Using Settings to Deepen Your Story, with Kathy Page Physical

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Participant handout: Where Are We? Using Settings to Deepen Your Story, with Kathy Page Physical setting is not only visual detail. It includes sound, smell, texture, taste, atmosphere. Setting includes the physical environment, but is far more than that, too: it encompasses the era and the political situation; history, social milieu, place of work, community, family, values, your character’s peer group, etc. Setting is not a mere backdrop. It creates story. A good setting can exert pressure on your characters, and/or offer them opportunities. Think of the Saint-Malo and other WW2 settings in Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See, or of the beach and hotel in On Chesil Beach by Ian MacEwan, or of the lifeboat in Jann Martel’s Life of Pi. Does your story come with an essential setting, or could a different setting strengthen or transform the story? How to establish setting? “Up Front,” “By Discovery,” or in between? Once established, setting needs to be sustained and built. How does your character feel about and interact with their environment? Does it change? How to create your setting using authentic detail, rather than relying on second hand sources such as TV dramas? It’s important to thoroughly research your settings, but also to keep some of that research to yourself. Setting examples (using the page numbers hand written in circles) P1–3 Excerpt from “Incoming Tide” and from “Security” in Olive Kitteridge, by Elizabeth Strout P4 – Excerpt from “Cat in the Rain” by Ernest Hemingway from In Our Time P5 – 7 Excerpt from The Break by Katherena Vermette P8 – 9 Excerpt from Life of Pi by Jann Martel .

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