Scene Setting Sneak Peek

Synopsis:

We all know that dialogue is important. Dialogue is how we interact with other character and it is a critical part of our simming style. We write dialogue and leave tags for other characters to interact with. But what about the parts of a story that are not dialogue? The action and description in a scene is as important as the dialogue, but sometimes we forget it or leave it out entirely. Learning how to add good descriptions is a vital part of becoming a stronger writer. 

Setting is the context in which a story or scene occurs and includes the time, place, and social environment. It is important to establish a setting in your story, so your readers can visualize and experience it. Whether you are writing fiction or nonfiction, it is critical to establish a setting in your scenes and story. You will learn the importance of setting a scene and how to do it right. We’ll be getting into how to add just the right amount of detail and how to use scenes to build your story. This is great for all those fiction writers who struggle with imagery and descriptions.

The information you will receive is:

1. What is a Scene?
2. Examples of Effective Scene Setting
3. How to Write a Scene
4. Scene Sketch Exercise

Excerpt:

Examples of Effective Scene Setting

While some writers stuff scenes with too much detail, most tend to underwrite sensory specifics. This step-in scene-crafting involves combining your draft and bringing scenes to life with vivid detail that engages your reader’s senses.

Your goal is to paint enough of a picture to help your reader see the scene as if on the big screen. Too much detail is boring, as are details that reveal nothing important. Scenes serve as the framework of your novel and shouldn’t be thrown together. 

Scene Detail: Harry Potter – Harry Entering Hogwarts’ Great Hall

Novel: Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone; page 86

Feeling oddly as though his legs had turned to lead, Harry got into line behind a boy with sandy hair, with Ron behind him, and they walked out of the chamber, back across the hall and through a pair of double doors into the Great Hall.

Harry had never even imagined such a strange and splendid place. It was lit by thousands and thousands of candles which were floating in midair over four long tables, where the rest of the students were sitting. These tables were laid with glittering golden plates and goblets. At the top of the hall was another long table where the teachers were sitting. Professor McGonagall led the first-years up here so that they came to a half in a line facing the other students, with the teachers behind them. The hundreds of faces staring at them looked like pale lanterns in the flickering candlelight. Dotted here and there around the students, the ghosts shone misty silver. Mainly to avoid all the staring eyes, Harry looked upwards and saw a velvety black ceiling dotted with stars. He heard Hermione whisper, “It’s bewitched to look like the sky outside, I read it in Hogwarts: A History.”

It was hard to believe there was a ceiling there at all, and that the Great Hall didn’t simply open on to the heavens.

Harry quickly looked down again as Professor McGonagall silently placed a four-legged stool in front of the first-years. On top of the stool she put a pointed wizard’s hat. This hat was patched and frayed and extremely dirty. Aunt Petunia wouldn’t have let it in the house.

Great Example

Why was this such a great example? The magic of it. What kid doesn’t love magic? Well you don’t get much more magical than the great hall. I remember having glow in the dark stars and planets on my ceiling when I was small and loved it.

Dragons, fantastic creatures, wizard schools, potions lessons, unknowable rooms, children (and adults) love to imagine and invent; Harry Potter gives them a license. 

J.K. Rowling knew all the answers. She knows the world of Harry Potter inside and out. We can fully immerse ourselves in the world without getting ‘stuck; the stories exist with few plot holes. Adults especially appreciate this. We like things to ‘work’ – even when things are impossible! We are provided with a concept of magic and the magical world’s rules. Because Rowling has covered every base, everything else fits neatly in place.

Fantasy, mythology, and fairy tales allow an author to shape our unconscious ideas about what our own world should be like—without beating us over the head with them or even stating them outright.

JK Rowling’s scene setting was so good it was easy for them to create, not one, but multiple movies of the world she had created.

What You Learn

1. How to describe a crowded and rambunctious room/group of people.
2. How to describe a character’s feelings of bewilderment and awe.

Use of the 5 Senses

One of the key things that a scene should do is appeal to all five of the senses. Appeal to the sense of sight only and your writing will lack dimension.

THE SENSE OF SIGHT

You don’t want to restrict yourself to JUST how things look, but sight is still the most important sense to engage in good descriptive writing. Describing how things look with words is the only way you’ll enable your readers to “see.” Don’t attempt to paint the full picture, describing every tree and building and passing dog in sight.

Instead, focus on just a handful of details (and allow readers to paint the rest of the picture for themselves). Make those details the best ones you can find. You can make a reader “see” with little (their brain will do the rest). And the same thing applies to making them hear, taste, touch and smell.

Look at this list of things you might use to describe a character:

• His almost-black hair
• The scar on his chin that only shows up in a certain light
• His chewed fingernails
• His ripped jeans

There’s nothing wrong with using one or more of these details to describe the character – except that they engage only the sense of sight. Descriptive writing that is one-dimensional like that can be tedious.

THE SENSE OF SMELL

Scent is one of the most overlooked senses. Writers rely most heavily on scent descriptions when things smell either really good or really bad. But this allows for so many missed opportunities. A scent of a long hallway at a hospital, for instance, might smell sterile. The scent of an old couch in someone’s basement might suggest the main character’s first kiss.

And of course, the scent of grass, or fresh water, or a specific flower can appeal to a reader’s nostalgia, while also transporting them to the world within your book. Incidentally, smell is a useful way of getting characters to remember an event from the past, in a flashback.

For descriptive writing, evoking the sense of smell is a great way of saying a lot with very few words. For example:

• The smell of a woodland in the summer after it rains.
• Sour milk in the refrigerator.
• The smell of the sea through a car window.

Finding one really good smell to describe will go a long way.

THE SENSE OF SOUND

What we hear around us shapes how we interact with the world. In storytelling, sound (and even silence) is equally as important as sight. To build a realistic setting, your story must be enveloped by a soundscape and a landscape. In individual scenes, sound can denote emotion and physical action.

For example, in a thriller, there are often lots of silences. In stories with lots of action, there is also often lots of explosive noise. These descriptive choices can make or break the setting and mood of a novel. Choose wisely.

Few settings are silent. And if they are truly silent, describing the absence of sound will be interesting. Characters speaking and coughing and banging things is one way of adding a soundtrack to a scene. Another way is to incorporate the sense of sound into the description.

So if you’re describing a seaside scene, for example, mention screeching gulls and waves breaking on pebbles to add an extra dimension to the description.

If you’re describing a character walking through a hotel lobby, mention his metal heels clicking on the marble, or the jangle of loose change in his pocket.

Sounds can sometimes be tricky to describe accurately, one solution is an onomatopoeia…

• Jangle
• Clatter
• Crash

Similes work well, too – “the cry of the fox sounded like a child in terrible pain.”

THE SENSE OF TASTE

Taste, like touch, is too often relegated to romance. But taste can reinforce setting so simply. On a beach, you can often taste the sea spray. In a fire, you taste smoke. Use the flavor of the air or a drink or even a character’s own dry lips to help the reader put themselves in a story as deeply as possible. And if there happens to be kissing, you should use taste to describe that, too.

You’ll mostly evoke the sense of taste under two circumstances – when characters are actively using their mouths and tongues. Always look for ways to incorporate it in more unexpected situations in your novel. Example:

• When a character arrives at the coast, the usual thing would be to have them smell the sea. Instead, have them taste the salt on the breeze.

Even if you don’t actually describe a taste, just mentioning the thing we taste with – the tongue – can be powerful in descriptive fiction. Example:

• It’s the first icy day of winter and it starts to snow. A character looks up and tries to catch the flakes on her tongue. Further down the street, her younger brother licks a metal pole.

THE SENSE OF TOUCH

Like all five senses, touch can be painful or pleasurable. Make it pleasurable, like the feel of cool cotton. Make it painful, like being head-butted on the nose. Sometimes, a touch is neither painful nor pleasurable, but just helps describe the person or the place.

Touch isn’t as simple as it may seem. It isn’t just used to convey about romance or how characters touch one another. When it comes to setting, touch is perhaps the most important sense to use in your writing. Appealing to a reader’s sense of touch can root a reader in space and time.

Does the scene take place indoors or outside? Do the characters feel warm or cold? Is the sweater they’re wearing itchy, or are they so nervous that their thighs are sticking to the chair where they’re sitting next to their crush?

All these descriptors can help something as small as a bedroom or something as large as a galaxy feel real to your readers. Like all five of the senses, touch can be painful or pleasurable. Make it pleasurable, like the feel of cool cotton. Make it painful, like being head-butted on the nose. Sometimes, a touch is neither painful nor pleasurable, but just helps describe the person or the place. Example:

• A greasy stove.
• Cracked lips.
• A cold handshake.

Sometimes the touch itself is what is important, not what the thing being touched feels like. A character touching another character can be extremely powerful under the right circumstances, as can the laying of a hand on a headstone.

Ellen Hopkins: Impulse

Impulse does a great job of using the senses to deepen scene description. Impulse has tons of figurative language that plays with the reader’s sense and brings deeper meaning to the novel and its various techniques. The images that appear on a constant basics are of ghosts and color, leading one to think of the opposition between death and life. Sentences like:

“She didn’t give two cents about what her lifestyle did to me. Her only son, because after one particularly ugly abortion, her body had decided it had had enough of Ma’s mistreatment and formed scar tissue…The odds of my having a sibling shrank to nil” (34) and “I hate this feeling. Like I belong somewhere else, anywhere but here, and escape lies just past the snowy window, cool and crisp as the February air…the streets beyond, bleak as the bleached bones of wilderness scaffolding my heart” (19)

:bring about thoughts of decay, ruin, and death because of words like “nil”, “abortion”, “mistreatment”, “scar tissues”, “snowy window”, “cool”, “crisp”, “February”, “bleak”, and “bones”. These words have negative figurative and literal meanings that allow these thoughts to come to the surface.