Exposition & Setting
Blogs
Exposition Explained
Exposition is the part that holds stories together, the bit that introduces information the reader needs to know to understand the plot. It’s the detail that cannot be contained within dialogue or action. Exposition is why a story makes sense.
Five Ways to Establish Context in Your Story (Part 2 of 2)
Context is everything in stories and in life. In the last blog, we explored the relationship between context and complication. This time, we’re going to examine the ways to establish context within your story.
There are two ways in which context affects story—the context of the plot (or event, in the case of nonfiction) and the context of character.
Using Context and Complication to Strengthen Your Story (Part 1 of 2)
Context is the foundation for everything. It colors perception and fact. It changes minds and tugs on emotion. Without context, a story is nothing more than an anecdote floating in space.
Context provides the background, backstory, setting and structure that holds the details of a story together and gives the reader the framework necessary to understand. Without this, the reader cannot know how to feel.
Sensory Writing: Taste (Part 6 of 6)
Taste is directly linked to smell. It, like smell, also happens within the body. We have to take in the food in order to taste it. Taste cannot happen passively. It is an active act, a decision. We drink the wine, eat the pizza, and savor the chocolate. As it’s linked to smell, I am going to limit my commentary, but I highly encourage you to include taste in your work.
Sensory Writing: Smell (Part 5 of 6)
Experts say that smell is the sense most closely related to memory. The one that can transport us in time. It is also the sense I am least able to discuss. I was born without the sense of smell (congenital anosmia). I have not smelled anything in my life. Never will (so please do not ask me to smell things, especially things like ammonia. Been there—done that—can’t smell it).
Sensory Writing: Touch (Part 4 of 6)
When we’re young, we learn about the world through touch. We put dirt in our mouths, Run our toes through the grass. Embed our hands into the dog’s shiny coat. As we grow, we learn not to touch dirty things and to keep our hands out of our mouths, but we never lose that desire to touch our world—to run our hands over objects of our desire.
Sensory Writing: Sound (Part 3 of 6)
Hearing is a physical reaction within the eardrum. A vibration that carries meaning. Everything your character hears should do the same. It should resound within the story or characters.
Sensory Writing: Sight (Part 2 of 6)
Welcome to the Sense Series. The first part was an overview of sensory writing. Now we’ll tackle one sense per week. First up: Sight.
Sight is the most common sense used in writing and the most important. Visual words and phrases bring that world to life. Through words, we recreate the world around us or invent an entirely new world for our reader.
Sensory Writing (Part 1 of 6)
We experience the world through our senses, through what we see, hear, touch, taste and smell. It’s our senses that define our existence, which is why it is imperative to incorporate sensory writing into your work.
Senses take a flat world and transforms it into a fully realized one with depth, texture and vibrancy. All five senses should be integrated into your description somewhere. If your story takes place in the woods, you might talk about the dappled lighting, moist ground, and sounds of the birds and animals moving about. It might smell of wet Earth or decomposing leaves. If your story takes place in a bakery, I would hope there would be talk of scents and tastes—touches of vanilla and chocolate and the feel of warm cookies straight from the oven. The goal is to offer details about your world through the five senses, not just sight and sounds, which are the most easily accessed and obvious.
Truth in Story and Setting
As writers, we create the circumstances and context for our characters. We create the world. The setting. The characters themselves. Then we offer it all to our readers with an unspoken promise that the story and characters will be worth their time. This promise is an acknowledgment that we will do our research and write a story that is not full of errors, factual, grammatical or otherwise.
Setting and Set Dressing (Part 3 of 3)
Setting is more than the broad location and time. It is everything contained within that space—the items and props that your characters handle and face.
Setting and Set Dressing (Part 2 of 3)
Setting is an essential element in any story. It provides context and a space for your characters. When wielded properly, it can do more than simply list what your characters can see. It can support every other aspect of your writing.
The last blog covered the basics of setting. Now it’s time to explore ways to use setting to its best advantage.
Setting and Set Dressing (Part 1 of 3)
Story requires place to make it come alive. Writing setting is much like the job of a set designer for the stage or screen. The trick is to discover ways to bring your setting to life. This may mean describing a building, a forest, a living room or some other place where your characters can move about their lives. This is setting. It includes everything from location to descriptions of the dishes on the kitchen table.
Show Versus Tell: The Case for Showing
Show versus Tell is an age old battle for writers. Deciding when to show your world to your readers and when to tell them facts is a balancing act. Good writing requires both styles. In the last blog, we covered when to tell. This blog focuses on showing—the powerhouse of writing.
Showing gives your reader a more immersive experience. It’s the difference between reading a newspaper article and a novel. One gives the facts with a sprinkling of details and description. The other invites the reader to experience the story along with the character. It’s engaging.
Show Versus Tell: The Case for Telling
Every writer has learned the first rule of writing: “Show don’t tell.” It is the preeminent bit of advice for writers of all levels and yet it remains one of the most misunderstood and confusing rules. Sure, it’s easy to understand why you shouldn’t tell your story from start to end like a person at the party who keeps saying, “…and then we…” with no end to the boredom. But it is not so easy to figure out what telling is versus showing. Sometimes they seem a lot alike. It all depends on how you write. The truth is good writing combines both showing and telling.
Transitions—Moments that Make or Break a Story
There are moments in a dance that instantly distinguishes a great dancer from a mediocre one. It’s the same type of moment that differentiates a choppy film from one that sweeps you away.
I’m talking about transitions. Those tiny moments between movements and scenes. The seconds hidden in the in-between spaces. A great dancer will use those transitions to make the dance flow seamlessly. A filmmaker uses transitions to hide cuts and let the story feel whole.
Making Setting Come Alive (Part 3 of 3)
This is the final installment in my three-part series on Setting. It’s time to share some great examples of setting in novels for inspiration.
Some authors excel at setting. You read them and can feel the wind on your face or get goose bumps from fear. These masters know how to use setting to increase tension, mood, characterization, anchoring and texture.
Making Setting Come Alive (Part 2 of 3)
Setting is an essential part of any fictional work. It anchors your character in time and place, and allows your reader to see, hear, smell and touch the world you have created. This is not an easy task. It takes careful consideration and a deft touch.
Making Setting Come Alive (Part 1 of 3)
Characters cannot live outside of time or place. Story demands setting to anchor characters in the world around them. You do this by using specific details. Anchoring requires specific details to firmly establish the what, where and when. But setting goes beyond that basic information. It also helps ground story in mood, texture and sense. It lets a writer reveal how a character feels about place, time and items around them. It also contributes to tension and pacing.
Lessons in Location and Setting
Setting is key in any story, whether you’re talking novels or films. Setting is what gives a story a sense of place, ambience, mood and texture, so picking the right location is everything. Stories set in New Orleans are vastly different than those set in New York or Hong Kong. Even neighborhoods have different nuances—think Chinatown versus Greektown or Queens versus the Bronx.
Description & Setting (Or Suffering From a Lack of B-Roll)
I work in the film and video industry, when I am not writing speeches, social media content, articles or a novel. Although the novel thing is rather new.
(Okay, it’s not really new, but it’s been recently that have I written the first draft of the only novel I want to edit. So that’s new.)
As I am transitioning from film to fiction, I have run into a host of problems: the biggest being a serious lack of B-roll.
Voice Is Everything
Writing is more than a collection of words strewn across the page. It has life and voice. We hear it when we read to ourselves. It speaks to us and takes on a life of its own depending on the author.
The voice of a story is what makes it come alive in the reading and it is the most important skill a writer can have. It’s what sets one writer apart from another—a Hemingway (short, short sentences) versus a Faulkner (who goes on and on), a Gaiman from a Melville. These are not the same voices. They sound different in our heads. The way these authors string words and sentences together creates different rhythms and cadences as we read along. They pull at us differently.
Below are a few examples of voice in writing. The first example is from one of my favorite authors.