Publish: Setting

Hi folks, I'm starting a series that will last for the summer. It's called Publish and is in conjunction with my TEENSPublish workshop at the Ringer Library in College Station, Texas. This is the fourth week and I'm covering setting. I think some of this will relate to any creative life.

One piece of the publishing puzzle is an authentic setting. The tribe attacked setting this week with fever.  Setting is about perception. It is the creation of the exterior world within a novel or short story. Setting is the sensory experience of a story. The best stories understand the importance of sensory experience. 

The first exercise we tackled this week was the bird's eye view.  Crayons and pencils were passed out; and the students were happy to take flight in their imagination and draw the bird's eye view of the setting in the first scene of their stories. This exercise is important because it forces the creator to go beyond the four walls. Is a nightingale singing outside the room of the house?  Is the wind picking up outside and whistling in the cracks?  Is there a rose arbor outside the window? Are ninjas hiding outside the window? The bird's eye perspective can enrich a scene.

Next we explored how language truly affects our setting.  Word choice is important when creating the mood of a scene.  We described our scenes with hard consonants with long vowels and then with soft consonants and short vowels.  The meanings of the words were similar but the scene changed with careful word choice. The upshot of this exercise? There is a poetic element to setting that must be addressed. 

Last we watched a video on world building.  Some of the tribe must invent partial or whole worlds to write inventive stories. This video is a good place to get started with is here.   To me what is important about world building is limiting what is different from the real world. What we love about other worlds is how they remind of us home.  You may travel to the far reaches but what resonates is when you meet someone from your hometown or you find out the banana pudding is just like home.  It's what brings us together that is important, not what separates us.  Good advice for world building and life, too, I think. 

I hope that you think about setting this week as you create master works. I research the settings of my books. Here is a public board on Pinterest for the setting of my book PLUMB CRAZY.  You might find this informative.  Click on the link in the side bar if you want to know more about the book.

Hope you create master works this week.  Next week we will take a break from the nuts and bolts and sneak in a contemplative blog about the universe, creativeness, and such. See you then.


Here is a art.

And finally a quote for your pocket. 

Be sure you put your feet in the right place, then stand firm. Abraham Lincoln.