Stuck for how to describe a scene? Forget what you know. Don’t worry about what the reader might know. Come at it as an entirely unfamiliar thing.

To do this, Edmund White has some advice:

One technique that the Russian Formalists use, and Nabokov and Tolstoy, is called defamiliarization. And the idea is that you describe everything as though you’re from Mars, so let’s say a girl’s first ball or going to the opera for the first time. Both of those scenes are in War and Peace. At the opera, there’s all these fat people coming on stage and screaming, and then everybody beats their hands together. It is described as though you’ve never seen it before and have no idea what it’s supposed to represent. It’s in some other language…

If it’s good enough for Nabokov and Tolstoy then it should work for you.