Jabrosky
Banned
I'm generally of the philosophy that description comes most in handy for things that are unfamiliar either to the reader or to the viewpoint character. Given that, what happens when your character ends up in a situation where she's surrounded by unfamiliar doodads?
I have in mind a scene where my heroine, an African jungle girl captured by dwarves, finds herself caged up and "exhibited" at the dwarf governess's dining hall. The dwarves have a culture that vaguely resembles the antebellum American South, albeit more matriarchal. Therefore we would expect their dining hall to have a bunch of mid-19th-centuryish technology and decoration lying around that our jungle girl would have never encountered before. For example, she's probably never seen a chandelier or neoclassical architecture. I don't want to swamp the scene's opening with descriptive info-dumping on the room's alien contents, but I do want to give my reader a sense that they're in a pseudo-antebellum Southern dining hall. How can I do that within the limits of my jungle girl heroine's point of view?
I have in mind a scene where my heroine, an African jungle girl captured by dwarves, finds herself caged up and "exhibited" at the dwarf governess's dining hall. The dwarves have a culture that vaguely resembles the antebellum American South, albeit more matriarchal. Therefore we would expect their dining hall to have a bunch of mid-19th-centuryish technology and decoration lying around that our jungle girl would have never encountered before. For example, she's probably never seen a chandelier or neoclassical architecture. I don't want to swamp the scene's opening with descriptive info-dumping on the room's alien contents, but I do want to give my reader a sense that they're in a pseudo-antebellum Southern dining hall. How can I do that within the limits of my jungle girl heroine's point of view?