Writing tip Wednesday: Setting the Scene

By David E. Booker

The earlier entry about scene writing covered one aspect of it. Here, for your consideration, are three other items related to scene description in a story or novel.

1) Scene description is not a list of things in a room, valley, planet, or universe. The writer is not a cataloger for a moving company, listing everything or even most thing in a scene. Scene description is a description of the important items in that scene.

2) Scene description is about movement. When describing clouds, describe them in motion. In The Great Gatsby, when F. Scott Fitzgerald describes what Nick sees, there is almost always something moving in the scene description.

When describing grass, describe it as a breeze rustles through it, or if it’s brown with drought, describe how crunchy it feels and sounds to a character.

Or give a sense of movement by describing something metaphorically or with simile. For example, describe an old, rundown house by writing: “The house slumped on its foundation like a tired old man struggling with a cane to keep upright. It creaked and smelled and sighed from its efforts, and the scaffolding along one side was not much of a cane.”

3) Describe scenery from a character’s point of view. If you are writing a first person story, that is the only way to describe scenery. But consider it even when writing from a third person point of view. And when doing so, consider two questions:

A) What is important enough for that character to notice? Focus, at least to start, on the two or three most important things.

B) How does the character react of feel about the items in the scene? This does not necessarily have to be a straightforward mater, such as: It was night and he was afraid of the dark. It can be subtilized by writing: “The fading daylight always brought with it a feeling of apprehension. Mike didn’t know if it was childhood and bad dreams still lurking around, or if it was because he heard sounds he could not easily identify or dismiss with a nod and a shrug. No, the sounds of the night had an insidiousness about them that he was unable to pin down or run away from.”

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And that brings us to a final thought on setting the scene in stories and novels: don’t forget the other senses: touching, hearing, tasting, smelling – all the tools that can help you tell the reader how a character feels about a scene and in doing so, set the scene dynamically for the reader.