: Re: How can you explain Scenery? I am writing a story about a character that travels as an ESL teacher and am wondering how you can explain scenery without getting to much into it.

@Lengel543

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Explaining the scenery without verbosity can be done by creating reader inferences. Thoughts and feelings can be used as a heuristics for the general setting.

You can use a first-person narrative to accomplish having a general feeling as heuristic for the setting. The reader should have a general idea about the character's personality before it's is possible to draw inferences from his or her feelings.

"I entered the gate of the new school I was supposed to teach at. There were trees everywhere, and the air smelled crisp and clean. As I walked to the entrance I met one of my new colleagues."

You can also use dialogue:

"Don't you love this place? Man, you can even hear the birds chirping!"

You can leave it to the reader what the scenery looks like. Also, you can prime the reader to associate a specific element with a certain scenery. If the main character brutally murdered his parents and buried them in the forest while hearing birds chirping, the above excerpt might be interpreted differently by the reader. This technique might be useful to create suspense.

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