to show the setting through the action of the story. You can move the plot of the story forward while including setting description embedded into this. Below are some examples. In each case you should be able to get a sense of the setting of the story without the action of the story pausing:
He was late. St Mark’s clocktower had struck one and Enzo found himself pushing against the tide of tourists milling towards the cafes lining the Piazza San Marco. A clump of pigeons scattered in front of him. (Example taken from this excellent Reedsy blog on ‘show don’t tell’.)
The car turned right, between white gates and high, dark tight-clipped hedges. The whisper of the road under the tyres changed to the crunch of gravel. The child, staring sideways, read black lettering on a white board: St. Edward's Preparatory School. Please Drive Slowly. He shifted on the seat, and the leather sucked at the bare skin under his knees, stinging.
Daisy was awoken by the cry of an animal. She sat up instinctively to scan the barn for movement, her eyes adjusting quickly to the darkness. Beyond the glowing embers of the previous night’s campfire, she could see the door rattling on its hinges. A wave of fear passed over her before she realised it was just the night-wind buffeting the barn.
Consider more senses than just vision
One of the easiest ways to make your description more vivid is to include more senses than just vision. Don’t just describe what the characters can see, but also describe what they can hear and smell. You can use feel and taste, too, though these senses are more difficult to do in a natural way, especially taste. But considering senses other than vision will give you an easy way to add more description to your piece, making it more vivid for the reader. And you don’t even need to specifically reference these senses (e.g. She could feel/taste/smell … etc) – you can just use words describing temperature, sounds or feelings in your general description, as in the example below, taken from The Little Friend by Donna Tartt.
An example of a multi-sensory description (different senses underlined): When she stepped onto the footpath and into the shady woods the passage from warmth to cool was like swimming into a cool plume of spring water in the lake. Airy clouds of buzzing gnats swirled away from her, spinning from the sudden movement like pond creatures in green water. In the daylight, the path was narrower and more chocked than she had imagined it to be in the dark; barbs of fox-tail and witch grass prickled up in tufts, and the ruts in the clay were coated in slimy green algae.
Choose a type of setting you like to work with and learn words attached to that setting so you can include more specific vocabulary
This is a worthwhile thing to do in the longer term, especially when it comes to getting good marks for vocabulary at GCSE. If you tend to set your stories outside, then you should take some time to look up words that are used to describe nature (e.g. glade, covert, bough, spindrift, copse, specific breeds of plant, tree and hedge, etc). You will need these words to write a sophisticated, vivid description. The same applies to settings indoors (e.g. types of furniture, types of light, types of carpet, etc) or urban settings (types of building, architectural terms like gable, cornice, fascia, eaves, etc). You will almost certainly need to look these up, but that’s easy to do on the internet. [Full disclosure: I looked up several of the terms in this part of the guide in a couple of internet searches.]
Match your description to the mood of your story
When you’re describing a setting, the description needs to match the general mood of the plot. So, if you’re describing a wedding between two loved-up people, the setting needs to feel similarly celebratory and joyous — it shouldn’t be a rainy day in a sombre tower block. (Unless you want to create a deliberate juxtaposition.) Similarly, if you’re describing the dungeon in which your character has been trapped for several days, it needs to sound suitably gloomy and miserable — you shouldn’t compare the sunlight through the tiny window to a queen’s coronation. This may sound like stating the obvious, but doing this well can make the difference between a powerfully effective piece of description and some description that feels so weird that it spoils the rest of the story.
And the difference is often quite subtle. Consider the two examples below. The first of these is from A Skinful Of Shadows by Frances Hardinge, and the mood is very downbeat and even sinister, conveyed through the description. The second is the same description, with exactly the same thing happening, but with a few words and phrases changed. The difference in terms of mood is huge, though. Both are effective descriptions (the first more than the second), but the first description would be terrible in a happy story, and the second would be terrible in a sinister story, hence the need to match the description to the mood. Read through them both and see if you can spot the differences.
Downbeat and sinister mood description: At last she wakened from a doze to find that the carriage was splashing along a rising road turned to soup by the rain. On either side lay bare fields and pastureland, the horizons guarded by a line of sombre hills. Ahead, behind a small coven of dark, twisting yews, stood a grey-faced house, graceless and vast. Two towers rose above its facade like misshapen horns.
Upbeat and hopeful mood description: At last she wakened from a doze to find that the carriage was flying along a rising road. On either side lay verdant fields and pastureland, the horizons ringed by a line of majestic hills. Ahead, behind a small grove of bright, blossoming yews, stood a bright-faced house, graceful and magnificent. Two towers rose above its facade like arms raised in triumph.
Link your description symbolically to a theme in your story
To make your setting descriptions even more sophisticated, you should use them to symbolically convey ideas in your story. This is not essential, unlike the other tips in this guide, but it is a fairly straightforward way to make your creative writing more sophisticated.
The easiest way to do this is with the pathetic fallacy: you can use aspects of the setting like weather, lighting or seasons to convey the mood of your story. So, if it’s a sad story, make it rain. Or if it’s a story about hope, set it in the morning and describe the sun coming up or the light in the room growing brighter. Or if it’s a story about something getting worse, set it in the autumn and mention the days growing shorter or the leaves falling from the trees. And so on.
An even more sophisticated way to do this is to describe something non-human which reflects something human in your story. So, for instance, if your story has sinister undertones, you could describe a spider in its web, waiting for something to fly into it by mistake. Or if it’s a story about how nothing lasts, you could describe a child’s toy which has been played with so much that it’s falling to bits and is no longer usable. Or if it’s a story about the scars left by a failed relationship, you could describe a table that has been damaged by hot cups placed on it without a coaster, leaving ‘scars’ in the table.
Putting this kind of extra thought into your descriptions will not only make them more sophisticated, but it will make them feel less dull and pointless to you as you write. You won’t feel like you’re just including description for the sake of it — it will feel like worthwhile way to add meaning to your story.
Summing up - key things to remember when describing a setting
Convey the basic details first – be clear and specific about where your story is taking place
Make your descriptions vivid by adding small, specific details – ask yourself: how well could someone draw your setting based on what you’ve written?
To avoid slowing your plot down, you can ‘show’ your description through the action in your story
You can also use the crime scene approach to convey story through your vivid description
Consider more senses than just vision, but don’t just tediously run through all five senses like it’s the 11+
Learn vocabulary associated with settings you like to describe
Carefully match the description of the setting to the mood of your story – getting this wrong makes your description sound absurd
Link your description to the theme of your story using symbolism and the pathetic fallacy