The location is where your story takes place. For example, Hogwarts is the location for the Harry Potter stories.

Some teachers bang on (and on) about ‘putting more adjectives in your writing.’ Now, don’t get me wrong, adjectives are important (you can’t write a brilliant description without them), but there is more to writing a good description than simply ‘putting in more adjectives’. You need to use descriptive techniques. And guess what? You’ve come to the right place to learn all about them!

There are three stages to writing a brilliant description:

  1. Imagining the place you are describing
  2. Choosing an atmosphere
  3. Deciding which descriptive skills to use

The starting point for writing a brilliant description is to form a visual picture in your imagination.  If I were describing a Vampire’s castle, I’d try to picture it in my mind before I started writing.  In other words, I’d try to imagine that I was there!

A clever technique is to base locations on a place you know, and then add some invented detail. I’ve visited lots of castles. I’d probably base my imaginary castle on one I’d actually visited, and then add some dried blood and cobwebs to make it a little spookier! If you can make a location seem realistic, the reader will believe in it, even if it exists only in your imagination!

Before you start writing, you should decide what atmosphere you are trying to create in your story.

Imagine a little cottage in the middle of a forest. We could set all sorts of stories in the same cottage – a fairy tale, obviously; a horror story (‘The Vampire’s Cottage!’); or a fantasy story (‘The Dwarves Who Lived In the Woods’).

If we were writing a fairy tale for infants, we might want the cottage to seem bright and cheerful, surrounded by bunny rabbits and the smell of warm biscuits; we’d probably want to describe it quite differently for our horror story.

I’m sure you know all about the five senses:

Sights
Sounds
Smells
Touch
Taste

Don’t forget that there is more to writing a good description than the five senses!  You must also try to include the following advanced descriptive skills:

  1. Similes (a simile is a comparison using ‘like’ or ‘as’)
  2. Metaphors (A metaphor is a comparison which doesn’t use ‘like’ or ‘as’)
  3. Colours
  4. Light and shadows
  5. Movement
  6. Details: ‘Zooming in’

Enjoy this description from one of my old Year Six pupils. See if you can spot which of our descriptive skills she used:
  1. Sights – ‘Everything is black’; you can ‘see’ the servants, the wall and the fireplace.
  2. Smell – the air is ‘thick with pipe smoke and alcohol fumes’
  3. Sound – The squeaking creatures – rats!
  4. Figurative language – The writer has used a simile – ‘It was as if the castle had stolen the sunlight, and was refusing to give it back.’
  5. ‘Zooming in’ – the writer has ‘zoomed’ in on the jagged edges of the black wood
  6. Colours – everything is ‘black’. The rats have ‘red’ eyes.
  7. Shadows – the servants are ‘skulking in the shadows’
  8. Movement – both the rats and servants are scuttling about. We can also imagine the pipe smoke swirling about.


(c) Nick Hitchen 2007
Last updated on August 13, 2007