Settings are the overlooked stepsister to characters and plot, and they shouldn’t be. Your selection and description of settings are just as important as the development of characters and plot. If your characters and plot aren’t grounded in a setting, then you don’t have a story. You have dialogue and action, but readers have no frame within which to reference them. Below are three ways to use immersive settings to hook readers and transform your novel.

What do I mean by immersive settings?

These are settings that are described so effectively, that paint such vivid word pictures, that readers feel they are actually experiencing the story along with the POV character. Those kind of settings hook readers and keep them turning pages.

But how do I write immersive settings?

Evoke the five senses. Take a look at a scene you’ve written. What senses have you used to describe it? You don’t, and usually you shouldn’t, use all five senses in every scene. But choose more than just sight for readers to imagine the scene the characters are inhabiting.

What’s the mood? What mood do you want to convey to readers? What is the mood of your POV character in a particular scene? The mood will determine what senses you choose to describe the scene as well as specific words.

For example, my teen sleuth Rae Riley hates hospitals. She visited too many of them while her mother battled a losing fight with cancer. Since Rae is my POV character, I will choose senses and descriptions that show readers Rae’s opinion of hospitals. Here’s an excerpt from A Riddle in the Lonesome October. Rae and her dad are accompanying Rae’s cousin Amber to see her father in ICU as he fights for his life after a riding accident:

Amber shrank into herself as we made our way through the maze that all hospitals adopted as their floor plan. Even if the color scheme was different from the hospitals in North Carolina, the miles of dead white light made it look the same. 

In the elevator, Dad put his arm around Amber, and she leaned into him, her breathing loud. 

I swallowed for about the hundredth time, trying to ignore the antiseptic stench that permeated every inch of every hospital I’d ever been in. 

Now a character who sees hospitals and medical procedures in a positive way might describe this journey to the ICU in more hopeful words, such as the smell was clean or refreshing. Instead of feeling like she’s lost in a maze, she notices the precision and industry of the nurses and staff she walks past.

Limit your description to make the most impact. One of the best pieces of advice I’ve received on describing settings came from romantic suspense author DiAnn Mills. She said that when you invite someone into your home for the first time, you don’t overwhelm them with a history of how you acquired each piece of furniture in your living room. You’d only discuss the items they showed an interest in.

In a similar way, you only describe what a reader needs to orient themselves in a scene with the characters and experience it through their senses. But how do you know what readers need in each scene?

This takes a lot of work–reading novels similar to yours to see how other authors write immersive settings and then practicing the technique over and over in your own writing.

The best tip is to limit your descriptions to the few aspects of the setting that will impart the greatest impact. In the excerpt above, I decided that since Rae is an amateur photographer, she would notice the quality of the light in the hospital. Since smell is the strongest sense to evoke memories, I chose to use that sense to convey Rae’s discomfort in hospitals. Both the light and the smell quickly and clearly immerse readers not only in the setting they’re walking with Rae, but also immerse them in her mind.

Here are more tips on writing immersive scenes for your novel.