Writing Workshop Week 3: Stories of a Place
Hello again, my very talented writers of tumblr! I canât tell you how much Iâve enjoyed reading your work. Iâve seen such stellar craft happening, and Iâm eager to see where youâll take this next prompt.
In week 1, we focused on a single object. In week 2, we attended to the objects in our environment. This week, weâre considering the environment as a wholeâsetting.
One of the reasons Iâve chosen this order specifically, small to large, is because setting can become overwhelming. But last week we already practiced it in our real environments by observing our surroundings, and putting those details into our work. Setting is not as huge and amorphous as it may seemâwhen it comes down to it, setting is the interaction between character and place. Notice I didnât say that setting is the place itself, and thatâs because a place is meaningless without grounding it in the personal stakes of a character. Itâs like walking around a grocery store and not putting anything in your cart. A setting only exists to hold its contents.Â
Setting can refer to the largest and smallest of places: universe, galaxy, planet, continent, country, city, home, bedroom, pillow fort. Setting can also refer to time: millennium, century, decade, year, month, week, day, hour, minute, second.Â
In writing, not all of these things have to be defined, nor should they. The difficulty in setting is the negotiation between our lived realityâin which we have all of this information at all timesâand the restrictive nature of writing, in which we not only control all these variables, but we also have to organize and convey them. In reality, events can occur simultaneously. You can drop a plate at the same time you get a text message. But in writing, even if those things happen at the same time in the lived reality of your character, you have to convey the plate dropping and then the phone vibrating in consecutive sentences, linked usually by the word âsimultaneously.â Your reader then retroactively crafts those moments happening at once in their memory, but there is a brief moment between those two details where the reader knows the plate has dropped but not that the phone will vibrate. Just as a film is restricted to the width of a cameraâs lens, writing is restricted to the sentence. As immersive as writing can be, it is still always a constructed thing.
When it comes to setting, you not only have control over all these details, you also have to figure out the order of information those details are conveyed. Which brings me toâŠ
One of the reasons people think fanfiction is âeasierâ than original fiction is because there are fewer decisions to make. You have an established universe to play in and so you donât have to pull up a name generator to figure out the name of your protagonist, or however you make those choices. But thatâs not trueâfanfiction requires a different type of decision-making and therefore a different (but equally difficult) skill set of creative thinking. The analogy I like to use is a playground versus a beach. On a playground, the equipment is already there, but you can use it however you want. On a beach, you have to decide what to bring with you. One is not inherently better than the other. Itâs all play.Â
I say this because Iâve coached a lot of writers who are transitioning from fanfiction to original fiction. It can be jarring to go from the playground to a beach. And so I see a lot of writers succumb to decision fatigueâthe exhaustion of creativity. You have to decide what kind of car your character drives, how old they are, where they live, what they do for a living, their relationships, the conflicts of those relationships, their educational background, and so on. Creativity is making decisions. And thatâs why itâs hard.
I would argue that setting is the most difficult series of decisions to make. Our entry into a new piece is generally a character, a premise, or an image. Or, as we say on Tumblr, we put a guy in situations. That guyâs environment will affect him and his situations, because that environment will either help or hinder him in some way. A meet-cute, for example, is nearly always related to setting.
I remember doing my first generative workshop on setting. It sent me into a spiral I couldnât climb out of for four years. The spiral was this:
All narratives, even narrative poems (as opposed to lyrical), exist in a time and place, and the author has control of those factors. The more specific those details are, the stronger the story becomes. The specificity of those details is rendered in imagery. Ergo, I have to develop my imagery.
And now Iâm going to tell you the result of that line of thinking so you donât fall into the same trap: I wrote a totally unpublishable novel. It was too long and not very interesting, and both of those things happened because I was more dedicated to developing my setting than my story.Â
Although that was great practice, it kind of sucked to spend an entire year working on something only to put it in a drawer and never look at it again. What pulled me out of the spiral was dedicating myself to narrationâI decided I was only obligated to describe that which my narrator observed. And because I didnât want to bother with setting anymore, I made a character who was totally oblivious.
(Weâll be looking at narration next week.)
I began to view the setting through a character rather than around a character. My narrator was narrow-focused and obsessive, so I was only obligated to write that which came into the one-lane bridge of her attention. In other words, I only wrote what was relevant to her. And the only thing that was relevant to her was the object of her fixation.Â
The big caveat here is that a story isnât always obligated to its narrator. Thatâs a choice Iâve made for my own work, because Iâm interested in narrators and the development of voice. My prose will never be beautiful or floral. Iâll never have the patience to lovingly describe what itâs like to live in Ohio. Iâll probably only ever write a character who has driven past the HELL IS REAL sign a dozen times and who maybe has strong opinions on corn. Itâs the best way I can find to help me avoid the decision fatigue of building an entire world.Â
For this weekâs activity, Iâd like you to think of a place you really love. This can be your home town or the house where you grew up or wherever has brought you joy. (Remember: love inspires.)Â
Next, Iâd like you to write 3 facts of public information and 3 facts of private information about that place.Â
Public information is anything that can be found, either by researching the place or visiting it. This could be factualâpopulation, square footage, location. It could also involve community knowledge, like legends, cultures, or customs. It can also include major historical events. If you were to show this place to a total stranger, what would you tell them about it? This part may require some research.Â
Private information is what canât be known by anyone but you (and maybe the people who were there with you). This includes memories you have of the place, secrets, unknown histories; anything that canât be understood unless you have intimate knowledge of the place or lived there during a particular moment.Â
For example, when I taught in the South, I had a lot of students who had lived through Hurricane Katrina. They were all young children at the time. When I had them do this activity, many of them chose to list facts that anyone could find about New Orleans in August of 2005âthat there were over 1300 casualties, that Katrina was a Category 5 hurricane. They also shared things that no one else could know, about their families housing total strangers whose homes were destroyed, about living for days or even weeks without electricity. About why their parents chose to stay rather than leave, or leave rather than stay. About loved ones who had died.
Once you have your 6 things, Iâd like you to write a piece based on them. Here are some ways you can approach it:
If you want to write nonfiction, tell the story of one of your private pieces of information.
If you want to write fiction, write a story using at least one of the public pieces of information. For example, you can tell the story of a legend, or make a legend up. Or you could do something similar to what we did last week, where you take those three pieces of information and weave them in.
If you want to write a poem, try to capture the sense of place by using one or more pieces of information, either private or public.
If you want to write something experimental, write a story about a piece of private information from the perspective of the place itself.Â
You donât have to share your 6 things (unless you want to). While youâre writing, note the details that emerge naturally while drafting, what becomes relevant to the story versus what doesnât. Like our previous prompts, allow yourself to lean into associative thinking and make connections with your memories.
Questions? Ask âem here before EOD Tuesday so @bettsfic can answer them on Wednesday. And remember to tag your work #tumblr writing workshop with betts if you want her to read your work and possibly feature it on Friday!
And, for those just joining us: @bettsfic is running a writing workshop on @books this month. Want to know more? Start here.
