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SETTING

When you are reading over your first draft check to make sure you've helped your reader to respond to your setting with more senses than just sight. What about the sounds, of the city at night, for example? What about the texture of things touched? What about the smell rising from that swamp of croaking frogs?

What about your protagonist's setting within his or her peer group, family and even the larger community?

Does the time period in which the story takes place affect either the action of the characters? If so, have you taken care that the reader knows when the story is taking place? (readers will assume it's now unless you tell them differently).

Going outside without any shoes on today will have very different consequences in January than going outside without any shoes on in July.


EXERCISE S
1. In enough detail to give a reader a clear mental picture of your setting describe the setting for your story then -- write at least one paragraph with your protagonist in that setting but make sure that each sentence increases the reader's awareness of the setting you've just described. 

   
  2.. Choose a room you know well.  Describe this room as seen by a character who is happy with her life.  Now, describe the same room through the viewpoint of a character who is disappointed with her life.       The circumstances might be poor health, failed relationship, 
   death in the family, loss of job, or anything else you can think of.  


    
     3.. Defamiliarize! Take a familiar setting and describe it from the point of view of someone who is unfamiliar with or even uncomfortable in that location.

                  Examples: a dormitory, library, dining hall, movie theater, shopping mall, suburban home, city apartment, local park, etc. Describe the setting through rich sensory images. Include weather, temperature, scenery, physical structures and objects in that location. Write the setting in a way that mimics a camera slowly panning around the location, showing every
detail of the place. Let us feel the strangeness of the location through the character’s eyes.

 

    4. Describe a setting (landscape or place) in such a way that it helps explain the behavior of the people who live there.  For example, a rotting, closed factory with broken out windows surrounded by tall weeds and garbage might have something to do with the amount of people who hang out in the parking lot of the local convenience store breaking beer bottles against the wall.