The document provides guidance on how to effectively establish setting and mood in creative writing. It encourages the reader to brainstorm spots from their neighborhood that they remember, and to create a vision of the setting for the reader using imagery and details. It explains that setting reveals information about characters and can be used to establish mood through details of time, weather, and atmosphere. The document provides examples of how settings and moods can be paired, and prompts the reader to write a poem or piece that takes place in one of their remembered spots, using setting to convey mood.

1.  Brainstorm the “spots” in your current or your
past neighborhood that you will always
remember. Make a list.

4.  Time
 Place
 Circumstances

5. “If a piece of literature does not create the
setting for us, if it seems to occur in a no-
place no-time or in a vague-place fuzzy-time,
we cannot experience it, or else we must
experience that vagueness itself as crucial to
the action.” – Janet Burroway

7.  description

9.  Your routine, your neighborhood, your take
on home, history, climate, and the cosmos is
unique, like your voice, and inseperable from
your voice.
 Create your vision for your reader.

10.  Although imagery has earned a bad wrap
because of overuse, this is the time to employ
it.
 Seriously.
 Find the fine details.

11.  Remember that setting says a great deal
about the people in your story.
 Of Mice and Men would not be the same if it
had not taken place on a ranch in the times of
the Great Depression. Right?

12.  Setting often begins a piece, for the very
good reason that this is the first thing we
register in life.
 When we enter a place, we take it in as a
panorama.
 Pretend you’re a camera and give your
reader the big picture with words.

13.  Definition:
 the emotional atmosphere in a text.
 You make your reader feel something when
you establish a mood.
 Can be established by setting
 Usually contains some element of time and
weather: wet or dry, dark or light, winter or
summer, calm or storm, etc.

14.  See packet.

15. MOOD / QUALITY OF
TIMES/PLACES/WEATHER ATMOSPHERE
 the city in the rain  sinister
 midnight on the farm  sick with love
 1890, in the parlor  full of promise
 high noon on the river  suicidal
 a spring moment  dangerous
 in a bar, after hours  suspense
 the dusty road  happy-go-lucky
 dawn in a foreign place  lonely
WRITE A POEM IN WHICH YOU MAKE THE SETTING SUGGEST THE ATMOSPHERE. IF
THE CONNECTION IS NOT OBVIOUS, YOUR PIECE WILL BE MORE INTERESTING.

16.  Select one of the spots on the list you made in your
Quick Write today. You’re going to tell the story of
that spot.
 Complete the T-chart for one of the moments.
 Then, use Google Drive to type a piece (you choose
the form) that took place there and:
 has a clear setting and establishes mood
 shows a story (i.e. don’t tell us what happened… use
imagery!)
 shows why the place has a special place in your heart.