Keeping Words in Perspective

A while back, I was working on one of my fantasy stories when I wrote a scene where the main character is being carried in flight over his home forest and where he describes the forest below like an ocean on a stormy day. When I went back to the scene later, I realized something was wrong. My main character lived in a place where it would have been impossible for him to have ever seen the ocean before, and so his description would be very inconsistent with his personal knowledge. This led me to thinking about the use of certain words and descriptions in stories.

Given our modern day today, including an internet that allows you to do quick searches in the blink of an eye and cameras that can take pictures of places that we have never seen before, most people can get some kind of taste of what lies outside our own personal world. However, in the days before instantaneous digital searches, such things did not exist. If you lived on the 19th century American frontier, it was highly unlikely that you had ever seen the ocean. If you lived in the deserts of the Middle East, you likely had never seen a river or forests before. So, if you had never experienced those things, the words "forests," "oceans," or "rivers" would probably not be in your vocabulary.

Related to this is seen in time or culture clashes. I'm currently working on a story where the character comes from a fantasy-esque world and enters our own modern day. His technology is pre-Medieval European, and so he has no idea what cars, modern medicine, phones, etc... are. So when he describes seeing the modern world, I have to describe it using words that he would know but also making sure that the audience gets some small understanding of what I'm describing on paper.

So, when you are writing a story, keep in mind what words you are using. Are they ones that your characters are familiar with? And can you give your audience enough simple clues for them to figure out what you are describing? This is important because it keeps your writing realistic.