Setting and Specificity of Detail

Details make our writing real in the eyes of the reader.  And the best place to see detail (literally) is in the setting.  By examining how authors use setting to establish place, we can better understand how to use specific and relevant details to bring our writing to life.

English 227: Intro to Creative Writing

Place and Setting: The Habitat for Our Fictional Characters

Setting plays a crucial element in establishing the tone and context of the story.  As you write, choose setting details which reflect the nature of your protagonist and the world he or she inhabits

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Blocking - Setting

Radical Revision - Expanding Your Fiction

Radical Revision is one of the quickest ways to jump-start a story which may be hard to write.  One reason we assign this exercise is because it encourages you to view your work from multiple angles, and this in turn will give you more ways to approach writing in the future.  I've adapted this exercise to help overcome a common issue that writers face: insufficient detail.

Writing the Setting Fiction Sketch

Setting.  It's the easiest aspect of fiction to identify.  The author describes a landscape or an object, and it's setting.  Deciding the importance of that setting to the story is somewhat more complicated, but it's an important consideration as you write your own fiction.

Writing Tone

A friend of mine e-mailed today asking about how to teach tone to her students.  And this is a very important question for any writer.  In your stories, physical descriptions, actions, and character details will carry the reader only so far.  Besides understanding and "seeing" the story, the reader needs to feel the story.  This is where tone comes in.

What is a Setting Poem?

Before I discuss the specifics of setting poems, I'd like to introduce a major concept in poetry which is often overlooked when trying to categorize poems.  Essentially, any poem has elements of every poem.  For example, in Bishop's "In the Waiting Room," it's a narrative poem, but we have the elements of a child-like voice and the setting details surrounding her narrative.  In Larkin's "Church Going," we have a similar effect, but it's a setting poem because the narrative is somewhat less important, but we still have some elements of narrative along with the voice of a man who's detached from religion and church in general.