October Novel Prep Challenge

The contest round for this week is:
Oct. 19: - Setting: CONTEST ROUND: Setting Description
Describe a setting in words. Use all five senses and make your reader experience the setting as if he or she were there.

The important thing to note here is "use all 5 senses."

Too many will describe their setting by telling the reader what they see, and that is all.

But there's a problem with that - it eliminates too much that makes a setting unique. Here's an example:

The hotel is old, built in 1863, made of the sandstone of the area with wooden-framed windows, made double-glazed in the 1960s, and a wide verandah out the front. When you walk inside, the bar itself is still the original one, constructed by old man Swann when he built the hotel. The lighting is subdued except over the snooker table, where it is much brighter. Two televisions are playing the same thing on opposite walls. Half a dozen tables and many more chairs are scattered around, but most patrons prefer to sit on the high stools at the bar, open to serving on three sides.

Sounds like a normal bar, right? Could be anywhere, in any place in Australia. But your story is unique; let's make this unique.

The hotel is old, built in 1863, made of the sandstone of the area, the outer walls rough to the touch, showing the lack of qualified masons at the time, so far away from the state's capital. The wooden-framed windows, made double-glazed in the 1960s, are also rough, and patrons find that running fingers over them often results in splinters, no matter how many coatings of paint have been applied. Out the front, it is covered by a wide verandah, which traps the sounds of the street, making the pub's own noises sound muffled, but making every car that goes past seem like a truck; for that reason, very few sit outside, giving it an abandoned feel. But the town is not busy, and so the smells of traffic and exhaust fumes tend not to linger; instead the nearby gum and wattle trees send their aroma across the block on the wind, giving the pub a floral sense that stands in stark contrast to its man-made origins.
         When you walk inside, the first thing you notice is the stark contrast with the pleasant smells of the outside world - stale beer and human sweat fills the thick stone-walled front bar, these smells embedded into the bar itself, still the original, constructed by old man Swann when he built the hotel. On a Friday or Saturday night, you can almost taste the beer in the air; in a place like this, beer and the occasional wine are pretty much all that the patrons drink. And so on...

Those extra senses add a sense of age, and add a sense of place - not a major city - to the hotel, making the setting more personal. Now, I know this is not a great description, and (like all descriptions) is tell, but I hope you get the idea of how to utilise everything in a descriptive piece to transport the reader to your setting.