Five Tips to Adding Depth with Setting

“It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents — except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.”

• Edward George Bulwer-Lytton 1830

One of the most famous descriptions… what does it do to us? Easy. It puts us right there. It firmly removes us from the chair we are sitting in and places us in the 19th century.

There’s a reason this is one of the most quoted lines in literature — it works!

So, how do you do that? How do you remove your reader from where they are physically and place them somewhere else? Does it take a mammoth sentence like the one above? I’ve got 5 tricks and tips on writing great description.

Obviously, it doesn’t take a sentence like Bulwer-Lytton’s because writers do this all the time. With great descriptions and evocative language, they transport their readers into a world of their own creation.

The trick, contrary to the sentence above, is not in paragraph-long sentences, but in short, phrases throw in here and there. As a reader, you might not even notice the descriptions an author throws in. They’re…