The origin of the word vivid is derived from vivere, “to live,” like the words vivacious or vive. To make something vivid is to bring something to life. Vivid colors are life-like colors. A vivid description is one that makes it come alive in a reader’s mind.

The best trick for making your prose more vivid is not to rely so much on your memory as much as a description you write of an actual place or situation. On your travel writing adventures, try to find a way to take notes, and do this exercise. Find a place that you want to describe, and sit down if you can. First, visually take in the entire surroundings by turning around slowly in 360 degrees. We might want to focus on the Grand Canyon itself, but turning around, we notice the whole place, the people and cars, the horizon all around. After taking some notes, close your eyes and focus on the sounds. Then, do the same for the smell (this is easier with your eyes closed as well). Finally, feel where you are standing or sitting. The exercise can be modified depending on where you are at (the sense exercise works well in restaurants as well because you get to also use taste—nobody wants to taste the dirt at the Grand Canyon). You will be surprised at how many words you actually know that you don’t often use if you focus your senses and take notes about those senses.

However, just picking the correct word and adding a slew of adjectives can lead to muddled prose, so we should save the real work for descriptions that matter. And sometimes we don’t need all the senses if the visuals are all that we have. Isabella Bird in Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains is fascinated with Long’s Peak. In this passage, Bird is looking at Long’s Peak from some distance, but she places the reader there with her, as she scans visually from her perspective up to the mountain:

The scenery up here is glorious, combining sublimity with beauty, and in the elastic air, fatigue has dropped off from me. This is no region for tourists and women, only for a few elk and bear hunters at times, and its unprofaned freshness gives me new life. I cannot by any words give you an idea of scenery so different from any that you or I have ever seen. This is an upland valley of grass and flowers, of glades and sloping lawns, and cherry-fringed beds of dry streams, and clumps of pines artistically placed, and mountain sides densely pine clad, the pines breaking into fringes as they come down upon the “park,” and the mountains breaking into pinnacles of bold grey rock as they pierce the blue of the sky. A single dell of bright green grass, on which dwarf clumps of the scarlet poison oak look like beds of geraniums, slopes towards the west, as if it must lead to the river which we seek. Deep, vast canyons, all trending westwards, lie in purple gloom. Pine-clad ranges, rising into the blasted top of Storm Peak, all run westwards too, and all the beauty and glory are but the frame out of which rises—heaven-piercing, pure in its pearly luster, as glorious a mountain as the sun tinges red in either hemisphere—the splintered, pinnacled, lonely, ghastly, imposing, double-peaked summit of Long’s Peak, the Mont Blanc of Northern Colorado.