Presentation setting/places in fiction. SFCC Spring 2020 Intro to Fiction

1. Eavesdroppings
• Take out your eavesdropped
conversations
• Without thinking about it too much,
use the dialogue you wrote down to
start a scene between two characters
• Include as much detail as you can
about them—this can be fiction, and
does not have to be the actual people
you heard say these words
• Try to incorporate as much direct
characterization as you can:
appearance, dialogue, action. Try to
use the dialogue to convey more than
what is being said.

2. “Oh, the places
you’ll go.”
—Dr. Seuss
Real and imagined settings in fiction

3. Sense of Place
“Nothing happens
nowhere.” —Elizabeth
Bowen
Setting grounds a story,
but also is intrinsic to a
story’s meaning
Dialogue means more
than it says—it helps
show the character’s
identity and quest
In the same way,
setting should mean
more than simply a
backdrop for
characters.

4. Beyond
Geography
• Place conveys a tone: gloomy, claustrophobic, happy,
laid back, uptight, weird, hopeless
• This tone can work to reinforce a character or be in
contrast to a character
• Atmosphere can also be used to reinforce a character’s
emotional state
• “One great advantage of being a writer is that you may
create the world. Places and the elements have the
significance and the emotional effect you give them in
language. As a person you may be depressed by rain, but
as an author you are free to make rain mean freshness,
growth, bounty, and God. You may choose; the only
thing you are not free to do is not to choose.” —Janet
Malcolm, Writing Fiction

5. Beyond
Geography
• Setting is not just the city, state
country, but also the personal settings
for characters: bedrooms, kitchens,
closet
• Sense of place can be the books
stacked on a nightstand, the clothes in
a closet
• All are rendered into physical reality
through meaningful sensory details

6. Other Ways to Consider Sense of Place
• Genius loci—”spirit of the place”
• Community: Who are the people that define a town or city?
• Nature: A story set in the high desert can’t be the same story as one set in Nantucket
• Political
• Experiential
• Spiritual
• And more
• What are some fictionalized/invented places that have stuck with you?

7. Jane Austen’s
England

8. Interiors

9. Willa Cather, writing room and Nebraska plains

10. John Steinbeck’s California

11. Relationship between
character and place
• John Steinbeck’s depiction of Cannery Row in his book Cannery Row
was so influential, that the name of the town was changed to Cannery
Row 13 years after the book was published. It used to be called Ocean
View Avenue.

13. Connecting
character and place
• Millard Owen Sheets showing the lives of 1930s migrant
fieldworkers are also a part of an exhibition. Sheets was commissioned
to do the pieces for a 1939 Fortune Magazine article. National
Steinbeck center

14. Edith Wharton’s
Gilded New York
Photos by Stephen Shore for Age of
Innocence (Arion Press)

15. Central Park

17. Capturing
environment

18. Henry Miller
and Paris

19. Paris culture 1930s
• Miller wrote to Anais
Nin from cafes all over
Paris.

20. Retracing Miller’s steps
• old postcard of
avenue Anatole
France in Clichy,
probably around the
time Miller lived
there.
• Millerwalks.com

21. Mark Twain & The Mississippi
Twain used the river and the characters he
created to write about race, religion, the West
By doing so, he influenced the way in which
the area is perceived to this day.
"Mark Twain" (meaning "Mark number two") was a
Mississippi River term: the second mark on the line that
measured depth signified two fathoms, or twelve feet—
safe depth for the steamboat. —UC Berkeley

22. Made-up worlds

23. Harry Potter/Hogwarts

24. Transforming real places into imaginary ones
JK Rowling imagined this

25. “Nothing
Happens
Nowhere”
• Like dialogue, setting does more than
one thing at once
• Character as an outcome of place
• Atmosphere helps set the tone of a
piece
• Characters can be in harmony or
conflict with their setting
• Place can help set the conflict and the
emotional “weather” of a piece

26. Author #1: Chitra Banerjee
Divakaruni
• Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is an
award-winning and bestselling
author, poet, activist and teacher
of writing. Her work has been
published in over 50 magazines,
including the Atlantic Monthly
and The New Yorker, and her
writing has been included in over
50 anthologies, including The Best
American Short Stories, the
O.Henry Prize Stories and the
Pushcart Prize Anthology. Her
books have been translated into
29 languages, including Dutch,
Hebrew, Bengali, Russian and
Japanese, and many of them have
been used for campus-wide and
city-wide reads.

27. Mrs. Dutta
Writes a Letter:
Group
questions
1. What happens in this story?
2. What do you think this story is about
about about?
3. How is her home in California
different than in Calcutta?
4. How do the settings reinforce the
story’s themes?
5. As always, use examples from the
text as much as possible.

28. From the story
Mrs. Dutta hums too as she fries potatoes for alu dum. Her voice is rusty and
slightly off- key. In India she would never have ventured to sing, but with
everyone gone the house is too quiet, all that silence pressing down on her
like the heel of a giant hand, and the TV voices, with their strange foreign
accents, are no help at all. As the potatoes turn golden- brown, she permits
herself a moment of nostalgia for her Calcutta kitchen -- the new gas stove
she bought with the birthday money Sagar sent, the scoured- shiny brass
pots stacked by the meat safe, the window with the lotus-pattern grille
through which she could look down on white- uniformed children playing
cricket after school. The mouthwatering smell of ginger and chili paste,
ground fresh by Reba, the maid, and, in the evening, strong black Assam tea
brewing in the kettle when Mrs. Basu came by to visit. In her mind she writes
to Mrs. Basu: Oh, Roma, I miss it all so much. Sometimes I feel that someone
has reached in and torn out a handful of my chest.

29. Mrs. Dutta Writes a Letter
• When this thought occurred to Mrs. Dutta, she was so frightened that
her body grew numb. The walls of the room spun into blackness; the
bed on which she lay, a vast fourposter she had shared with Sagar's
father since their wedding, rocked like a dinghy caught in a storm; and
a great hollow roaring reverberated inside her head.

30. Mrs. Dutta
• STEPPING into the back yard with a bucket of newly washed clothes,
Mrs. Dutta views the sky with some anxiety. The butter- gold sunlight
is gone, black- bellied clouds have taken over the horizon, and the air
feels still and heavy on her face, as before a Bengal storm. What if her
clothes don't dry by the time the others return home?

31. Mrs. Dutta…
• MRS. Dutta hums a popular Tagore song as she pulls her sari from the fence. It's
been a good day, as good as it can be in a country where you might stare out the
window for hours and not see one living soul. No vegetable vendors with
enormous wicker baskets balanced on their heads, no knife sharpeners with their
distinctive call scissors- knives-choppers, scissors- knives- choppers to bring the
children running. No peasant women with colorful tattoos on their arms to sell
you cookware in exchange for your old silk saris. Why, even the animals that
frequented Ghoshpara Lane had personality -- stray dogs that knew to line up
outside the kitchen door just when the leftovers were likely to be thrown out; the
goat that maneuvered its head through the garden grille hoping to get at her
dahlias; cows that planted themselves majestically in the center of the road,
ignoring honking drivers. And right across the street was Mrs. Basu's two- story
house, which Mrs. Dutta knew as well as her own. How many times had she
walked up the stairs to that airy room, painted sea- green and filled with plants,
where her friend would be waiting for her?

32. Author #2: Lorrie
Moore
Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English at Vanderbilt
University. Author of three novels and four collections of stories
as well as the editor of several anthologies. Moore has received
honors for her work, among them the Irish Times International
Prize for Literature, a Lannan Foundation fellowship, as well as
the PEN/Malamud Award and the Rea Award for her
achievement in the short story. Her most recent novel, A Gate
at the Stairs, was shortlisted for the 2010 Orange Prize and for
the PEN/Faulkner. Her most recent collection, BARK, was
shortlisted for The Story Prize, The Frank O'Connor Prize, and
The Gregor Von Rezzori Prize. She was elected to the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001 and to the American
Academy of Arts and Letters in 2005

33. From the author (Paris Review, Art of Fiction)
“As for the relationship of my fictional characters to me, their author, I suppose it would
depend on which characters you mean. Each has a slightly different relationship, I
believe—I hope. I assume you mostly mean the protagonists, who sometimes have the
burden of having a couple of things in common with me and sometimes don’t. I’m never
writing autobiography—I would be bored, the reader would be bored, the writing would
be nowhere. One has to imagine, one has to create (exaggerate, lie, fabricate from whole
cloth and patch together from remnants), or the thing will not come alive as art. Of course,
what one is interested in writing about often comes from what one has remarked in one’s
immediate world or what one has experienced oneself or perhaps what one’s friends have
experienced. But one takes these observations, feelings, memories, anecdotes—
whatever—and goes on an imaginative journey with them. What one hopes to do in that
journey is to imagine deeply and well and thereby somehow both gather and mine the
best stuff of the world. A story is a kind of biopsy of human life. A story is both local,
specific, small, and deep, in a kind of penetrating, layered, and revealing way. Perhaps it’s
even diagnostic, though now I’ve got to lose this completely repellent medical imagery.”
• — https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/510/a-href-authors-4693-lorrie-
moorelorrie-moore-a-the-art-of-fiction-no-167-lorrie-moore

34. You’re Ugly, Too by Lorrie Moore

35. Character and Place
• What’s the story about?
• What’s it about about?
• “Illinois. It makes me sarcastic to be here.”
• What is the relationship between the protagonist, Zoe, and Illinois?
• Other observations?

36. What does this passage reveal about Zoe?

37. Writing
exercise: Pick a
place: 15
minutes
• Exercise either #1 or #2 (p. 122)
• 1. Consider the ideas of home, homesickness,
foreignness, alienation. Place a character in a
scene where these ideas are evoked by place,
time, and weather.
• Or
• #2. Two characters are in conflict over a
setting. One wants to stay, the other wants to
go. The more interesting the setting you
choose the more interesting the scene will be.
Le the disagreement escalate. Resolve it. Who
wins? How? Why?
• Option/Suggestion: Use one or both characters
from the earlier exercise to keep developing
them.

38. Next week’s
assignments
• Read: “Chapter Six” in Writing Fiction: The Tower and
the Net, Plot and Structure
• Read for class: Read: “Happy Endings” by Margaret
Atwood and
• “Silver Water” by Amy Bloom
• Please bring observations and questions from your
reading of both stories that relate to the techniques of
fiction we've reviewed so far. We will do some work on
analysis in small groups.
• We will also discuss fictional time from this week’s
reading next week.
• We will have a writing assignment in class that will build
toward your first piece for small-group workshops