Place and Setting

How do we create places and settings that draw the reader, or audience member, in? This is the question we asked ourselves in Writing for Page and Stage this week.

This week we explored creating settings that are rich in atmosphere and evoke a mood, without telling the reader how to feel. For this, we created evocative pieces that engaged the reader or audience’s senses.

After last week’s session, people added their pieces about the buildings that made up our evolving town. The writers created a range of interesting buildings - each piece hinting at hidden aspects of local history, bygone days and, for some buildings, even a longing for something different than the run-down and dusty present.

Our town has: a dodgy supermarket where you need to watch your back, TWO abandoned and dilapidated libraries, a river that has a tale to tell, a forest (Evergreen library sits between the forest and the road), a post office with a shiny new sign (big news for the town!), a brooding building that is The Working Men’s Club. There is the Dancehall that aches for the monthly dance with aging patrons, in amongst the town hall meetings it hosts, the baby groups and art classes. The Nothing Club is where the rats gather and whoever looks after it, does a poor job. It seems a town of facades is emerging. Of fronts and covers, hollow insides and dreams of what has been.

For the first half of the session, we looked at place and setting in terms of descriptive writing. As a warm-up, we wrote about place with a focus on evoking a certain feeling from the reader or audience, without using any words that directly related to the feeling. We ended up in a cosy reading nook as well as a run-down bedroom of a teenager.

We then wrote about another place or building in the town, with a view to using all the senses in our process, in the hope that this would bring the location alive for the reader. We examined the difference between location and setting. Setting includes the physical location, time period and cultural and social context. Setting can be a character, too, and it can also influence the mood - and journey - of the characters that inhabit it.

We wrote to get to know a little bit more about how its inhabitants (or strangers passing through) interact with the places and spaces of the town. To explore this we wrote pieces that showed how characters interacted with the places in the town. The emphasis here was less on the character and more on the setting and their interactions with it. This meant we steered away from internal monologues and the character’s experience and instead used the third person point of view to describe them within the context of the setting. This shift in focus invited the reader/audience member into the realm of the world we are co-creating in sessions, as well as giving a glimpse of some of the characters and their roles within our town. You can read some of the pieces in the image above & below.

Our blogs

Regular news and insight from our many poets, writers, educators and facilitators

Place and Setting