: How to create feeling with setting I have a passion for setting. I've heard you should write about what you're passionate about. Now when I say passion I mean I like to visualize the fantastic

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I used to hate writing descriptions, because I approached them as flat catalogs of visual details. But descriptions come alive when you understand all the different things they can do.

1 - Put yourself in the mind and mood of the narrator: "The trees stood like silent sentinels..." versus "The trees were angry soldiers, with branches like spears..." versus "The dancing trees opened their branches to the sky..." It's the same forest each time, but the person seeing them is experiencing them very differently. You still get a strong visual image, but the seemingly external details are giving you an internal portrait at the same time.

2 - Foreshadow the future, or illuminate the past: "That old tree looked like it was waiting on a hanging" "Mama's oaken wardrobe, with its battered and splintered wood --how many times had I hidden inside it as a child?" This is a good, gentle way to include scraps of your backstory without it getting overwhelming.

3 - Tell an embedded story: "A dog cloud chased a cat cloud across a stormy sky, and just as the dog caught up with the cat, it transformed, and became a dragon instead.

4 - Develop the voice of the narrator or the characters: "Falling feathers filled the air, a swirl of softly soaring snow" is a sentence that gives you a sense of voice that is very different from "No one couldn't tell that damn mutt from a pile of its own turds."

You can use all these techniques to develop a sense of a beloved place. Find loving metaphors in which to describe it, and then coat it in a fabric of treasured memories and imagined possibilities.

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I look at several aspects when describing settings:

The senses

It's helpful to look at each of the senses in turn and make a few notes on relevant things in the setting to each of them, basically answering the following questions:
What can the character see?
What can they taste? (might be something on the air, rather than going around licking trees and walls and stuff)
What can they feel? The texture of things around them, temperature, weather...
What can they hear? Close by and far away sounds.
What can they smell?

Metaphors

When describing a place, think about how each element can be interpreted. For example:

The house could gleam brightly with a fresh coat of whitewash; have aging, peeling, lead-heavy paint; or give the impression of a gaping skull with sightless windows as eyes and a door forever gagging its silent scream.

The sea could roll heavily, recline in reflective tranquility or froth with lively white horses.

The way you describe the scene shoudl reflect the mood and atmosphere you're trying to evoke in the reader.

Characters

When describing locations, I'm always considering what the POV character would notice about it. For example and ex-police officer is likely to notice completely different things to a five year old. What is important to the character? How do they feel about different places and the furniture and others items they might come across in those places?

You also asked about motivation reaction units, and whether you can use them. I think these relate more to character and driving the plot than setting description, so trying to apply them to your descriptions might get a bit confusing. Personally, I wouldn't try.

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Try to invoke the reader's senses by addressing the sights, sounds, smells, and tactile sensations engendered by the location. Use carefully-selected and specific details. But don't make the mistake of OVER-describing a location. Let the readers will in the rest of the details with their own imaginations, which are very powerful. Just plant a few well-chosen details to provide credibility and set the stage for the reader to fill in the rest.

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IMHO, one good way to create feeling is to elicit sensory memories in the reader of place(s) they've been or vividly imagined that are like your setting. I say elicit, because there's always the show vs. tell way of conveying those. Don't limit yourself to the visual; consider hot/cold, humid/dry, quiet/noisy (what kinds of noises), smells, tastes, tactile if it works in your narration.

In SF and Fantasy, the author en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Vance Jack Vance was a past master of this; suggest you take a look at some of his writing if you can. Wonderfully vivid!

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