Describing Place — A Short Lesson
Describing place is a great entry point for enhancing description, because it represents that elemental dichotomy, the writer and the outside world. The observer and the observed. The interior mind brought to bear on the exterior world. This is the essence of writing, and bridging this gap, to the extent that it is a gap, is one of the fundamental tasks of the writer.
It’s also deceptive. A good description of place captures many things that a person in the real world takes for granted. Most of these things are taken for granted because we are desensitized to them, or because evolution has made our sensory programming more alert to other things at certain times. For that reason, it is deceptively difficult to recreate even the most basic place in its essence, with truth, succinctly.
We’re at a gas station at night, routinely filling the tank. Do we even notice anymore the tickle of diesel fumes, the garish cast of light, the fluttering moths?
One technique I find helpful is to approach descriptions of place with the fresh eyes of the newly arrived. You have to forget all you know, or assume you know, about a place, and arrive there anew in your description.
Look at this passage from John Updike’s novel Rabbit is Rich. In it, Harry (“Rabbit”) Angstrom arrives by plane to a Caribbean island:
Through his patch of scratched Plexiglas he sees a milky turquoise sea mottled with purple-green shadows cast from underneath, islands beneath the surface. A single sailboat. Then a ragged arm of rocky land in a sleeve of white beach. Small houses with red corrugated roofs rise toward him.
A plane landing. On the one hand, it’s a very common occurrence. Thousands of planes take off and land every day. And yet, to someone like this character who has never flown, it’s an extraordinarily vivid experience. In just these few lines, Updike captures the freshness of the new place to Harry. This fullness and richness is what we want to bring to our descriptions of place.
Try this writing prompt.
PROMPT: Write a scene of at least 750 words with a character, first or third person, arriving somewhere. The place might be a daycare, a nightclub, Mecca, or your grandparent’s house at Thanksgiving. Show the place unfolding before your character’s eyes. Make it as vivid as it would be to a curious newcomer.
Descriptions of the sights, sounds, and smells of a place are like walls to a room that you construct and locate your reader in. Once they are erected, he/she feels oriented. Not necessarily comfortable, but like they know unmistakably where they are.
I hope you enjoy this mini-lesson. This lesson goes on to address your character’s reason for being in that place, and how it effects description. Where the character’s focus goes must be inherent to him/her as a character in that scene within the larger plot.
After all, a dentist’s office would be described quite differently by someone arriving for major surgery than by a teenager getting her braces removed after two unsightly years.
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Ben Obler is the author of the novel Javascotia, from Penguin UK. His short story “The White Man’s Incredulity Furrows His Brow” won the 2014 short story contest with the journal Puerto del Sol. He holds a Master’s of Letters degree from the University of Glasgow, Scotland.
