Guest blogger, Carole Gift Page, continues to share her Ten Steps in Writing a Novel. Here is a continuation of Step Five:
Take a look at a few descriptive passages from Beyond the Windswept Sea. Notice how we tried to weave scenic descriptions in with our characters’ ongoing actions to keep the story moving and avoid sounding like a travelogue.
“We drove around the waterfront, catching the pungent smells of pulp mills and salmon canneries, then wended our way past towering spruce, mountain ash with red berries, and barren cedar.
“We made our way toward Creek Street—a ragged string of rustic houses teetering on spindly pilings over a raging stream.”
If you can’t visit the locations in your novel, visit your public library and read about them. Don’t just wing it from your armchair, trusting vague generalizations to convey a strong sense of place. Write your own detailed descriptions from photographs in travel books. Interview people who have been there. In our novel Storm Clouds over Paradise, Doris and I created our own island in the Caribbean by writing descriptions from travel photos. Here are random samples:
“There stood the sprawling, two-story Windy Reef Hotel, looming like a refurbished Georgian plantation, its pillars glistening white in the sunlight . . . surrounded by a profusion of riotous colors—full-blooming scarlet bougainvillea, exotic lavender orchids, and sweet-scented frangipani.
“Tamarind trees and palms weighted with ripened coconuts lined the water’s edge, their fronds dipping and waving lazily in the cooling breeze.
“We crossed to the row of open-air booths where kilo scales dangled from makeshift burlap awnings while bulging sacks of dried beans and red peppers basked in the sun. The bins were heaping with red tomatoes, hills of onions, sliced watermelon, bruised bananas, fly-dotted mangoes, and pineapples with spiky stalks.”
A final word on describing locations: Make sure your descriptions appeal to all five senses—sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch (or texture). Put your emphasis on specific descriptive nouns and verbs, and, to a lesser extent, on adjectives and adverbs.