Setting is a collection of details—the right details in the right amount. It involves curating the essential elements of the characters’ surroundings for the reader. In other words, immersive setting is not about expanding; it is about narrowing. Narrow the reader’s focus on what matters most and the place will come alive.

Here are five ways you can create immersive setting when writing historical fiction (or any fiction, really).

1) Develop vivid sensory details

Call on all of your characters’ senses. We rely heavily on sight when describing anything from our appearance to a sentimental piece of jewelry to a visit to the beach, so it feels natural to extend this comfort zone to our stories. Challenge yourself to include senses other than sight.

In an effort to incorporate the other senses, you may find yourself stumbling into cliché with overused descriptions such as:

• The wail of the siren
• The warm flush in her cheeks
• The fresh pine (Why is pine always touted as fresh?)

I’m sure you can think of others. These clichés steal from your story because there is nothing fresh (like pine, apparently) or innovative here. The reader ends up skimming over them.

Try this: Close your eyes and pretend you’re in the scene with your characters. Imagine it’s 1924 Paris or 1898 Puerto Rico. What would you be smelling, hearing, tasting or touching? What does your character notice?  What is one element that would stand out to your character?

2) Reveal character emotions through place

Setting is personal. Your characters live there. I’ve edited many manuscripts where the setting feels like it was torn from the pages of a guidebook or taken directly from the author’s experience with the place. That is a good starting point, but description should be filtered through your character’s perspective.

Try this: Consider your character’s emotional state and relationship to the location. For example, a noble in Marie Antoinette’s court is in a different state of mind than her lady-in-waiting who has a different perspective than a peasant living hand-to-mouth. How would the mood of the place change for each character? How would the narrator’s word choice differ?

3) Create a setting that acts as a character

This is ultimately what we want, isn’t it? We want the reader to feel the setting of our story is so rich that it has a personality all its own. Every place, like every character, has a past, which informs its present. Without knowing about that past, the setting can feel untethered, not rooted to anything important.

Try this: Explore the setting’s backstory. There. I’ve used the B-word. Don’t be afraid to include a bit of the place’s history. (Note: this doesn’t mean pages upon pages that have no bearing on the character.) Consider how the history has affected your character through social or personal experiences. Does he or she have to make a decision with this past in mind?  How can you use your setting’s history to target conflict in the present?

4) Make setting a catalyst for the characters’ actions

Dynamic settings are about change. If something changes in a character’s environment, she may be forced to take action. A few years ago, I wrote a short story about a hurricane that devastated the Florida Keys in 1935. The storm touched every person who lived on the islands, and it forced every character to make tough choices about what to do next. The setting played an active role in moving the story forward.

Try this: You don’t need to include a natural disaster to have the setting act as a catalyst for change. Add or subtract an important element in the location.  Maybe your character uncovers something previously unknown to her like the lovely park statues are cameras in disguise, watching her every move. Or maybe the power supply to the town goes out, plunging everyone into darkness. Then what do your characters do?

5) Utilize macro and micro setting

Setting exists on two levels for the reader and for the characters. Macro is the overarching location of place. China 1949. Boston 1776. The Dust Bowl. Each of these evokes an emotional response in the reader just by virtue of naming it. Micro setting, on the other hand, happens on the sentence level. Word choice and sensory images affect how the reader interprets the setting. Snow can be blustery or delightful. Heirloom pearls can be nostalgic or a burden. The difference is how your character perceives these details and how you present them to the reader.

Try this: Dive into historical documents. You can very likely find a library archive that relates to your period and subject, and many are now online. Some have primary sources and photos available. The New York Public Library’s Digital Collection could be a great place to start. But remember that less is more. Don’t be tempted to include every detail you unearth. Only include that which moves your story forward.

Building immersive setting is about weaving a dream for readers so they feel they’re stepping out of their world and into the world of your story. Let me know how these suggestions work for you!

Jacquelin Cangro is a book editor, creative writing instructor, and writing coach with 20 years of experience at Penguin Random House. She helps writers develop the confidence and skills they need to get their stories on the page. Visit her site to find many resources to improve your writing, including her e-course Writing About Place. Find her on Instagram @jcangro and in her Facebook group.

The post #5onFri: Five Ways to Create Immersive Setting in Historical Fiction appeared first on DIY MFA.

Today I am so excited to have Michael Zadoorian on the show!

Michael is an author and recipient of numerous awards such as the Michigan Notable Book award, and the Kresge Artist Fellowship. His writing has appeared in several prestigious journals including The Literary Review and American Short Fiction, as well as in multiple anthologies including Detroit Noir.

He is the author of The Leisure Seeker—which was recently made into a film starring Helen Mirren and Donald Sutherland—as well as the novel Second Hand and the story collection The Lost Tiki Palaces of Detroit.

His latest novel, Beautiful Music, is a coming of age story set against the backdrop of his hometown of Detroit in the 1970’s and is available now.

Listen in as we talk about this amazing book, and how to enrich your story with sensory writing.

In this episode Michael and I discuss:

• How to determine the genre label for your story by finding your audience.
• Conveying sound through your characters’ emotions.
• Engaging all five senses of your reader.
• The role of parents in a literary coming of age story.
• Creating a strong sense of place in your writing.

Plus, Michael’s #1 tip for writers.

About Michael Zadoorian

Michael Zadoorian is a recipient of a Kresge Artist Fellowship in the Literary Arts, the Columbia University Anahid Literary Award, the Michigan Notable Book award, the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award and was long-listed for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

His work has appeared in The Literary Review, Beloit Fiction Journal, American Short Fiction, Witness, Great Lakes Review, North American Review and the anthologies Bob Seger’s House, On The Clock, and Detroit Noir.

He has worked as a copywriter, journalist, voice over talent, shipping room clerk, and a plant guard for Chrysler. A lifetime resident of the Detroit area, he lives with his wife in a 1937 bungalow filled with cats and objects that used to be in the houses of other people.

Michael is the author of The Leisure Seeker; a motion picture of which was released in March 2018 starring Helen Mirren and Donald Sutherland.  He is also the author of the novel Second Hand, and the story collection The Lost Tiki Palaces of Detroit.

His latest novel, Beautiful Music, is now available from Akashic Books.

To connect with Michael check out his website at www.michaelzadoorian.com.

Beautiful Music

Set in early 1970s Detroit, a divided city still reeling from its violent race riot of 1967, Beautiful Music is the story of one young man’s transformation through music.

Danny Yzemski is a husky, pop radio–loving loner balancing a dysfunctional home life with the sudden harsh realities of freshman year at a high school marked by racial turbulence.

But after tragedy strikes the family, Danny’s mother becomes increasingly erratic and angry about the seismic cultural shifts unfolding in her city and the world. As she tries to hold it together with the help of Librium, highballs, and breakfast cereal, Danny finds his own reason to carry on: rock and roll. In particular, the drum and guitar–heavy songs of local legends like the MC5 and Iggy Pop.

In the vein of Nick Hornby and Tobias Wolff, yet with a style very much Zadoorian’s own, Beautiful Music is a touching story about the power of music and its ability to save one’s soul.

If you decide to check out the book, we hope you’ll do so via this Amazon affiliate link, where if you choose to purchase via the link DIY MFA gets a referral fee at no cost to you. As always, thank you for supporting DIY MFA!

Link to Episode 204

(Right-click to download.)

If you liked this episode…

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Until next week, keep writing and keep being awesome!

The post Episode 204: Bringing Sound to Life on the Page — Interview with Michael Zadoorian appeared first on DIY MFA.

Take this opening passage from Flaneuse by Lauren Elkin as an example (And check out my previous column for more about this book as it relates to writing creative nonfiction!):

“On a street in Paris, a woman pauses to light a cigarette. She holds up a match with one hand, its box and a glove in the other. Her tall figure aligns with the shadow of a lamp post, two forward slashes on the wall behind her as a photographer closes the shutter. She is fleeting; pausing; permanent.”

What’s so lovely about this moment is its physicality. We’re aware of Paris as a place and asked to consider it as a cultural archetype. But then Elkin takes us beyond that. She details the actions the woman must take to light the cigarette, giving the moment significance instead of delivering a reported action. The last line portrays the woman as a moving figure, and we are engaged.

This is just one example. There are so many places you can take writing about the body and physical space. Let’s get into the details.

Be in The Moment

Think about a great narrative you read recently, fiction or nonfiction, with a scene that made you feel engaged. What made it great was probably its immediacy, physicality, and inclusion of the senses. But there’s something more to writing about a moment. Sometimes it helps to imagine the moment several times as you are writing it. If you can, use tools to make you feel its immediacy.

For example, you can use Google Maps to stand on that street corner and feel the emotion of the place through you or your narrator’s eyes.

Bonus: when you’re taking a walk to inspire yourself, take this advice to heart.

Focus on Identity

Our bodies fundamentally affect our identities. The way we navigate in the world. The way we see ourselves. There’s so much more to writing about the body than simply making your readers be present. What about writing about illness, sexuality, trauma? As Ruth Ozeki says in this writer’s roundtable hosted by Literary Hub, “the body is filled with stories.” It’s definitely an element you can’t forget about when you’re a writer.

Ashley Perez also has great advice in this roundtable on writing about the body:

“As with other writing, narrow your focus. Determine what specific thing your essay is about. That one thing defines this piece of writing. Don’t worry that it defines you or all of your writing.”

In a single piece of writing, there is one you. Embody it. You may also find it helpful to research trauma, illness, or sexuality alongside your own discussion of your personal experience to inform your direction. Sometimes this step can impact the way you write the piece.

Don’t Dismiss Your Experience

In the back of your mind, you may feel that what you’re going through has already been written about. You may be surprised. Sometimes when we try to write about experience we encounter a wall of language, unsure of which figure could tell our experiences in the most compelling way. The body and language can be at odds, but writing about it is powerful.

Virginia Woolf suffered from depression, migraines, and fevers. Her work is filled with references to these moments in her life, but her essay “On Being Ill” beautifully illuminates why we should be writing about the body:

“Literature does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind; that the body is a sheet of plain glass through which the soul looks straight and clear, and, save for one or two passions such as desire and greed, is null, and negligible and non-existent. On the contrary, the very opposite is true. All day, all night the body intervenes.”

In The Atlantic, Joe Fassler wrote about this particular Woolf essay alongside Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams. When writing his first novel, Fassler’s editor told him that he wrote the word “sweat” too much and included too many mentions of plum-colored bruises. The essay is about his “daily dramas of the body,” and it’s a must-read. He writes,

“I imagined myself the bard of swelling; I wanted to write toothache lyrics for swelling—to evoke the chronic panic of its deforming sculptural practice: it shapes you into something like you, but not you. I wanted to bring that aching knowledge to my nonexistent reading public.”

Whether you are writing about illness or the experience of existing in your body, an important step is simply listening to yourself.

Essay Recommendations:

• https://granta.com/kettle-holes/
• https://lithub.com/walking-while-black/
• https://hazlitt.net/feature/year-plagues

Books:

• Hunger by Roxane Gay
• The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison
• Brain on Fire by Susanna Cahalan

Kayla Dean is a Vegas-based writer, who has written for publications like Electric Literature, Darling, and Bella Grace. She has several stories and essays in the works and also blogs about writing and creativity on her personal website. Currently at work on a literary nonfiction thesis, she will receive her MA in English Literature this May. You can find her on Twitter@kayladeanwrites.

The post How To Write About the Body in Creative Nonfiction appeared first on DIY MFA.