Let me tell you a story that will help you enhance your world building through description immensely, creating a more immersive experience for your readers.
Two of our friends have two little girls. One is three, and the other six. Our friends live in an apartment and so have no garden, but they really wanted to teach their girls essential gardening skills and give them that important experience.
We have a massive garden, and because we rent, there's not much we can do with it, but there's a little area we're allowed to grow vegetables in if we wish. We offered this space to our friends as sa communal gardening area, where they could bring their girls over and we could all plant vegetables together.
The girls came armed with their welly boots and trowels, so excited to start gardening, and we showed them how to prepare the soil before planting the seeds.
And then came the time they were most excited for: planting the seeds.
The three year old, in her excitement, would grab a handful of seeds and BAM! She would dump them all together in the same place.
No matter how much we tried to show her to gently place them little by little in spaced out intervals, she couldn't contain her excitement and her motorskills were still developing that her control over these tiny seeds wasn't quite enough to help her spread them carefully.
So she took another handful and BAM! More went in another big clump.
I think new writers are a little like this.
They get so excited about the world they're creating, and they understand in their heads how they want it to look and sound, but they're not quite ready to describe the setting in the way the readers need.
But I think looking at it like this, in the concept of spreading seeds, would really help.
Imagine your world like the garden, and you're trying to describe it to the readers to help them immerse into your story and see what you see.
Instead of info dumping them BAM! all in one go like the little three-year-old, imagine you're spreading seeds with enough space for the plants to grow.
Sprinkle a little bit here, a few here, and some there.
At regular intervals.
Seeding your descriptions like this well up-level your world building in such a way that it will give your readers an incredible and much more immersive reading experience, rather than info dumping in large, overwhelming clumps.
Seed a few hints on character hair colour, eye colour, personality here ...
Sprinkle some information on the landscape or building design there ...
A little more on how narrow the alleyways are a bit later on my describing how even children can jump from rooftop to rooftop to play.
What sounds and smells do your characters notice?
Again, just hints, just seeds.
Remembering it like this, like sprinkling seeds carefully throughout the book rather than dumping them all in one place, will give your writing skills that next level you're looking for, keeping your readers constantly engaged in your world.
If this helped you develop your world building through description, sign up for our newsletter for more writing and publishing tips, and share with people you think this would help too.
Kommentarer