"When you consider something like death, after which (there being no news flash to the contrary) we may well go out like a candle flame, then it probably doesn't matter if we try too hard, are awkward sometimes, care for one another too deeply, are excessively curious about nature, are too open to experience, enjoy a nonstop expense of the senses in an effort to know life intimately and lovingly. It probably doesn't matter if, while trying to be modest and eager watchers of life's many spectacles, we sometimes look clumsy or get dirty or ask stupid questions or reveal our ignorance or say the wrong think or light up with wonder like the children we all are. It probably doesn't matter if a passerby sees us dipping a finger into the moist pouches of dozens of lady's slippers to find out what bugs tend to fall into them, and thinks us a bit eccentric. Or a neighbor, fetching her mail, sees us standing in the cold with our own letters in one hand and a seismically red autumn leaf in the other, its color hitting our sense like a blow from a stun gun, as we stand with a huge grin, too paralyzed by the intricately veined gaudiness of the leaf to move."
Diane Ackerman, from A Natural History of the Senses.
Lesson 4: use of setting
- Think of setting as a tool, rather than an actual occurrence
- Put some "setting pointers" in early on
- Think about how you intend to deploy your setting - what is it to be used for
- No impact (eg generic big city, or desert)
- Stage set only. Set the scene initially and then tell the story
- Local colour. Use throughout story but don't provide colour for its own sake; its use must contribute
- Atmosphere. Make clear what a character is feeling but also make the reader feel the same (pathetic fallacy). The setting can take on human characteristics, or be described in the light of the characters current emotions
- Contribute to action. Characters are influenced by the setting (eg a race track)
- Major contributor to the drama (eg snow storm, flood, fire)
- Central symbol. Setting casts a spell that affects everything in the story (eg Titanic)
- Don't use description for its own sake: antithetical to story
- Use to set era eg pre or post cellphones
- Setting can set physical movement or emotional movement
- Make a choice of what you are using as a setting and stick to it
- Point of view
- First, second, third
- First can be effective in that (eg) Watson is the first person but Holmes is the main character. Holmes can surprise us without our requiring the explanations that would be required if Watson was also the Holmes figure
- Third person requires the writer to consider to whose thoughts does the main character have access (Free indirect discourse)
- With second person, you are the protagonist. Writing in the second person is supposed to be more immediate (Note: I am very uncertain about this as the lesson ran out of time)
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