Writing Active Setting Book 1: Characterization and Sensory Detail Read Online Free PDF Page A

on either side. Most of the apartments were brick — t he old fashioned-kind of brick that screamed genteel families and industrious lives. One building stood out — being concrete, as if the people who lived there didn’t care so m uch about their surroundings. Steps led down from each home to the cracked sidewalk, filled with chalk drawings and hopscotch squares. Five boxwood trees marched along the outer curb, one with a droopy Happy Birthday balloon snagged in its branches. Several mini-vans and SUVs parked along the street, waiting for the next trip to school or soccer.
     
    So what did you learn about Fran? About what matters in her life? What she wants more of in her world just based on how she subjectively focused on this city block?
     
    Note : How the Setting is revealed says a lot about the character.
     
    Joe can’t get away from threat assessment whereas Fran is focused on the happy families she sees living there, or the possibilities of happy families . The writer needs to be aware that the relationship between the POV character and the Setting is what allows the reader to see/experience the story on a deeper level.
    It’s important to remember that place can and should be filtered through a specific character’s emotions, impressions, viewpoint , and focus — this is how it reveals character and why it is that what one character sees in a S etting can be more important than the S etting itself. Ignoring the powerf ul use of characterization and S etting decreases the subtext of your story and also decreases the immediacy a character feels in your story world. If your POV character simply walks through a Setting with nothing revealed except that the character is now at a store, on a street, returning home, you are showing your readers that this Setting doesn’t matter that much to the story. So if it does matter, show it!
     
    Note: Don’t use Setting simply as window dressing.
     
     
    R IGHT INFORMATION/ RIGHT SIGNALS
     
    Don’t confuse the reader. They are going to come into your Setting with very little context, so they'll be trying to visualize the who as well as the where and when of the location and how it feeds into your story. So you might go back and edit to make sure you're:
     
    * S haring the right information and sending the right signals for that char a cter . Fran would not think of offensive and defensive positions and Joe would not notice chalk drawings unless they constituted a threat.
     
    * F iltering the Setting through one character’s experience, emotions and mind set at a time.
     
    * Not stop ping the story flow to show place , or details of a place, unless that place reveals something tha t’s important to know about the characters.
     
    Note : Adding Setting description is not necessarily an intrusion on the page, but can be an extension of the character’s communication. Important to realize if your first drafts are heavy on showing characters via their dialogue or movement.
     
     
    R EVE ALING CHARACTER THROUGH SETTING
     
    Here’s the beginning of a Setting passage from a Nancy Pickard mystery .   This novel is part of a series, so the author chooses to reveal character via Setting rather than simply repeat what readers of the series may have already learned . You discover so much about this couple by what the POV character sees just by looking around her own living room.
     
    Our furniture didn’t match, at least not in theory, but it fit together perfectly in practice. We’d used my favorite clear, bright colors — yellows, oranges, reds — and mixed them with his favorite deep brown wood tones, so the house had an autumnal atmosphere all year long, kind of crisp and cheerful and cozy all at once. There were always books and magazines littering the rooms like scattered leaves, and often a week’s worth of newspapers trailing from the kitchen to our bedroom upstairs and the bathrooms down to the living room and finally into recycling. And books, so many books