by Dawn Hawkins

Created on: March 13, 2009   Last Updated: September 18, 2010

A writer has a gift for bringing things to life that others do not possess. It takes a great imagination that is mixed thoroughly with great research skills. With these two things well in hand, you can make anything appeal to a reader as though you had lived every minute yourself.

Writing about a place you have never been takes a great deal of both of these things. In order to do it effectively and believably, you have to take your research to a new level. Understanding what a place stands for and what kind of people live there are essential to making you imagination come to life on paper.

It may help if you do an exercise first to see if you have what it takes to put it all together. This is a favorite of mine and the hope is that you will enjoy the skill building exercise as much as this writer did.

The internet makes it possible for us to do things that we could never do before. With this, comes the ability to talk to people from around the world. My choice was Western Australia. The chat friend was a Catholic High School principal with a love for learning and teaching others.

If you chat or have an internet friend in a place that is of interest to you, it is an opportunity to test your writing skills at the highest level.

Listen

Listen to what the other person tells you about the place they live. You can pick up an amazing amount of first-hand information that way. You don't have to ask them to describe it. As a good writer, you will only need to know the name of the place they live. They will drop hints about different places they like and what the people there are like. In fact, if you read your subject well, they will give you far more information about the place they live without even knowing it. It is your job to pick up those little details and burn them into your mind.

Image

Close your eyes and think of the place. How does the descriptions that you have picked up from your subject make you feel? Feelings play a huge percentage in the way that you write about something. Generally closing you eyes for a couple of minutes lets you picture the place in question.

Study

The hard part comes when you are doing your research. You want to find accurate information. Finding pictures of certain features of a city or what the water really looks like will help you in the description when you attempt to put it on paper. Research should be extensive so that you can describe it to a person who lives there and have them say how amazingly accurate you are.

Never go solely by the words that you found. You must see pictures of it to accurately describe it from your viewpoint. The research you do on the area is extremely important.

Once you have set these practices in motion, you should be able to describe a place that you have never been to so perfectly that a person who lives there will be stopped dead in their tracks when they read your story.

Writers describe things they don't personally know everyday. It is this art that sets them apart from those who only wish they could be as completely descriptive. After sending my story to my Australian friend, Greg Williams, he sent an email back stating how amazed he was with my description and to ask me if I was sure that I hadn't been there before. This was a true test of my writing ability. Receiving such a high compliment from a man with such a high educational background was a true lift to the spirits of this writer.

This article is in dedication to Mr. Greg Williams for his ability to draw out in a writer what may have forever laid dormant forever. May every writer have a friend who is able to give them what this man gave me.

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