The only “Recipe” you need for Stunningly Descriptive Writing
The way that writers and readers co-create scenes is unforgettable once you know how it works.
Magic is born out of everyday moments. Even the wildest fantasies, conjured by the most creative imaginations, are rooted in the sights, sounds and sensations of real life.
Storytelling requires us to dive deep into the world from which we are writing – real or imagined – and somehow persuade our readers to jump in with us. We can’t just let them dip a toe and wander off after a paragraph or two. We must convince them to leave their shoes on the bank, forget about everything else, and wade right into our written world; all the way up to their necks.
There’s an important aspect to both the construction of “real world” sense-of-place and the creation of fantasy landscapes, which is easy to overlook: it’s not only the imagination, memories and experiences of the writer that shape a scene.
Imagination and memory connect to one another, every second of our lives. We experience this consciously; when we anticipate a first date and are reminded of a past encounter. Or when a destination we’ve been longing to see either does, or doesn’t match up to the picture we’d painted in our minds’ eye. That picture was formed…
