I find descriptions hard to write, but stories need them. Our readers want to be able to drop themselves into the scene, and authors need to give them at least a few clues.

This week, I’m inviting writers to drop a description into the comments. Mine is from Beached, which is coming out next week in the box set Summer Romance on Main Street.

The shape of the harbor had given Valentine Bay its name: a heart on its side. A gap at the eastern point provided entrance to the harbor. On the western side, directly opposite, the wharves and moorings of the fishing port occupied a rocky promontory between two gently curved beaches. North Beach was currently undeveloped farm and bush land, though the planned hotel would change that. On the shores of South Beach, the settlement spread from the fishing port around the curve of the southern lobe of the heart and beyond, stretching partway along the road that led to the historic lighthouse at the harbor entrance.

Most of the shops in Valentine Bay lined one side of Beach Road or the other. That hadn’t changed. The shops themselves had—in her childhood, there’d been half a dozen businesses offering services and products to the locals and the rare visitor. A dairy, a fish and chip shop, a general store, a bakery, a book shop that also sold stationery and gifts, a garage with petrol pumps out the front and a workshop out the back. If any of those survived, they had gone upmarket to match the twenty or so others that now extended the shopping area far beyond the boundaries she remembered.

On the coast side of the road, the shops, cafes and restaurants backed onto the beach reserve, a wide stretch of lawn with picnic tables and public barbecue stations scattered among the pohutukawa trees and plantings of tough flax and ornamental grasses.

The businesses on the other side backed into the hill, no longer half farmland, but split up into residential lots with an eclectic mix of houses: Victorian villas cheek-by-jowl with modern beach extravaganzas and little square mid-20th century holiday houses, or baches as they were known here in New Zealand’s North Island.