Everything Has a Place

(Post by Kirsten)

* Photo credit

It's time for part-two of our three-part exercise!

Today's exercise is focused on creating setting. As writer Elizabeth Bowen famously said, "Nothing can happen nowhere." It's important to remember as you write that your reader can only see what you describe for her. If you don't intentionally create setting, the characters and plot you've taken pains to paint vividly will still feel flat and colorless. They can only exist if they exist somewhere. 

More than that, setting not only gives characters a place to be and plot a space in which to happen, it enriches, develops, and is integral to who your characters are and why they act and react as they do. (Just think for a moment, for instance, about how different you would be if you'd grown up in an entirely different location or a different time period. How does where you live and when you live influence the way you see the world, yourself, and others? How does it influence the choices you make?)

Great writers know the essential value of well written setting. Here's writer Mindy Friddle's blog, on which she offers a great sampling of setting descriptions from novels you'll probably find familiar. And here is writer Shaunta Grimes on setting as well.

So, now it's your turn to shift your gaze to place. And again, this exercise could be considered part of the work you're doing on a single piece, whose character(s) you developed yesterday (and whose plot you'll work on tomorrow); it might instead be a single, stand-alone exercise--the start of a story or poem. Up to you.

Write three paragraphs, each set in the same location but 10 years apart. Where is this place? Inside or outside? Private residence or public place? City or country? What changes about this place over the course of ten years? Or twenty? Focus each paragraph just on a description of the setting--no characters, no plot. Find one detail of the place to keep consistent in each of the paragraphs (an object, for instance, that remains in the room--or, if you're writing a natural landscape, perhaps a feature of that place remains unchanged, like a body of water or a specific tree).