Build Your Story: 8 Strategies for Writing Innovative Setting with Impact
Start your character’s journey, emotional and literal, with
his immediate environment. Have him see it close up. Then pick one or two
images to be representative of that territory.
Writing Exercise
1.
Take a walk down a street in your childhood.
Write down what you see, hear, remember. Write quickly a free write, broadly
spaced. (about ten minutes)
2.
Now go back through your notes and add
specifics: sound, taste, and smell. For example, not just a swing on the front
porch or in a yard, but what kind of swing. Metal-wooden-plastic/size/sounds it
makes.
3.
Choose one aspect of your walk—a particular
setting or character or animal and highlight either by enhanced detail, or
exaggeration. Draw an analogy. For
example:
“And the story goes she never forgave him.
She looked out the window her whole life, the way so many women sit their
sadness on an elbow.” Sandra Cisneros.
Did some
additional thoughts, feelings insights come with each layer?
4. Take
the scene you used for your painting, and now have your character walk through
that ‘street’, even if the street is a pathway through a plain or a forest,
adding specific sounds, tastes, smells but using the emotional response you
experienced on your own memory walk.
Share: How
does that change from your original perspective, or does it?
Read deep, marcy
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