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2020 fictional places
This document provides information and exercises about developing sense of place in fiction writing. It discusses how setting can reinforce themes and characters. Specific authors and works are examined as examples, such as Lorrie Moore's short story "You're Ugly, Too" and the relationship between the protagonist and her hometown of Illinois. Writing exercises prompt the reader to develop a short scene exploring themes of home and conflict over a setting. The document concludes with assignments for next week, including reading two short stories and coming prepared with observations and questions relating to fiction techniques covered so far.
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2020 fictional places
- 1. Eavesdroppings • Take outyour 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’llgo.” —Dr. Seuss Real and imagined settings in fiction
- 3. Sense of Place “Nothinghappens 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 conveysa 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 isnot 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 toConsider 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?
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- 9. Willa Cather, writingroom and Nebraska plains
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- 11. Relationship between character andplace • 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 NewYork Photos by Stephen Shore for Age of Innocence (Arion Press)
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- 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
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- 24. Transforming real placesinto 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: ChitraBanerjee 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 aLetter: 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 Writesa 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 • STEPPINGinto 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 GertrudeConaway 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, Tooby 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 thispassage 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
Editor's Notes
- #4 Bowen: irish novelist
- #8 In Jane Austen’s novels, the countryside and the estates are the setting ELIZABETH, as they drove along, watched for the first appearance of Pemberley Woods with some perturbation; and when at length they turned in at the lodge, her spirits were in a high flutter. The park was very large, and contained great variety of ground. They entered it in one of its lowest points, and drove for some time through a beautiful wood, stretching over a wide extent. Elizabeth's mind was too full for conversation, but she saw and admired every remarkable spot and point of view. They gradually ascended for half a mile, and then found themselves at the top of a considerable eminence, where the wood ceased, and the eye was instantly caught by Pemberley House, situated on the opposite side of a valley, into which the road, with some abruptness, wound. It was a large, handsome, stone building, standing well on rising ground, and backed by a ridge of high woody hills; -- and in front, a stream of some natural importance was swelled into greater, but without any artificial appearance. Its banks were neither formal, nor falsely adorned. Elizabeth was delighted. She had never seen a place for which nature had done more, or where natural beauty had been so little counteracted by an awkward taste. They were all of them warm in their admiration; and at that moment she felt that to be mistress of Pemberley might be something! for the stories, but they also depict a particular time in 19th century London, the landed gentry’s homes, the sprawling grounds.
- #9 Makes a particular difference because at the heart of that book is this issue of a woman’s only way of surviving was to marry well and marrying well meant marrying someone who had their own property.
- #10 Tells the story of immigrant families who moved to Nebraska; Willa Cather’s attic room in Red Cloud, Nebraska. In MY ANTONIA, Jim Burden says of his first glimpse of Nebraska, “There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.” During the 20-mile trip by horse-drawn wagon from town to his grandparents’ farm, Jim looks out at the starry night and says of his deceased parents, “I had left even their spirits behind me. The wagon jolted on, carrying me I knew not where. … Between that earth and sky I felt erased, blotted out.”
- #11 “Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses. Its inhabitant are, as the man once said, "whores, pimps, gambler and sons of bitches," by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, "Saints and angels and martyrs and holymen" and he would have meant the same thing.”
- #12 Published in 1945
- #15 Age of Innocence: “Then the house had been boldly planned with a ball-room, so that, instead of squeezing through a narrow passage to get to it (as at the Chiverses') one marched solemnly down a vista of enfiladed drawing-rooms (the sea-green, the crimson and the bouton d'or), seeing from afar the many-candled lustres reflected in the polished parquetry, and beyond that the depths of a conservatory where camellias and tree-ferns arched their costly foliage over seats of black and gold bamboo.”
- #22 Samuel Langhorne Clemens
- #24 Hogwarts, Alnwick Castle is the largest inhabited castle in England. The ancestral home of the Duke of Northumberland since the 13th centuryHogwarts looked just as I imagined it. It was the most bizarre experience when I walked onto the set of the Great Hall; it really was like walking into my own brain. Narnia
- #25 Hogwarts, Alnwick Castle is the largest inhabited castle in England. The ancestral home of the Duke of Northumberland since the 13th centur Hogwarts looked just as I imagined it. It was the most bizarre experience when I walked onto the set of the Great Hall; it really was like walking into my own brain.
- #26 Atmosphere meaning the tone of a piece. The same environment can be depicted as sinister of harmonious, depending on the types of descriptions used, meaning word choice. LET’S TALK ABOUT TODAY’S READINGS
- #27 video
- #32 Other observations from the story?
- #35 Why do you think the story starts this way?