Setting & Character

I'm still plodding through Fiction Writers Workshop. You know, it's making me think I'm not cut out to take writing classes - seriously, I have my three hours a day to write and read and such, and I want to spend it actually producing something I like, rather than random musings on my childhood.

Setting was up first. The exercises were good at training how to attend to the world and recall things most people gloss over, but I always thought writers had that weird glitch anyway. Have you ever noticed the way a writer friend will tell a story has drops of color while another might tell the story in black and white, without smell or textures?

This section was a bit sad - most readers gloss over setting sections. Writers put so much detail in them. Setting is one of the things I consistently get dinged on by the CP - two pages into a scene and I get a note about 'who's driveway are they in?' I'm trying to drop three points of setting into the first page of every scene - a wall, the floor, a chair...whatever. I think that should be enough to let readers know, but not so much the skip. Hmmm. Maybe I ought to just put pictures of nekkid people on the walls. That's garner attention.

Character came next. This section gave me quite the epiphany. I start every story - novel or short - with a concept. Just One Spark was a song, Breaking His Rules a segment on CNN, Par For The Course a magazine article...you get the point. I start with an idea I wouldn't mind sharing head space with for a year or so, and then flip characters through until I find a few that stick.

Did you know there are methods of character generation?
ideal method - frm psychological texts, myth, imagination
biographical method - fusion of people you know
autobiographical method - fisson. projecting self
mixed medthod - a bit of biographical and ideal methods