Making a scene

 People have asked me how I develop the scenery in my book. At first, I didn’t think of that process as special. However, while I find myself googling how to quote dialogue, I never have had trouble visualizing a setting. Therefore, I thought I'd share my advice for making a scene.

My simplest suggestion is to visualize the scene. Think of a Rorschach Blot, what is the first thing you see in your mind's eye? Do you see a bleak overpass, do you see a specific place from your childhood, or do you see a pink dream castle. Whatever you see, start with that. Write your character through that place, and let it help you finish writing the scene. Next, expand and decorate. You know what one or two rooms of the house look like. Start adding what you see in the room. Take the misty world of imagination and slowly paint in the architecture, the décor, and the simple details as needed.

My next suggestion is recognizing your own unique talents, use your experience. Of course, it is always easiest to write about what we know. How do you describe California if you have never been there. Or what parts of the US does rural Beijing remind you of. However, we have more than just grand experiences. How many buildings, houses, and outdoor places have we been. Whether it is a fantasy or a science fiction room, you can still build off a structure you have seen. As I describe a dark balcony in an alien city, I remember a dark two-story mall in a foreign country. Use the experiences you have to gain a foothold to understand. No one needs to know where you brought the scene from, reality can quickly become whatever fantasy you imagine.

Which brings us to our next skill, research. Whether books, movies, or googling images, you can always try to look things up. Whenever I want to sketch a building, I search images to find features I like. The same applies to cities and places. We think we can picture a European city, but for every ancient building and culturally defined street, there's places that look as modern as how we think of an American city. Which is the same mistake as trying to describe an urban Chicago street, which is mostly One-hundred years old and looks extremely specific. Everyone wants to write about the south of France or the North of Scotland, but in these places you have to look closely at pictures and not just feel the landscape, but notice the plants and contour of the land. Surely you have stood on a hill before, now picture being surrounded by the specific landscape you imagine.

This leads me to my last piece of advice, when in doubt sketch. Mostly I mean mental sketching. Sit back, stop, and think. Imagine your location, your actions, start to draw the scene in depth. What belongs in the scene you are thinking of. How do your characters move from one block of the city, to the next, to the next. And in the case of action scenes, literally using paper to physically layout the scene might be necessary.

Obviously, these can't be the only methods that work. However, they are what I do. Again, maybe for me it is a lot easier based on my past. Still, I hope by sharing my actual thought process it can help you better write your scenes.