Setting & Emotion

It's been tough getting back into my novel again after idling these last couple of weeks over the holidays. Not to mention taking the month of November off to write a new  novel for NaNoWriMo '09! There's nothing like the start of a new year, however, to get my engines revving again.  Unfortunately, I can barely remember where I left off.  


Thank goodness I made some detailed notes in my novel journal before quitting at the end of October.  Looks like I was in the middle of a scene where my protagonist enters a new and frightening situation--moving into a house with six people he's never met before--for him, his worst nightmare.  I was having some difficulty getting into my character's mind for this one, when I remembered a writing exercise on emotion and setting from a Gotham Writer's Workshop class taught by Brandi Reissenweber.  The trick, as always, is to tweak the exercise so that it fits the problematic scene in your own project that you're hoping to improve.  In my case, the "surroundings" my character enters into will not be vacant--there'll be six other characters to greet him when he walks in the front door.

Janet Burroway describes the relationship of character to place in her book, Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft: 

Below, Burroway refers to an example from the short story "Ralph the Duck" by Frederick Busch:

Happy writing!