Setting (and Character): A Goldilocks Exercise

My father used to say, about reading fiction, that he never bother to read anything that wasn't in quotes. Like me, he was interested in the characters, and ignored the settings.

Unfortunately for my fiction writing career, my father and I are different from a huge proportion of potential readers. They want to see, hear, feel, and smell what the characters do, in order to deepen their reader trance. So, I've had to overcome my tendency to skip details of setting.

As I worked on this problem, I overshot the mark, and began to over-describe settings. So, I had to learn to cut these descriptions down until they were "just right."

I've developed a number of exercises to help me. Perhaps this one will help you:

The Goldilocks Exercise

1. Take yourself to a place you might use for a setting in one of your stories or articles.

2. In at least one hundred words, describe the setting in all its detail. (too much)

3. Now reduce the setting description to a single sentence, no more than seven words. (too little)

4. Now describe the setting in as few words as it takes to retain the trance-inducing qualities, more than seven and less than a hundred. (just right)


The Character Version

By the way, I also use this exercise to describe characters. I often pick out an intriguing person in an airport waiting area and take notes on every single detail I can capture, trying to use as many senses as feasible. I keep all these details in my database of fieldstones and start the exercise from there. The database entry serves as a reference if and when I use this character (or setting) in a story.


The Intermediate Version

For intermediate writers, there's a fifth step, particularly useful if step four's output still seems a little more than a reader might swallow in one gulp.

5. Distribute the parts of the description into at least three pieces, which can be dropped into the story or article in separate places.


The Advanced Version

Moving ahead, to the advanced version of the exercise:

6. Now express the parts of the description from step 5 in terms of a point-of-view character's emotional reactions to them:

Examples:

"How does he get his wheelchair over that small step between the old part of the house and his office? Maybe he's more mobile than he wants me to believe."

"If I had a gas fireplace in my office, I wouldn't fill it with cut flowers. Not in winter, anyway."

"Why would an agnostic keep a statue of St. Jude on the right next to his top-of-the line computer?"

We'd love to see the results of your exercise as a comment on this post.

Useful Links and Meta-Links for Writers

Although I'm not posting every day, I'm always blogging: looking for new connections and ideas that can help writers. It's the same with all my writing–not all writing is "writing down." For every hour I spend drafting new material, I probably spend two hours on editing, researching, marketing, and taking care of my writing business. But every once in a while I have to put my research together and write down a few things, so today I'm writing down some of my useful links.

Miss Snark

So, Miss Snark, who I mentioned in a previous post, has retired from blogging, but all her old posts are still available, thanks to work by Wyrdsmiths, "a weblog for the Twin Cities area speculative fiction writers' group." They've indexed her work at http://wyrdsmiths.blogspot.com/2007/09/truly-garagantuan-miss-snark-index-post.html. It's a treasure-trove for writers. Work your way through it, or select a topic from one of these:

Advice (General)

Agent Information, Where to Find

Agents and Publishers: Bad Signs and Scams

Agents: What to Ask/Know Before You Sign

Being a Good Client/Client Agent Relationships

Best Foot Forward

Conferences and Talking to Agents

Contracts Agency and Publisher

Credits/Short Stories/Contests/Etc.

Dealing With the Clueless/PODs and Vanity Presses

Dumb Things, Don't Do These

Finish the Book

Firing Your Agent: Why and How

Follow the directions

Misc

Movie Stuff

Non-Fiction

Novels: Definitions etc.

Partials and Fulls

Publishing Economics

Queries

Rejection

Resubmission

Revisions

Rights Questions

Royalties and Getting Paid

Submission, General

Synopses

Waiting for Agent Responses

What an Agent Does

Writing the Book

Midwest Book Review: Writer Resources

In their own words: "Here are a wealth of Web sites offering tips, tricks, and techniques for both established authors as well as aspiring writers earnestly seeking to break into print."

This site, http://www.midwestbookreview.com/bookbiz/writers.htm, has more than 200 internet links to just about anything a writer might want to know about. Caution: Unlike Miss Snark's weblog, the information here is not evaluated, so you're on your own for assessing the worth of each of these sites. But it's a marvelous place to start searching the web.

Plot in Short Stories

If you write short stories, you'll want to read this essay on Plot by the master, Damon Knight:

http://www.theroseandthornezine.com/Article/33Plot.html

It's an excerpt from his book, Creating Short Fiction. After you read this essay, you'll want to own the book: Creating Short Fiction

ISBN 0-312-15094-6

©1985,1986, 1997 by Damon Knight

Plagiarism

Came across this article in my internet travels. A story of plagiarism.

http://www.help4nonprofits.com/Plagiarism/Anatomy.htm

Also, if you are posting on the internet, it links a site which allows you to check if your website has been plagiarized elsewhere on the web.

http://www.copyscape.com/

Well, enough for one post. Watch for more links as I collect them.