Setting and Description

Using The Five Senses

Task 1

Task 2

Find a video describing the five senses, and how to use them in writing. You can use youtube, google, or any search engine. 

 

After you watch the video, move on to the second task. 

Using your new-found knowledge on the five senses, create a description of your favorite place in the world using all the five senses. Make your readers want to go there. Make them feel something about this place. Be descriptive and creative. The place can be fiction or reality.

This writing should be added to your writing portfolio. 

Task 3:

I realized that our five senses were doorways to evoke our own stories. I have tested this theory in writing classes and found it to be true- that using one of our natural senses that we take for granted- like taste, or smell, or hearing- can bring stories to our mind. To use this way of evocation through the sense of taste, for instance, you don't need to actually eat anything; you only have to think of the taste of something to bring forth stories. Once I simply suggested the taste of bacon to a group of factory workers, and one of them wrote and read to the group a moving story that was evoked for him. The heart of the story was that as a child, when he woke up and smelled bacon frying, he knew it would be a good day in. his home; if he woke and didn't smell the bacon, it meant that his parents had hangovers from drinking too much the night before, and things in his house that day would not be pleasant. 

 

Here is a list of common foods that may trigger a memory or scene in your mind: 

The taste of applesauce; the taste of popcorn; the taste of coffee; the taste of chocolate; the taste of hot dogs. 

 

Whichever taste brings something to mind, write everything you remember about it for the next ten minutes. Write the way you would tell a friend about what you remember. Don't edit or second guess yourself, just let the story come forth. The story is in the taste. 

 

- Taken from Now Write (p. 46)

Task #4

"In his wonderful biography, Les Mots, Jean-Paul Sartre describes how as a boy writing stories, he would bring his hero and heroine to some dramatic point, say one of them had fallen overboard from a small boat, and then spend the next two pages copying out the encyclopedia description of sharks. Of course this makes us smile but it also captures something of the attitude that many of us bring to setting and description. We create our characters with care, we work hard at our plots, we ponder our themes.

Setting, on the other hand, tends to be either a given, or an after thought..." 

- Setting in Fiction,  Margo Livesey

 

Complete the following to demonstrate your development and understanding of writing setting. They should be added to your writing portfolio: 

1. Do some research on establishing setting in a story. Find a video or article that stands out to you as giving relevant information. Choose a quote from that article that captures the most significant element of setting/writing setting. Cite your source. 

2. Write a long paragraph. Introduce the character in the first sentence, then describe the setting. Return to the character only at the end of the paragraph. 

- Consider all the options. Maybe the character's situation stands in contrast to the setting. Maybe it is dictated by it. The setting itself could be an exact description of a room, a town, or even an item of clothing that dominates the atmosphere of the scene. 

3. Learning to Layer: Start with a sentence, then add layers to it. See this document for more information on the act of establishing setting through layers. This applies to every type of writing. Worry first about getting the story on paper. Then you can worry about making it do what you want it to. 

 

(Resources from Now Write, edited by Sherry Ellis) 

Optional Task

Explore one of the book resources in the library. You can choose to read only the selection that applies to setting and description. Write a quick review of what you chose to read in your Writer's Portfolio.