It’s the season of entrance examinations and timed assessments.
Students often ask me how can you keep on writing when your mind goes blank, you can’t start or you just run out of ideas?
And time is ticking away….
Remember...
Creative cul-de-sacs are easy to escape from if you remember your SETTING
Let’s learn by example….
Here’s an extract from Nina Bawden’s novel, The Witch’s Daughter:
”Home was a white house on the shore of an inland loch…The front door did not open.”
- Notice how carefully constructed this description is in terms of setting and the character of the house.
- You can easily repeat Bawden’s technique beginning with Home and then make up your own version of the setting sentence.
- In Bawden’s setting sentence we can pick out the ‘white house’ on the horizon visually and know where it is situated.
- We also know that the front door is a ‘problem’ and that subsequently people must use the back door.
(Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde uses a similar technique, where the back door takes on a very particular significance as it relates to the criminality of Mr Hyde. )
In Bawden, these details create our first impressions of the protagonist’s home and we may find ourselves thinking about the ways in which the home’s isolation may relate to the possible loneliness of the inhabitants. The inhabitants could be antisocial too and perhaps there may be some secrecy involved, even danger?
- A simple statement about the front door gives you several clues for your writing further along.
- The setting sentence assembles together several building blocks of narrative possibilities.
- Then as you write, you can pick up on something from your setting sentence and make it work in your story.
- So begin with a carefully constructed setting sentence and introduce a ‘problem’ in the setting.
- In Robert Louis Stevenson’s tales, home is always left behind to allow for adventure.
So create your SETTING SENTENCE! And you never need to get stuck again!
