(Photo #1)
Those familiar with my writing know that vivid settings are important to my storytelling—whether exotic foreign locales (including invented planets), the glorious wilderness, the shimmering world under the waves, or the flavor of downtown streets. I confess I gravitate to the outdoors when possible, and find it boring when scenes and sometimes whole stories are devoted to characters talking in generic rooms. When I’m working with student writers, I “open up the toolbox” of techniques to try in the pursuit of fully textured fiction. I’ve found that setting and landscape are often forgotten in the development of character and conflict, but they can be powerful in establishing the emotional tone of a scene. Witness Shakespeare’s plays that famously use weather and landscape as symbolic mirrors of the human comedy or drama.
“This castle hath a pleasant seat; the air
Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself
Unto our gentle senses.” (MacBeth, Act I Scene 6)
A perfect moment to lull us into relaxation before the horrific events to come.
“It was the owl that shriek’d, the fatal bellman,
Which gives the stern’st good-night.” (Macbeth. ACT II Scene 2) Continue reading
I met you, if you’ll recall, when I was six and my father let me stay up to watch ”The Day the Earth Stood Still”. You terrified me and exhilarated me and gave me a fascination with the unexplained and alien.
Since my teens (possibly even before that, but the facts get lost in the gauze of time) I have occasionally fallen over. Often publicly. The first time I remember was in gym class, where I turned to a classmate, said, “I feel like I’m gonna–” and did, coming to a minute later to see the faces of all three of the school’s gym teachers very close to mine, and to hear the “what happened?” of 40 15-year-old girls echoing like the cries of maddened seagulls in my ears. Since then, my public swoons have been the stuff of anecdote, like the time I fell at the top of the up escalator at a department store, and awoke to find that I was being prodded with a cane by an elderly woman who thought I was staging a protest (it was the ’70s).
