Build Your Story: 8 Strategies for Writing Innovative Setting with Impact
Introduction
Have you ever gotten together with
a group of family or friends and pulled out a photo album of a particular
location? Notice how each person gravitates to a particular photo and sometimes
the same photo will generate both a positive and negative reaction.
In her study on memoir, I Could Tell You Stories, Patricia Hampl
notes that it is a landscape bordered by memory and imagination. “For to remember is to make a pledge: to the
indelible experience of personal perception, and to history itself.”
The memories recalled are sacred
emotional connections to each person. The landscape has in some ways
encapsulated the experience. Whether used as a silent backdrop or a plot
plunging odyssey, landscape has the potential to magnify the power in your
story with few ordinary details. The key is the personal connection, a holy
unique recall.
Looking at landscape through the eyes of art and imagery can
become a separate language of communication. It’s setting up your scenes or
vignettes as a view through a series of ‘photographs’. The snapshots can come from a personal
album, or a collection from a museum, a series of postcards, or by remembering
images in your mind’s eye. Or the specific details can turn mandatory locations
into an indelible experience for your character, as author Sarah Sundin pointed
out last week @ http://mythicimpact.blogspot.com/2014/07/strategy-1-habitat-highways-interview.html
“You
can craft settings so realistic that your readers will say, “I felt like I was
there!”
Landscape Exercise:
Now that you’ve chosen your natural habitat and researched a sense of
its strengths and weaknesses, begin to look at daily details.
Where does the sun rise and set?
What parts of home are in light or darkness daily or seasonally? What does the
air smell like when you open the door in the morning, in the afternoon or in
the evening?
Share: Do any details surprise you?
Read deep, marcy
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