Young Writers Society

Using any example, how would you explain a rainy,sunny,day or anything to do with nature like describbing the night sky or a forest or anything like that.

Hey Zo! Al here, for a Helping Hand!

A natural setting, eh? Well, technically, the way of writing best for this is descriptive writing. This technique is commonly used in essays and stories set within a large area or situation that is in bad need of description.

So, how to do descriptive writing? What I do is the Five-Sense Design.

1.) Imagine that you are in the setting, may it be one simple setting (e.g. A forest) or a very specific one (e.g. A vast, towering forest swarmed with animals, in a bright sunny day). The following steps can be done in any order.

2.) Use the sense of sight. Let's use the sunny forest, for example. First, describe what the forest is. Then ask yourself, what can I see? Trees, squirrels, rocks and a brook. Easy right? That doesn't end there, though! What do you see about them? The trees are tall and verdant, the squirrels are grayish-brown and scurrying, the rocks are still and hard and the brook is lone but crystal blue clear. What's important here is use the visual adjectives: color, quality, number etc. Describe all of what you see using these adjectives.

EXAMPLE: An old forest, stretching from East to West end, sprawled over the Yellow Brick Road. The verdant trees, which seem to be from ancient times, towered up to the sky, clouds meeting their canopy. Grayish-brown squirrels scurry around the trees' mighty trunks. Rocks piles sat still seemingly watching the lone brook wash away its crystal blue waters.

3.) Touching is believing. Ask these while you are in the setting: Is it smooth or rough? Soft or hard? Is it dusty or waxed? Is it lumpy or round? Then on to describing. Let's use a sunny desert for example.

EXAMPLE: I took effortless steps across the arid Sahara Desert; I am used to the rough rocks which line the path and the lumpy sand that go through my feet. I grabbed a handful of sand and felt its grainy smudge.

4.)The sense of smell and taste is of situational use. Like the others, describe what you smell and taste using adjectives, its up to you whether you will tell where it came from or not. For smell, there are words like fragrant and unpleasant for description; we have sweet and sour etc for taste. Let's use a Spring Meadow for example. Smell the flowers, the bees, the honey! Describe those smells ! Remember that food aren't the only ones that smell. Even tree bark has a smell, just imagine

EXAMPLE: It was Spring that day. I knew it was because of the fragrant twist of floral scent from the blossoms, alluring the deer and the sweet-tasting, gooey honey gathered by the foul-smelling honeybees.

5.) Hear. Another essential. Use everything from the sense of sight. These two really go together well. Let's use a mountain in a thunderstorm. Without question, thunder will be the first to be heard. If you can't describe what sound it is, then use Onomatopoeia, or words that resemble sounds like crackle, murmur, mumble and BAM!

EXAMPLE: The thunderclouds swarmed overhead the mountaintops. Lightning crackles across the country with a loud BOOM! The townspeople screamed and shrieked in fear as they ran for their lives.

6.) Use the figures of speech. Add creativity into them!

EXAMPLE: The graceful night sky spread across the earth like a vast blue blanket. Stars twinkled as they were scattered onto the dark sheets of misty light. The soft purity of clouds echoed lightning bolts which smelled of fire.The air tasted funny; something will happen this peaceful night.

As you can see, I used all the snese here

Well, that's all I do in a natural setting. If you need more help, check out these sites:
http://teacher.scholastic.com/writewit/diary/
http://www.evolutionwriters.com/samples ... ature.html
http://www.schoolsucks.com/paper/Nature ... /4801.html
These are usually about descriptive essays, but you can use those techniques for stories too.

I actually got this from an article I made. Maybe I'll post the WHOLE article of mine about descriptive writing someday here at YWS; be the first to check it out!

Hope I helped!

Your pal,
Al

Only describe what the viewpoint character is seeing/feeling/hearing/smelling/tasting, in the language they would use to describe something, and prioritize which senses get the most description based on the MC's tendency to notice certain senses first.

This applies to third and first person. Limit yourself to what the viewpoint character is experiencing, how they'd experience it.

I think this is an interesting question, because there is not really a best way to do this, as in, everyone has their own writing style. Have you found "your" style yet?

As posted above, using your 5 senses to describe a natural scene, helps by making sure the description is complete, you describe everything someone can experience. Make sure you describe the senses that you can use, only. And sometimes, as you will read here later, .

What I would like to add:

- Don't use too many adverbs.
- Don't use too many adjectives.

When you do use them, make sure they add something to the description, and make sure there are no contradictions.

Example, A small piece of text by my favorite author (Hemingway) that is also a good example for your question:

"In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels."

( /Whenever I find an excuse to post that piece of text I will, I love it that much. )

In the above text, the narrator did not touch anything, nor did he smell or taste, he sees. Swiftly moving water does create noise, but it is not described here as him hearing that, again, he just sees that it moves swiftly.

As you can see, you can get a lot of information about the natural setting, without going deep into details, which for me is a true challenge, and is the style in which I write.

I hope my answer combined with the others, help you!

/Pom

Perhaps, as well as describing what the character can see, hear, smell touch and taste, using other techniques such as personification, e.g. "the heavy fog clawed at my every being" in order to add an extra sense of depth.

Play around with some new ideas, see what you can come up with. Maybe it'd be good to try some activities to get your imagination warmed up? For example, setting yourself a time limit for a particular descriptive paragraph, or even describing the room around you and see how interesting you can make it sound. Practising techniques like this wil really add a sense of realism when it comes to depicting your character's surroundings, and realism is what readers relate to - and get drawn in by.

Have fun!