Muse & the Marketplace 2019

Setting isn’t just the backdrop over which we drape our other story elements, and effectively writing setting means more than painting, however impressively, a static picture. This session will explore the relationship between settings and the characters who navigate and narrate them. Sometimes setting asserts itself in an obvious way--through a lethally harsh landscape, for example--but more often the writer manipulates subtler shades of comfort or discomfort, familiarity or unfamiliarity, nostalgia or surprise. How does setting description differ when characters explore places new to them, versus when characters enter a place so excruciatingly familiar it’s crowded with their own remembered selves?

We’ll examine and discuss examples of effectively written settings in literature and consider how the authors were able to bring to the page the complexities of the relationship between person and place. With writing exercises we’ll practice activating our own settings, putting them to work in our stories.