: Re: 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

@Moriarity138

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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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