: Tips for describing features of unusual place that I often visit I'm having problems describing certain parts of a place that I usually visit. Here are some pictures: For instance, I have

Doing research is part of being a writer. So, don't know what that pavilion is called? Find out. Look online, look around the thing to see if there's a plaque that may give you a hint, heck, you could even ask some people in the area, like cafe workers.

That said, you don't necessarily need to know what it is:

...spotted a large wooden platform with an asian-looking arbor over it. It
looked vaguely Shinto, not that Jun's experience with oriental shrines
extended much past martial arts movies.

But that's only if you need to focus that much attention on it. I think the problem you're running into has less to do with the wooden platform and more to do with over-describing and under-showing the scene. That is, you've basically got a bullet point list of what Jun sees and does. This takes a scene with some very interesting concepts (the staring girl, the dead tree, the blackout), and dulls and flattens it.

Compare your first two paragraphs to this:

The darkness and fog muffled the street. Jun could barely see to the
end of the sidewalk, so he felt, more than saw, his way along. He kept
the parked scooters rising and falling in the mist like chained
derelicts to his left and the dead iron ladder of the sewage canal's
railing stretching to infinity on the right. He'd steer between the
two, and eventually he'd be home.

Eventually. He wasn't quite ready to get there just yet.

A wooden pavilion shaped itself out of the gloom and Jun
sat down. A couple of cans of beer in his backpack called to him so
he open one, drank, and pondered the dark wavelets in the canal.

The hiss-click of another can of beer startled Jun out of his
reverie. There was a girl sitting on the far end of the pavilion, her
legs dangling over the sides. Had she been there the whole time? He
watched her drink the beer down in one long swallow, her eyes closed, her throat
bobbing in time.

She didn't seem to notice him. Instead she stared across the canal, the beer
can, now empty, forgotten in her lap.

This isn't necessarily the best way to write this, but it shows you that you don't have to tell the reader the boring bits of how a character moves through space (X meters, spotting, looking this way and that) -- their mind will fill in those blanks.

The blanks they can't fill in are how the scene feels -- and how it'll make them (the readers) feel. This is texture, and you have to provide that. And that can't be done by listing facts.

Consider, for instance, when Jun first sees the dead tree. You write:

It took him some time to make up the shape. It looked like a tree. A
standing dead tree. It had a grayish color and had long branches.

"It had a grayish color and had long branches." Really? No! This tree is a pivotal element on the scene that, if my impression is right, gives the scene's spooky nature a reason for being. I mean, the whole thing was set up for the girl to stare at that dead tree, right? So why not something like:

"It stood there like a forgotten evil, its bark the shriveled gray of a drowned man's
flesh, its skeletal branches grasping through streamers of
murky night air, lusting after the memory of its trembling victims.

Both here and and in the first paragraph with the scooters and canal railing, I'm using similes and adjectives to give these elements some punch.

I'll grant you, I am over-doing it a bit. The tree thing especially is over the top. But that's just for purposes of example to make my point.

When describing a setting you don't want to describe everything, which inevitably leads to summarization. Instead, you want to use a few elements shown in loving, delicious detail to set the whole scene for you.

So remember, it's about texture.

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