Road Trip to NaNo: How to Add Texture to Your Setting

NaNoWriMo is an international event, and the stories being written every year reflect our hundreds of participating regions. We’re taking a Road Trip to NaNo to hear from our amazing volunteers and writers all around the world. Today, one of our Municipal Liaisons in the Otago-Southland region in New Zealand shares how his home inspires him to add texture to his settings:

I probably don’t have to explain to anyone who’s ever seen Lord of the Rings how beautiful New Zealand is, and how rich and varied the landscapes are. I live in Dunedin, and it’s impossible to go anywhere in the city without rolling green hills or the wide sprawling coastline in your view, and more often than not you get a good helping of both.

The more inland parts of the city often smell faintly of the rich damp wood of nearby subtropical rainforests, and closer to the coast, when the wind is right, the salty smell of the ocean fills your nostrils and you can feel the sea on your skin. The countryside is just over the hill, and every so often (especially when sheep trucks pass through town) you get a sudden strong waft of earthy country air.

It’s easy at times to take for granted when you experience it on a daily basis, but every location has texture. There are sensory factors that are completely unique to every place, and some that are universal. Really grabbing hold of that texture and putting it down in words is a great tool to draw audiences into the world your characters inhabit…

This can be on a grand scale, like the description of my home up there, or a smaller, more personal level. For example, everyone knows the scratchy fabric of waiting room chairs, so when your character is stressed and anxiously running their fingertips over the rough arm of the chair, the reader can really inhabit that moment with them.

Sprinkle your descriptions carefully, though. Too much all at once can overwhelm and potentially alienate a reader, but just the right amount (and used consistently) and readers will step into your story like it’s a real place they’re visiting for the first time.

Take some time to think about the places you go in your day-to-day life. What does the air smell like? What are the sounds and textures you experience? How do they differ from what your characters experience? How are they similar?

Before you sit down this November to battle your way to 50K, try to really feel out the sensory aspects of your story’s world, pinpoint specific things that you want to stand out, and think of ways you can best express them through writing, so readers will be drawn in and feel every footstep alongside your main character.

Rowan Stanley is returning as ML for the Otago and Southland region for his fifth and final year in 2014. He mainly writes young adult fiction, dabbling in fantasy and science fiction. Away from the keyboard he is a dancer, and spends an increasing amount of time training, choreographing and performing. One day he hopes to master the difficult art of sleeping.