If you want to practice writing settings, try writing down everything you notice about the environment around you. That was a bit of advice a professor gave me, back in the days when I was taking writing workshops. There have been several instances where I've pulled out my phone or my notebook and jotted down every detail I could see. These details have helped me later on, when I'm trying to write a fictional scene in a fictional setting influenced by my own personal experiences. But setting writing also helps to sharpen my description skills across the board.
If I hadn't followed my professor's advice, I never would have noticed that sand isn't the same on all Gulf of Mexico beaches. Not just the color, which can vary from bright white to light gray (particularly after rain). Not just the dimensions of the beach, which can be thin on the beach in Galveston, Texas, or wider on Passe-a-Grille, St. Pete Beach, Florida. These sorts of details are easy to spot, hard to overlook and easy to recall later. But there are other details I noticed in the moment but that are harder to recall later on, details that help to bring the beach to life.
For instance, sand is looser on the Passe-a-Grille beach. It shifts easily underfoot. Each footstep presses your feet down into the sand, and when you lift it, you bring a bit of sand with you, which goes shooting in an arch to sprinkle on the sand just ahead of you. Every footstep is a challenge, and it feels a tiny bit like climbing. Every step takes you closer to the water, but the water still feels so far away, you try to quicken your pace. But the sand shifts with every footstep, creating a mini depression, and if you press your foot down further, the sand falls on top of it, covering it in a moment. What's more, the sand immediately under your foot is pressed together, becoming compact and hard, and the arch of your foot is in mild pain through your sandal. And when you finally reach the edge of the beach, the bare sand becomes more compact and covered in tiny, intact shells. There's a line of turtle grass and manatee grass, and then, just before the surf, the beach slants, turning into a hard-packed incline that is permanently gray, wet as it is constantly washed by the surf, and partly covered in more shells. You take off your shoes and walk carefully across the shells and manatee grass and short slope, and then you're in the water.
Meanwhile, the sand on the Galveston beach is compact throughout the entire beach, especially when wet after rain, as it was during my visit. It is soft, not hard. While the Floridian beach is a challenge to walk across, the Texan beach is not. The sand does not sink under your footsteps, taking your feet with it. The water is right there, and it takes almost no effort to get to it. There are scattered shells across the beach, but it is an easy matter to avoid stepping on them. There is no incline to descend to reach the water. The surf washes onto half of the beach with each surge of the waves.
Both beaches border the Gulf of Mexico. But they are very different. Setting writing helped me pay attention to those details and record them so I could remember them later.
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