Tag: Mannequin Monday (Page 7 of 9)

Mannequin Monday – It’s Just as Well

“Show us a world we’ve never seen before.” A sense of place in writing. Not simply setting. A place. A world. Almost a character in itself. This Mannequin Monday finds us working on creating worlds with our words. I visit one of Louise Penny’s novels, The Long Way Home, for descriptors of a unique world.

I include a piece of my own writing. “The Rain is a Thief.” A short story of tragedy – and release – set in a black night of rain.

This Week’s Story

I am participating in a writing course from the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program. This week’s lesson centers on setting.

One of the instructors tells us, “Show us a world we’ve never seen before and we’ll never see again.” She continues. “You can create that kind of singularity simply by overlaying an emotional reality over that physical reality in a way that’s never been done before in quite that sense.”

Elsewhere in the course, “You’re not just setting into place pieces of landscape in which your characters are moving around. You’re also getting a chance to do some major work to show the gears that are turning inside of those characters, show what’s important to them, show what’s haunting them so fully that nothing in their gaze, nothing in their perspective is like escaping the sway of whatever that emotional situation is.”