Look at the picture above.What do you see? The river winds its way through the forest. Theplants and trees and mosses along the ground. The clouds that cover up all the blue in the sky. Write down a basic description, just the surface details. Set the scene for somebody. Tell them what you see.

Now, once that exercie is done, look beyond the surface details and really flesh the scene out. Look for signs of events in the past, or indications that things may happen in the near future. For example, the sky is cloudy. Has it just rained, or is it going to rain soon? Or perhaps it's just an overcast day. Is it hot and humid, or a bit chilly?

What about in the trees themselves? This bit requires a little more creativity than just guessing the weather, since the picture above isn't clear enough to show all the signs, but dig a little and you'll be able to find a lot worth writing about. Animal tend to live in the woods, right? What kind of animals are in the area? Maybe there's a squirrel chattering in the trees, sending an alarm after being started by a passing deer. The rustle of plants low to the ground could be a mouse or vole running to the safety of its hole.

How does the river smell? Is it fresh and clean, or does it have that dirty bitter scent that comes with pollution? What about the scent of the greenery in the area? Do the woods smell like pine?

Setting the scene is an important part of writing. If you don't tell your readers where the characters are, how can they be expected to get into the story properly? Is the detective having a screaming match with the suspect in the interrogation room of a police station, or in the middle of a crowded street? Is the final battle against good and evil taking place an top of a mountain, or in the middle of a farmer's field?

These things might not seem like the most important parts of what you're trying to convey, but they do play a large and signficant part of things. To the reader, a properly set scene helps them understand the story more, allows them to more easily visualize what's happening and so better appreciate the story. Give them an event in a place that has no description, and you're going to find that readers actually get a little lost and confused. If a blizzard suddenly comes up and you've given no indication that it was even cloudy, this can be distracting enough to take the edge off what's happening elsewhere.

Okay, maybe that specific example and reaction is a bit of an exaggeration. Especially when one assumes that there's only one scene that needs to be dealt with. But when you look at your writing as a linear progression of events, proper scene description becomes even more important.

For example, if a blizzard suddenly comes up, and the last scene that was described said it was the middle of summer in the Bahamas, there's a problem. Either the snow is something that even the characters will find strange, or you forgot to mention that your characters are now in northern Canada the following winter. I've read books where the author neglected to let the reader know these facts. It makes the reader have to take a step back from the story to figure things out, and it comes across like sloppy work, as though the author couldn't be bothered to write a few simple details that would actually have made a good deal of difference.

The trick is twofold. The first thing to do is place yourself in the scene that you've got your characters in. If they're in a busy city street, remember what it was like last time you were in the same sort of place. Now go through your five senses. What is the noise level like? What can you see? What can you smell? Go through your senses and remember what information they conveyed to you, and add those bits of information to the scene you're writing.

That doesn't mean you have to spend half a chapter describing the conversations you heard a the bus stop or describing how the sunlight felt on your face. But if it's loud and your characters are having a conversation, mention that it's loud. Maybe one of the characters mishears something and has to get the other to repeat it. Little details like that can make a scene incredibly realistic, and make it easier for your readers to get themselves involved in a scene, easier for them to relate to what's going on.

Try a few writing exercises to help strengthen this skill. The first one is what I described above, in reference to the picture. Look at a photograph, and describe the scene. Remember to ask the "what if" questions that can add details. Follow the lines of thought that come from the questions you ask, and write them down.

The second is an exercise of memory as well as or writing. Pick a place you've been in the past, and write about it. Don't necessarily write about what you were doing, but write about where you were, the place itself. Your physical surroundings. Remember how the air smelled, what the temperature was, the things that were around you.

Write these things down and then show them to a friend, somebody you trust to show your writing to. Ask them if they can see what you saw in those scenes. Ask them if they have any questions about what was in the scenes that they don't think you described very well, or that might have been missed. Constructive criticism and review are good tools to make use of when improving your writing skills, even when doing simple practice exercises.

And you never know. Perhaps writing a random scene might end up evolving into something greater. The opening scene to an epic story that came about because of the "what if" questions that you asked yourself about the hidden parts of a scene. It sounds a bit silly, but that's happened to me more than once. I start of writing something simple, and it becomes something much more complex. One scene suddenly spawns characters, a plot, a dozen different viewpoints.

It's amazing what can come of practice sometimes.