How to Describe a Setting in a Novel

Let the character do the looking

Readers see a place most vividly through the eyes of whoever is standing in it. A pickpocket walking into a market notices pockets and exits; someone coming home after twenty years notices what has changed. What a character notices, and what they compare it to, also tells readers who they are: a tailor might see a cloudy sky as a worn-out lining. And people stop seeing what they see every day, so a character walking through her own house notices only what's out of place. Before you describe anything, settle the scene's point of view.

Choose a few details only this place has

In an 1886 letter to his older brother Alexander, Chekhov advised him to seize on small details when describing nature and to group them so that readers see a picture when they close their eyes. His example: write that a piece of glass from a broken bottle glittered like a little star on the mill dam, and you have a moonlit night. The line so often credited to him, 'Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass', is probably not his at all but a later condensation of that letter. So instead of listing everything in a room, pick two or three details readers couldn't have guessed, and choose the specific word over the general one: 'paint blistering on the window frames', not 'an old house'; 'a crooked fig', not 'a tree'.

Go beyond sight

Description tends to lean on the eyes, but it's the other senses that put a place into the reader's body: the mildew smell of a cellar, footsteps echoing down a stone corridor, an iron railing so cold in winter it seems to grab your palm. Sound also tells readers what kind of space they're in: it bounces off the walls of a narrow street and dies in a snowy courtyard. Smell goes straight to memory. You don't need every sense in every scene; one or two on top of sight are plenty. And watch for filter verbs like 'heard', 'saw' and 'noticed': 'She heard the church bell ring' holds readers a step back, while 'The church bell rang' lets them hear it with her.

Match the description to the pace of the scene

A long descriptive passage stops the story's clock, so use one on purpose. When a character first walks into a place, or just before tension breaks, making readers wait a moment works; in a chase, a slick step or a shutter slamming down is all you need. Most of the time, scatter details between the character's actions: she shoulders open a swollen door, then runs a finger through the dust on the table. And orient readers briefly at the start of each scene, or your characters end up talking in empty space, a problem writers call 'white room syndrome'.

Let details carry the mood and the story

Calling a room 'eerie' or 'peaceful' rarely makes readers feel it; the details you choose do. A character waiting for someone she loves notices the kettle beginning to whistle and the windows fogging up. Waiting for bad news in the same kitchen, she hears only the clock that won't stop ticking, and her tea goes cold. John Gardner's well-known exercise in The Art of Fiction tests exactly this: describe a barn as seen by a man whose son has just been killed in a war, without mentioning the son, the war, death or the man himself.

Setting carries plot, too. Snow closes the roads, a broken window latch foreshadows an escape, and a character who returns to the same room at the end of the book and notices different things shows readers how she has changed.

What to leave out

Skip what readers already assume: a kitchen has counters, an inn's yard has horses. A furniture inventory reads like a real estate listing, and pouring in all your research reads like an encyclopedia entry. When a place returns later in the book, give only what has changed, or one detail that puts readers back there. The last of Elmore Leonard's ten rules for writers sums it up: 'Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.' And since readers assume that anything described with care matters, use it later or cut it, as Chekhov's gun suggests.

Keep a place consistent across chapters and books

A place comes back again and again over a novel, and in a series, book after book. If the tavern door is blue in chapter one and green in chapter twelve, attentive readers will notice, so for every important place, write down what doesn't change: its smell, its sounds, its light, the color of its door. Our guides to designing a fictional city and shaping a fantasy world's geography cover building the place; this note keeps it consistent every time you go back.

In yazar.io, each place has its own record in the Locations section. Add custom fields such as Smell, Sound and Light to the Field Template for Locations, and they appear on every location record, ready to fill in. Reference photos go in the record's image gallery. On a board in Boards, use Add from Book to bring in the location's card, then arrange the images and sticky notes that capture a scene's mood around it. Type the place's name in a record's text or a note and save, and the link is made automatically: the location's page lists the records that mention it under Linked pages and the notes under Linked notes. Events whose Location you set to this place in the Event Flow appear there too, under Events that happened here. While you write the novel itself in Word or Google Docs, you can check the door's color and the street's sounds there whenever the story goes back to that place.