A Few Tips on Setting
*Instead of a huge list of describing words, focus on one specific detail of your character’s setting.
*Make it dramatic through strong nouns and active verbs, and the senses. If your character is familiar with the place, make sure she REALLY knows it well.
*Treat the setting like a character. Have the character interact with the setting.
*Attach emotions to nature or objects to show the character’s mood. “lonely prairie” . . . “grim rain”
Exercise: What geographic setting do YOU know intimately? First, write a long description. Next, focus on one of those specific details. Use your senses to bring this setting alive.
What do you mean when you say “one specific detail”? Can you give an example?
Rather than describe the entire room to get the setting across, you could just describe one detail that one make the moment very real for the reader. Focus a sentence or two on that detail. (Especially with a short story, where you don’t have space for paragraphs on setting.)
In David Almond’s novel Skellig, Almond uses light to enhance a scene.
The door into the garden was ajar. The moon had climbed. It hung directly over us. Behind the wall, the garden was flooded with its light.
Another time he spends time with a pomegranate. Since it’s a novel, he uses one specific detail and spends time with this detail.
“Pomegranate,” she said. “Isn’t it a lovely word?”
She cut through the fruit with a kitchen knife. The red juice leaked out. The hundreds of seeds inside were exposed.
“It’s what Persephone ate while she was waiting in the Underworld,” she said.
She gave a quarter to me, a quarter to Mina, and took a quarter for herself. She gave us pins to pick the pips out with, and we sat there nibbling away the sweet flesh from the bitter seed.
“Look at all the life in this,” she said. “Every pip could become a tree, and ever tree could bear another hundred fruits and ever fruit could bear another hundred trees. And so on to infinity.”
I picked the pips from my tongue with my fingers.
“Just imagine,” she said. “If every seed grew, there’d be no room in the world for anything but pomegranate trees.”