Real Places and Real Struggles

This week, I was trying to describe a place that actually exists.  You can go there.  People know about it.  You can look it up on Google Maps.  It was just a couple paragraphs of description of a place with which I'm familiar, a place that fills me with an unique emotion that I was excited to share with the world. 

And it was the most painful couple of paragraphs.  After an hour I had two hundred words, which is nothing.  I hadn't even finished the description enough to move on, so I took a break to do something I don't even remember like watch Netflix or play Pic-a-pix.  And those two hundred words weren't even good.  They were boring and flat and confusing.  I had no motivation to write that section, to write any other section, or write at all.

So I got to thinking about why this was so awful.  I don't think it was that I wanted to be accurate.  I don't think it was that I cared that someone would read and go, "That's not the right kind of tree, you hack!"  Although, I did spend a lot of time looking at pictures of the area, then looking at info graphics of different tree types to describe them correctly.  But I think this quest for acuracy is more of a symptom than the root of the problem.

Eventually I realized that the passage felt flat because it wasn't conveying the feeling I wanted to express.  I have a very distinct emotion when I'm in this place and I wanted that to come through in the writing.  That was the goal, not description of the landscape, but a description of how the landscape affects the character.  But I was going about this by describing what it looks like and expecting the reader to have that same reaction. 

I was going about it like if I described the breadth of the sky and the crunch of the grass and the contrast between the road and the foliage, the reader would get the same sense of awe that I feel in a country that runs wild.  When that emotion wasn't coming across, my first instinct was that I wasn't describing it as fully as I should, thus the quest for accuracy in my descriptions.  But the way I went about accuracy made the passage feel even more distant and even more like a slog for me to write.  I didn't know the tree I had in my head was a buckeye, and I won't remember that next week, so why would I expect a reader to have an emotional reaction there?  No, I need to describe what it is about a buckeye that stands out, that makes it part of the landscape, that makes it important. 

I need to describe the way this setting affects the character.