Anyone can describe a setting. It’s your job to help the reader feel it.
Use all your senses. Is it hot or cold; stuffy or humid; drafty or stale. How does it smell? Rank or pleasant; sour or sweet; acrid or fresh. How does it taste? How does it sound? You don’t need many words to do the job. Just a few well placed adjectives and verbs. Use words that also imply instead of straight description: decrepit, disheveled, ungainly. Your readers can build out the image using their own experience.
But what if you’re writing about a place you’ve never visited?
Hmm. Let’s count the places I’ve written about and never visited (or at least not long enough to do any setting-related research): Brittany, France; Elizabethan England (I’ve visited London, but there are very few Elizabethan era buildings left there); Puritan New England; Gilded Age New York City; Newport, Rhode Island; colonial-era Philadelphia; Dark Ages France; French Alps; North-eastern France; St. Louis; Boston’s North-end; West Point. If you’re counting…that’s the vast majority of the books I’ve written.
And yet readers tell me they feel like they’ve been there.
How do I do it? Look at that sentence again: ‘I make them feel like they’ve been there.’ Anyone can look at a photo or painting and get an idea of what a city looks like, but I try to tell the reader what it feels like. What are the sounds of the place? The scents? What kinds of materials have been used to construct its buildings? I sift through photos and paintings. I hoard of-the-era, eye-witness accounts. And then I place myself into that setting. I know what it sounds like to walk into a soaring medieval Cathedral; I know how light filters down from its windows. I know what it feels like when a wintery draft curls around my ankles and a malign tugs at my hair and then plasters it against my face. And I know how your mind plays tricks on you when you’ve been out in the snow for too long. All of those details? They’re not confined to a particular place or era. That’s the key to making your reader feel a setting: make them do that work themselves.