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Now that you have heard about everybody's scouted structure in your group you must make a decision. you must decide as a group which structure you want to do from the four your group members scouted out. Spend about 6 minutes maximum to make this decision.
After you make your decision read the passage below about writing about places.
Creating a sense of place while writing
The setting, or place, creates the world in which the characters live and struggle. In this world, the plot will unfold. Something will happen.
The writer who can create a believable world, a convincing place, goes a long way toward trancing the reader into the larger world of the article, biography, poem, or story.
Use the senses to describe place: touch, smell, sight, sound, taste.
Setting can also be a fine way of building tension in a piece of writing with the taut pull (or push) between opposing forces.
Setting provides the author with an excellent way to develop character. The relationship between character and the character’s physical world is a complex one. Each of us is a product of the world we live in.
Not only does environment shape character but the character’s emotional state determines how he or she perceives the environment.
Many authors know this about landscape: that it is the setting or background for their characters. But the better authors realize much more. Place can be shorthand (or longhand) to explain a hero or villain: Think of the difference between the living green forest of Ents and the Orc-made desert of Modor in the Lord of the Rings.
Better writers also know that landscape can be metaphor, can be a parallel to their character’s lives, can become central to the action, can even be a character in itself. Think of R. L. Stevenson’s Davie Balfour, striding across the harsh Highland countryside, becoming a man. The territory he treads helps shape him. Think of the uncompromising sea through which Captain Ahab plows and how it defines him, creates him just as the whale Moby Dick “tasks” him and “heaps” him.
All novels work best when they have a landscape that seems real, alive, purposeful, important.
Perhaps it would be helpful to think of landscape as coming in three parts.
o First, find the large shapes.
Some are immovable and in human terms, immutable . . .like mountain landscapes. And some like water—rivers, streams, oceans-certainly moves within its banks. How to describe them so the reader actually sees the shifting blues and greens, the foaming spume of whitewater, the tumble of waves? Some large shapes are mobile and shifting. What about the clouds? Are they streamers or plump cumulus? Are they white as feathers or gray as stone? With such depictions of landscape, the writer can set a mood, background music for the eye. Or can set up the landscape to act contrapuntally against (or with) the hero.
o Second, there are singular features: a rock, flower, vine, bird against the slate of sky.
These individuals are punctuations of landscape, used instead of an exclamation point. By watching how your character in motion, by watching his actions on the landscape or in concert with it, the reader will not need to be told how he is feeling.
o Third, know that landscape well enough to individualize its features: gray porous rock, spikes of yew, eruptions of read poppies in a green field.
Some authors get to that specificity by making lists, writing out travelogues, drawing maps, researching seasons/flora/fauna in books. But first of all, the author must become an observer; of nature as well as of character.
If you do not look, you cannot see. If you cannot see, how can you write well enough to make others see? And after you see, you must learn to hear: unseen frogs chorusing in the fading light, the weeping cry of a screech owl, the long fall of a coyote’s voice. And after that the smells: the sharp brine of ocean, the pong of rotting seaweed, the crisp mountain air scented light with pine.
Have you ever read a book – fiction or non-fiction – in which you felt you had been transported to another world? You could almost feel it, taste it, touch it and smell it. How did the writer achieve that?
· They used their senses.
· They focused on a few choice details.
· They used imagery.
· They established power relations between the narrator / character / reader and their environment.
Using Your Senses
Consider how Markus Zusak uses the senses of sight and touch to describe the first impressions of a house in this passage from The Book Thief:
The house was pale, almost sick-looking, with an iron gate and a brown, spit-stained door. From his pocket, he pulled out the key. It did not sparkle but lay dull and limp in his hand. For a moment he squeezed it, half expecting it to come leaking towards his wrist. It didn’t. The metal was hard and flat, with a healthy set of teeth, and he squeezed it till it pierced him. Slowly then, the struggler leaned forward, his cheek against the wood, and he removed the key from his fist.
Focusing on Details
You cannot and should not describe every last detail of an environment. It will be too much for the reader to absorb and will simply obfuscate your writing. Rather choose a few telling details that are representative of the world you are describing. When the picture you are sketching is a huge one, it helps to focus the reader on something small. Consider the opening passage from Terry Pratchett’s Wintersmith. Note how simply the mention of a primrose evokes the whole spectrum of spring. Note too that the vastness of the winterscape is thus amplified in contrast to the flowers and the ‘little cluster of thorn trees’.
When the storm came, it hit the hills like a hammer. No sky should hold as much snow as this, and because no sky could, it fell; fell in a wall of white. There was a small hill of snow where there had been, a few hours ago, a little cluster of thorn trees on an ancient mound. This time last year there had been a few early primroses; now there was just snow.
Imagery
Sometimes an environment or the essence of a place can best be described through imagery. A place is more than its physical presence: it is a landscape of meaning, feeling and emotion. Consider this passage from William Horwood’s Duncton Wood:
August is an untidy month in Duncton Wood, when the leaves of the trees have lost both the virgin greenness in which they gloried up until June and their rich rustling maturity, which was one of the pleasures of July. Now they are past their best. Here and there, passing August rain brings one or two leaves down, green but limp, on to the wood’s brown floor to die among the great blowzy fern and insinuating ivy into which they have fallen.
Power Relationships With Place
The moment a character – fictional or real – comes into contact with a place a power relationship is established. Is that character in control of the environment or does the environment threaten to overpower the character? Sometimes this relationship is neutral, in which case the place is merely a background to the action that takes place within it. However, the best writing allows the environment to contribute to the action or the emotional sub-text of a passage by setting it either ‘above’ or ‘below’ the character in terms of power. For example, a man standing in the face of an avalanche is not in control of his environment. But take that man, give him a flag and perch him on top of a mountain, and he is a conqueror.
Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland shows a character struggling to establish control over her environment. Of course, this is a metaphor for a girl trying to establish control over her own life. Similarly, the vastness of the desert in Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient threatens to overcome Almasy and he only temporarily rises above it when he is in his aeroplane. The Bedouin who rescue him from his plane crash are in a neutral or symbiotic relationship with their environment.
In this passage from Alexander McCall Smith’s The No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency, what power relationship exists between the character and the environment? How has Smith communicated this?
Then we went down to the shafts and were shown what to do. They put us in cages, beneath great wheels, and these cages shot down as fast as hawks falling upon their prey. They had trains down there – small trains – and they put us on these and took us to the end of long, dark tunnels, which were filled with green rock and dust. My job was to load rock after it had been blasted, and I did this for seven hours a day. I grew strong, but all the time there was dust, dust, dust.
Now that you have decided on your location take paper, pens and pencils and as a group you are going to write everything you notice about the structure. Do both A & B on paper with your group and then return to class and type it. Whatever you don't finish will be homework due next class.
A. Each group member should write about the place using a different sense.
Vision: One member should write about the stucture using their eyes, describing the way the structure looks.
Scent: One member must only describe the smells of the place. Be very specific
Hearing: One member must describe and write about all the sounds in and around your structure. Close your eyes and try to hear every detail.
Touch: One member must describe the texture and feeling of the structure.
Taste: I don't want any member to taste the structure so you can skip this sense.
B. Answer the question:
If the structure had a voice what would it tell us? What stories does it know? What has it seen? What has it lived through?
Return to class and type and submit your groups writing about your structure.
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