Writing Exercises for Emerging Writers

Setting: A Writer's Point A

Sep 27, 2009 Eduardo Camacho

The place of where a story begins or happens is just as important as the dialogue and character development.

"Man is a child of his environment." - Shinichi Suzuki.

Establish the area where the story takes place helps to electrify the fiction as well as add flavor to your character's ideas and actions. If, in a post-apocalyptic world, abandoned cars litter the streets and buildings deteriorate from lack of construction and maintenance. The jungle is primal and filled to the brim with savagry and the struggle for life and death. These various locations inspire the readers to live in the moment or explain the events unfolding around the story. Here are some steps to help you create an ideal playground for your players.

Take a Picture:

• Whether a photograph, painting, or illustration from a vacation or Google.com search for images, try and describe every detail going on in your own words.
• Now, introduce your newly created character(s) into the scene. Remember the why (money, revenge, lost, etc.), how (airplane, car, train, hitchhiked, etc.) and when (past, present or future).

Location, Location, Location....:

• Those spiring mountains of the countryside or the kinetic fire in the city work only by designing locales within the environment. A folksy bed & breakfast off the dirt road to the local bar near the subway station color the landscape better than a kid's crayon.
• Carry a journal and sit outside, wait at the bus stop or look out out the window (if possible) and write everything that happens from that very moment for 5 minutes. Build on that slice of life and then put a twist in it like a car crash, a serial killer stalks his/her prey, a married woman decides to ask out the handsome young man after months of flirting.

Research Your Domain:

• There are unfamiliar places out there where the great mystery or thriller wants and needs to take place for the sake of the plot. For what is James Bond without his international adventures? Unless money is limitless, research the locales through books, videos, road trips, documentaries, and many more resources if necessary. Same goes for time periods or eras like the Victorian Age or World War II.
• Take notes or cut out clips and paste them into a scrapbook along with pictures to establish the look of the setting and combine those elements then use the senses (smell, taste, sight, and sound) to guide along the protagonist's path down those London streets or Turkish roads or Italian canals.

Invention Versus The Internet:

• A simple way to avoid all the other steps and research is to flat-out make an entire world from scratch or alternate reality. "World-building" is popular in science fiction but regular fiction works with the same design. Create a European country, a metropolitan city or soverign state somewhere in the Pacific. Establish rules for the characters to abide by and if plausible break those rules for added drama or tension.
• When all else fails, utilize certain generators from the Internet to create the world or setting for the characters to exist. It's a bit of a cheat but if the discovery of a unkown planet or magical realm sparks the creative juices then by all means. Realize, though, the responsibility to the reader to lead and convince that the setting functions with the characters and vice versa.

Lastly, have fun. Every setting contains subtle details that paints the characters in a different shade and helps increase the story's pace and tone.

The copyright of the article Writing Exercises for Emerging Writers in Writing Fiction is owned by Eduardo Camacho. Permission to republish Writing Exercises for Emerging Writers in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

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