Setting

Setting as the World

Setting is the environment in which a story takes place. A story’s setting can have both physical as well as psychological effects on the action and characters of the story. How much differently might a story turn out if it were set in a crowded city instead of on a deserted island?

Your routine, your neighborhood, your take on home, history, climate, and the cosmos are unique, like your voice, and inseparable from your voice. As a writer you need to be alert to your own vision and to create for us, even make strange to us, the world you think most familiar.

Description has earned a bad rap with overlong, self-indulgent eulogies to wallflowers, furniture, or even alien planets. Bur setting involves everything that supports and impinges on your characters. The props of the world artifacts and architecture, infrastructure, books, food, fabrics, tools and technology—create and sustain identity. People behaving in relation to their surroundings define both space and time, and reveal much more.

Assignment:

Draw the floor plan of the first house you remember living in. Take a mental tour through the house, pausing (and marking on the floor plan) where significant occurred. Walk through again, making a list of these events. Pick one of them and write about it. Pay attention to the setting and the atmosphere of the event. How does your relation to the space, light, weather, walls, furniture, and objects affect what you are doing and feeling? Explain in detail, does the space represent safety or confinement? 

Memoir and Personal Essay

A memoir is a story retrieved from the author’s memory, with the writer as protagonist—the “I” remembering and commenting on events described in the essay. Memoir tends to place the emphasis on the story, and the “point” is likely to emerge, as it does in fiction, largely from the events and characters themselves, rather than the through the author’s speculation and reflection.

The personal essay has its origin in something that has happened in the writer’s life, but it may be something that happened yesterday afternoon, or it may represent an area of interest deliberately explored, and it is likely to give rise to reflection or intellectual exploration. In his book, The Art of the Personal Essay, Philip Lopate refers to the personal essay as, “…the drive toward candor and self-exposure.

Assignment: Write narrative style essays for the following prompts as indicated:

Memoir

People often say “Don’t judge a book by its cover.” Describe a time when you misjudged someone based on his or her appearance or when someone misjudged you.

Personal Essay

The way a person handles disappointment reveals a great deal about what is important to him or her. Tell about a time in your life when you confronted disappointment and how you handled it.

The essays should be at least 250 words but no more than 750 words. Essays are due Wednesday, November 10^th at the beginning of class. Also, please post them on your blogs.

Figures of Speech

English is a language unusually rich in tropes or figures of speech—that is, expressions not meant to be taken literally, but as standing for something related in some way (the word trope comes from a Greek word meaning to twist or turn). Tropes almost invariably involve an image. The number and variety of common figures of speech make English difficult to learn as a foreign language, but also makes it a fertile ground for creative writing. (Notice that fertile ground here is a trope, specifically a metaphor in which the language is compared to soil.)

There are many different kinds of figures of speech, but there are five major tropes are usually considered to be:

Metonymy – in which one thing is represented by another thing associate with it, as in all crowns of Europe (where crowns stands for kings)

Synecdoche – in which a part stands for the whole, as in all hands on deck (where hands stands for men)

Personification – in which human characteristics are bestowed on anything non human, as in the breathing city or the gentle breeze

Metaphor – a comparison as in the woman is a rose.

Simile – a comparison as in the woman is like a rose.

Though these are five of the most frequently used figures of speech in English, you may be familiar with others, such as hyperbole, which is extreme exaggeration, and oxymoron, which links two contradictory words. And who hasn’t enjoyed groaning at a pun? In medieval and Renaissance rhetoric, dozens of tropes were identified, classified, and debate, and skill using these “ornaments” much admired.

Assignment:

Write three (3) poems of two (2) verses each in the following format: The first line consists of an abstraction, plus a verb, plus a place. The second line describes attire. The third line summarizes an action.

Beauty creeps out the window
Wearing nothing but taut bare skin
Leaving a trail of wrinkles behind her.

Hunger yells in the hallway,
Draped in cymbals;
He stomps and shouts, “Hear me now!”

Example by Carrisa Neff