description - How does a person go about describing a place/experience that they never personally experienced before, like a circus?

I've never been to a circus, and all the shows and videos I've seen about them don't give off the full effect.

How does a person go about describing a place/experience that they never personally experienced before?

Is there a specific feel that a writer should get into in order to write about something so colorful and full of scents?

Answer

Your question reminds me of an article I once read by the novelist Isaac Asimov. He said that his first attempt at writing fiction was about people living in a small town, and that others told him this was a bad idea because he had to that point never been outside New York City. But, he said, he went on to write many science fiction novels about life on other planets, and he'd never been to other planets either.

So CAN you write about places you've never been or things you've never done? Sure. But it's tricky. There are a million details that you might get wrong and that you might not even think of.

Sure, some things you might just get away with. Even if readers realize they're wrong, they'll accept them for the sake of the story. Like if you say that a character is standing on the corner of Fourth Street and Elm in Foobarville and he sees a startling headline on a newspaper in the kiosk there, someone who has been to Foobarville might know that there is no newspaper kiosk on that corner. But he'd probably gloss over it. You needed the character to see this headline to move the plot forward, so yeah, whatever.

But other mistakes are more glaring. Two examples come to mind:

1. 
   

   Okay, not a fiction story, but I recently saw an ad with a headline, I forget the exact words, but something about "people in Michigan are discovering" how this company can save them money on their cars. And they have a picture of people standing in front of a building with a sign reading "Motor Vehicle Bureau". Except ... we don't have such a thing as a "Motor Vehicle Bureau" here in Michigan. Licenses and car registrations are done at the Secretary of State office. It told me right off that the people who made this ad wanted to make it sound like it was something tailored to Michigan, but in fact they didn't know the most basic things about car ownership in Michigan.

   
   



2. 
   

   I saw a documentary about a murder that took place in Wendover, Nevada. It caught my attention because my daughter lives in Wendover, Nevada and I have been there many times. They had some re-enactments of events leading up to the murder, including one that they said was in the parking lot of the high school. And you can see the thick forest all around the parking lot. Except that Wendover is in the middle of a desert; there are about ten trees in the entire town. That scene was not filmed anywhere near Wendover. I found it very distracting.

   
   

It's pretty hard to find a circus in America today. Ringling Brothers, probably the most famous, just went out of business in 2017. My brother used to work for Clyde Beatty Cole Brothers circus, which held out for a long time but apparently went under in 2016, according to something I just found on the Internet. Apparently there are still some out there: https://wanderwisdom.com/misc/Touring-circuses-In-the-United-States-and-Beyond I don't know if circuses are still thriving in other parts of the world.

If you can't attend an actual circus, at least try to find books by or about circus people.