Write Great Fiction: Description & Setting

In this course we’ll consider the importance of description and setting in creating a fully believable, fully realized fictional world. More importantly, we’ll consider what makes description effective—how precise language, combined with surprising ways of looking at familiar things, creates a full experience for a reader—and how you might begin employing these techniques in your own work to create characters and settings which hum with life.

Using Ron Rozelle’s Write Great Fiction: Description & Setting as your guide, you will see how striking, yet credible, description is formed—and what such description allows you to accomplish in your own work.

Course level: Beginner

Required Book:  Write Great Fiction: Description & Setting by Ron Rozelle

Workshop Length: 8 weeks

Tuition: $345.00 ($310.50 for VIP)

Start Date: View Write Great Fiction: Description & Setting Course Schedule

Course Structure
The workshop will consist of eight one-week sessions. Each session will include online lectures (text based), associated textbook reading assignments, and creative writing and exercises submitted to the instructor for private review. In addition, the course provides a number of interactive venues through which you might further the conversation with your peers and advance the cause of the course as community.

You will learn:

• How to attune your writer’s radar to interesting details and story ideas from real life
• How to balance showing and telling in constructing a convincing narrative voice
• How to build your fictional world and descriptions so they serve and illuminate character, motivation, tone, and theme
• How to engage the senses—and even allow them to cross and overlap—in order to form compelling, potent descriptions, and
• How to balance the familiar and the unfamiliar in description and setting in order to show the everyday in clear, and surprising, new ways

Who should take this course:

• Beginning writers who want to strengthen their description and setting skills
• Novel writers of any genre
• Short Story writers
• Creative Nonfiction writers

Course Outline

Session One: Learning to Pay Attention

• Attuning Your Radar to Useful Blips
• Keeping A Journal
• Creating, Not Chronicling

Writing Assignment (Fundamentals): Go to a place with an interesting cross-section of people and activities you might observe (shopping mall, baseball stadium, amusement park, etc.) and take note of what’s around you. You might start with the obvious, like physical descriptions of the setting, but be open to the peculiarities: snippets of conversation, out-of-place or notable events or actions, anything. Sit for no more than an hour, but jot down anything that seems important—meaning, anything that catches your eye or ear or sparks your imagination— in your writer’s notebook. Then, look at the story “sparks” you’ve recorded and write 750 to 1,000 words in which you try to tell the story of that place as you experienced it, using, combining, and re-creating the images or sparks you jotted down. Keep in mind you are not simply chronicling like a reporter but using the images or impressions you’ve recorded to help jumpstart the imagination and create a world.

Writing Assignment (Advanced): Examine your work-in-progress for a scene (around 750 to 1,000 words) where place or setting is in the forefront—possibly even a scene which takes place in your primary setting—and consider the ways you’ve used particular images and details to convey not just the simple, physical structure but the experience of the place. (You might even do a mental exercise where you imagine yourself sitting at the place and observing, as with the fundamentals assignment, and jot down anything that enters your imagination.) Then, rework the scene so that the details form a complete experience of the place … so that the reader sees not just the four walls but the experience or feeling you intend to convey inside them.

Session Two: Showing, Telling, and Combining the Two

• Showing the Right Thing
• Telling Us, Slant
• The Balancing Act

Writing Assignment (Fundamentals): Choose a familiar place—somewhere you go frequently and have an affinity for that you might describe for someone else, like a coffee shop or a nearby theater—and write a 1,000 to 1,250-word “biography” of the place. The goal of this short piece is not to simply describe what the place looks like but to convey a sense of it … what it feels like to be there, what it is that draws you there. You might brainstorm before you begin writing on what sensory details you might show (sounds, smells, sights, et cetera) and what details about the place or the people there you’d have to tell (interpreting the people or things there, explaining or offering perspective, whatever). Write your brief “biography” of the place trying to balance showing and telling to illustrate the real experience of being there for someone who’s never been. (If you’d rather, you might invent such a place to practice imagining details for showing and telling … if you do it well, we’d never know the place doesn’t exist.)

Writing Assignment (Advanced): Examine your work-in-progress for a scene (around 1,000 to 1,250 words) where you feel the showing and telling is out of balance … where too much of one or the other is causing the scene to lag. Consider what feeling, understanding, or experience we should take out of the scene and its subject, then consider ways of balancing showing and telling to get that across, rewriting the scene.

Session Three: Using All the Tools in Your Kit

• Constructing a Voice
• The Right Tools for the Job
• How Voice and Description Match Up
• What to Avoid

Writing Assignment (Fundamentals): Revisit your first assignment (on the place you chose with an interesting cross-section of people and activities) and write another version of the work … this time, from the perspective of a character who is unhappy or annoyed at being there. You might give this character a (brief) reason for being annoyed—if your scene was in a mall, for instance, perhaps he’s been dragged there by his spouse, or perhaps your character is on the search for some particular item and the search has led to this crowded place—but the important thing to consider is how this perspective might alter the descriptions of the things going on, even if what’s being narrated this time around is essentially the same as the last time (from a different way of seeing). If you have trouble re-envisioning this place in this way, you might go back there to do more journaling with an “annoyed” mindset … or, you might think back to the last time you were annoyed by being somewhere you didn’t want to be and consider the small, minute sensory details of the place that seemed to you, at the time, insufferable. This new version should be slightly longer than the original … 1,000 to 1,250 words.

Writing Assignment (Advanced): Choose part of a work in progress (roughly 1,000 to 1,250 words) and read the work aloud to yourself, paying attention to the kind of narrative voice you’ve constructed. How would you define the voice you’ve set up, and does it match with your goals or what you want to convey in the piece? Look particularly at the descriptions being used throughout, at the particular tools from the chapter and how you’ve employed them, and then rewrite the work so that the language and descriptions convey a sharper sense of narrative voice, tone, and overall experience you intend.

Session Four: Sensory Description

• Using Your Senses for the First Time
• Overlapping or Mismatching the Senses
• Avoiding Cliché

Writing Assignment (Fundamentals): Write a brief piece (1,000 to 1,250 words) on an activity or event that you do almost daily that you find enjoyable. This might be drinking coffee, or going to a particular place, or even just watching your young child watching cartoons … anything at all that you find familiar and comfortable. Then, find some way of describing the event or activity and what it means to you, using descriptive language to show the familiar experience through unfamiliar, yet accurate and recognizable, terms. Consider any of the senses that might be engaged, but don’t pile on descriptors or senses for their own sake. Rather, consider just how you’d need to describe the event to create the same experience for your reader.

Writing Assignment (Advanced): Choose a brief portion from your work in progress (1,000 to 1,250 words) and circle all the descriptors you come to in the piece. Then, examine the approaches you’ve taken to them: how might you convey description mixing up or mismatching the senses? Are there any spots where the descriptions are either familiar or clichéd? Rework the manuscript targeting the descriptions, trying not to go overboard with any one approach but trying to pare down description to precise and focused lines which convey the familiar in surprising or unfamiliar ways.

Session Five: Description of Characters

• Motivation
• Flaws
• What to Watch Out For

Writing Assignment (Fundamentals): Write a brief but complete scene (1,000 to 1,250 words) in which you convey a character and his or her motivations/conflict using description. The premise can be as simple or direct as you like—a couple about to break up over dinner, a woman late for something standing in a long line, a man being unfairly treated at a mechanic, whatever—but the important thing is not to come out and directly summarize the character and conflict but to let us see, feel, and experience both through showing and (selective) telling. You might look back at your writer’s journal for ideas to use here, or you might simply pay attention to what you see around you on a given day. But try to use your descriptions and voice to give us a sense of who the character is, what she does or doesn’t want in the scene … and then allow the writing to show you how the conflict resolves or where it leads.

Writing Assignment (Advanced): Choose a scene from a work in progress (around 1,000 to 1,250 words) where the character seems out of focus, passive, nondescript, or otherwise “washed out.” (This might be a scene with a primary character, or one where a secondary character feels one-dimensional or incomplete.) Consider what the motivations are for each character in the scene, whether large or small, and thus what’s at stake for the players, and then rewrite the scene using showing and (selective) telling to sharpen the characters and conflicts, infusing more life into the scene through targeted description.

Session Six: Time and Place

• Through the Lens
• Navigating the Macro and Micro
• Creating Believable Settings in Impossible Places

Writing Assignment (Fundamentals): Revisit your work from the previous assignment—on showing character, motivation, and conflict through description—and rewrite and expand upon it to include targeted descriptions of place through the lens of your character. The details you use can be micro, macro, or both, but keep in mind that the way we see place in the scene should match up with how the character views the place in the moment … in other words, that the setting and descriptions deepen and sharpen our understanding of the character and conflict. (The completed and rewritten scene should be 1,250 to 1,500 words.)

Writing Assignment (Advanced): Revisit your work in progress from the previous assignment and rewrite/expand upon it to include targeted descriptions of setting which further our understanding of the motivations and conflicts of the character (or characters) in the scene. What’s the relationship of setting to the goals and conflicts of the characters? How might you show setting not only with an eye toward making us believe the world, through sensory description, but illustrating the relationship of the world to the characters and conflicts within it? If you have more than one character in the scene, how does setting reflect the attitudes of the primary character while still matching up and revealing something about the secondary characters present? (The completed and rewritten scene should be 1,250 to 1,500 words.)

Session Seven: Working the Magic

• First Lines and Titles
• Description and Setting as a Means to an End
• Following the Story’s Lead (Part I)

Writing Assignment (Fundamentals and Advanced): Write a complete—and completely new—short story, no more than 1,500 words, using the tools discussed in the class to form a full and believable world and set of characters. (You might look back to your writer’s journal for some spark to get you going, some incident or detail you’d like to follow through on.) Try to formulate a strong first line which suggests to you character, conflict, tone, and setting, and then let that line lead to a second, a third, and so on. Don’t forget that it’s of prime importance to you to understand who the character is and what motivates him or her in the moment, as that plays a large role in how description and setting, as well as language and tone, should be conveyed throughout. (But also allow for moments where you characters and their actions, interactions, and behaviors surprise you.) You might even find yourself using different details and ideas from your journal to move the story along. The subject matter is, of course, completely up to you … the important thing is that we understand what’s at stake for the characters through your use of voice, language, setting, and description.

Session Eight: Too Little, Too Much

• Cutting
• Building
• Following the Story’s Lead (Part II)

Writing Assignment (Fundamentals and Advanced): Revisit your completed story from the last assignment and consider what might be changed—what aspects cut, what built upon or brought out—in a revision in order to sharpen the focus of the story and make the world and characters more definite. You might consider any feedback you’ve received from your instructor or classmates, but remember that the ultimate guide is the story itself and what is suggested by your first draft. Remember, too, to try to avoid clichés or too-familiar descriptions and language … you want to the reader to experience the situations and character as if for the first time, even if (or especially if) the situations or characters seem to be everyday. This is your final assignment for the course, so roll up your sleeves and give the revision process the careful attention it deserves. The maximum word count for your revised work is 2,500 words.