Time PlaceCircumstances

“If a piece of literature does not create the setting for us, if it seems to occur in a no-place no-time or in a vague-place fuzzy-time, we cannot experience it, or else we must experience that vagueness itself as crucial to the action.” – Janet Burroway

description

Your routine, your neighborhood, your take on home, history, climate, and the cosmos is unique, like your voice, and inseperable from your voice.

Create your vision for your reader.

Draw a rough floor plan of the first house you remember living in.

Take a mental tour through the house, pausing (and marking on the floor plan) where significant events occurred.

Pick one of these events and write about it.

Pay attention to the setting and the atmosphere of the event. How does your relation to the space, light, weather, walls, furniture, and objects affect what you are doing and feeling? Does the place represent safety or confinement?

Although imagery has earned a bad wrap because of overuse, this is the time to employ it.

Seriously.Find the fine details.

Remember that setting says a great deal about the people in your story.

Of Mice and Men would not be the same if it had not taken place on a ranch in the times of the Great Depression. Right?

Write about a landscape with a single tree.

Describe the tree in as exact detail as you would a human being.

Add a human being to the scene. What is the relationship of the

human to the tree?

Setting often begins a piece, for the very good reason that this is the first thing we register in life.

When we enter a place, we take it in as a panorama.

Pretend you’re a camera and give your reader the picture with words.

Usually contains some element of time and weather: wet or dry, dark or light, winter or summer, calm or storm, etc.

TIMES/PLACES/WEATHER

the city in the rain midnight on the farm 1890, in the parlor high noon on the river a spring moment in a bar, after hours the dusty road dawn in a foreign

place

MOOD / QUALITY OF ATMOSPHERE

sinister sick with love full of promise suicidal dangerous suspense happy-go-lucky lonely

WRITE A POEM IN WHICH YOU MAKE THE SETTING SUGGEST THE ATMOSPHERE. IF THE CONNECTION IS NOT OBVIOUS, YOUR PIECE WILL BE MORE INTERESTING.