This Week's IWW Practice Exercise

Exercise: Where are we?

Prepared by: Carter Jefferson
Posted on: Sunday, June 24, 2007

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Exercise: In 400 words or less, write a portion of a story or memoir that clearly
portrays the setting and its importance to the events that will follow. Your
characters should show us the surroundings in which they act.
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Settings influence stories; sometimes they are almost as important
as the characters. Readers may not think they pay attention to the details of the location of the drama, but they are influenced by the stage on which events unfold. They expect characters to behave differently in different settings. In a church people may be solemn, at a football game noisy, in a gentleman's club formal and polite.

Some writers start their stories by simply describing the setting, but in this exercise let the actors show us the stage and the props in such a way that readers will know where they are fairly early in the story.

Just setting the story in a barn won't do. Details are important. Is it light or dark? Mice rustling around? Horses in their stalls? Hay in racks above? Or is it completely deserted, with cobwebs in the corners and old tools rusting on the ground? How does it smell? Is it dry or damp? Barns differ, and so do the stories
they house.

Here's a sample from Raold Dahl's story, "Man From the South":

"It was getting on toward six o'clock so I thought I'd buy myself a beer and go out and sit in a deck chair by the swimming pool and have a little evening sun.

"I went to the bar and got the beer and carried it outside and wandered down the garden toward the pool.

"It was a fine garden with lawns and beds of azaleas and tall coconut palms, and the wind was blowing strongly through the tops of the palm trees making the leaves hiss and crackle as though they were on fire. I could see the clusters of big brown nuts hanging down underneath the leaves.

"There were plenty of deck chairs around the swimming pool . . . ."

This could be done in third person as well: "he thought he'd buy
himself a beer . . . ."

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IWW PRACTICE Exercises are archived.