Tag Archive - setting

How to Choose Setting with a Purpose

August 27, 2018 in Novel Structure with 4 Comments

Settings in fiction are often in the background—literally. Characters are talking and doing things, but readers get merely a glimpse of setting.

A character enters a building in some unidentified place (town, countryside, the Moon?) and goes into a room that has no description whatsoever.

The character walks outside, and there is no notice of weather or time of day or season. The reader can’t see the neighborhood or the environment.

Face it: if a writer doesn’t care much about setting, the reader won’t either.

Is that a problem? Maybe not for some readers. But most people will agree that the task of a fiction writer is to immerse her readers into her story. And story is setting. Characters have to be somewhere while they are talking, thinking, and behaving. Continue Reading…

Masterful Setting Description Part 3

January 1, 2018 in Novel Structure with 4 Comments

Masterful setting description teaches us an important lesson: writers need to take the time to paint enough of a sensory-rich picture in order for readers to feel they are there—or at very least, get a glimpse of how the setting feels and looks to the POV character.

As we’ve discussed in many of these posts on masterful description, all details presented in description is the POV character’s observation. When you are in POV and you describe a tree, you are not giving dry statistics about that tree; you are sharing what that character notices when looking at that tree. And the way that tree is described has to

  1. fit the character’s personality, vocabulary, background, and education (you can’t have an uneducated character describe the tree the way a botanist would);
  2. fit the character’s mood at that moment (the choice of phrasing and adjectives, as well as the aspects of the tree noticed, has to reveal, mirror, or imply the mind-set);
  3. and help set the tone of the scene.

That description could do much more than what I stated above. It could act as a metaphor in some way, or a motif. Spindly bare arms could signify bareness, for example, and while the character may not be standing in front of the tree thinking, “Gee, this tree is like me: barren,” you could masterfully describe the tree in a way that the reader gets the subtext, the unspoken thoughts, that are often more powerful than the outward descriptions. Continue Reading…

Masterful Setting Description Part 2

December 25, 2017 in Novel Structure with 6 Comments

Setting description in most novels is the weakest element. As with character description, many writers don’t want to bother describing the setting. Or they don’t understand how vitally important it is, in order to paint a sensory picture of where characters are so that readers can feel as if they are right there with them, experiencing the action alongside them.

That’s hard to do if there is no setting; in many scenes I critique, the characters seem to be floating in a black void of nothingness. Which would be fine if that were the intent of the author. But, sad to say, the writer is probably assuming her readers are picturing the setting via some ESP into the author’s mind.

Probably the most prevalent reason for not writing great setting description is the author doesn’t know how. And yet . . . there are countless novels with beautiful setting descriptions. The whole key to becoming a masterful writer is to study masters of writing. And that’s what we’ve been doing in this series. Continue Reading…

Page 5 of 9« First...«34567»...Last »