Up To No Good

Setting is more than place or time, it evokes emotion, not only to let us know how the character is feeling but also gives us clues as to what might happen and if the narrator is trustworthy or not.

Setting can occur during a long period of time, or even a moment.

If you get stuck during nano and want to get on track, think about these words:
above
before
below
after
toward
beyond

Atmosphere is part of setting, including the time of day, period in history, the weather, and the decor of a place.

Setting can help you SHOW instead of TELL about how your character perceives the world. It can be harmonious (happy person in a cozy place) or conflicted (sad person, everyone around is happy). You can begin to learn to use symbolism here to hint about the future for your characters. Your setting can be familiar to everyone and your characters (home, forests, mountains, sea) or it can be alien (planet zooknob where the trees are pink and creatures the size of elephants hang from trees by their beaver tails).

Much can happen in the setting, or not much at all (See Edgar Allen Poe for examples of long passages that are the character's imaginings rather than actual events).

You can summarize, you can flashback, you can use slow motion or speed things up.

If you get stuck, here are some writing assignments to help you get through (based on Writing Fiction by Janet Burroway)

1. write a scene where your character is uncomfortable in a setting, such as barbie in a boy's locker room, or a dragon warrior tiptoeing through a field of flowers.

2. Write a scene where the setting is familiar to you, but not to your characters. Perhaps they transport there via magic... use lots of descriptive words and active verbs to let us know how foreign it feels to them.

3. Write a scene where your characters argue about going to a particular place. Do they go? Make sure you really have them argue it out, and one convinces the other (to go or not).

4. Write a scene where your character's mood is opposite that of the weather. Do they change their mood? Does the weather change?

Posted by tracy at 01:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today we talked about what makes a good book. I highly recommend Debra Dixon's book Goal, Motivation and Conflict (it's a small press book I think, and very readable for kids, though at this juncture I can't recall *exactly* how kid friendly it is since she's a romance writer... I'll check)

Anyway, so we are making the who, what, why and why not of our books today. Dd's characters are Amy and Anne, and she is busy working on the GMC for one of them right now, more about that in a bit.

So GMC can be broken down in more simplistic terms for kiddos, and she uses "The Wizard of Oz" quite frequently in her book as examples. We watched the beginning of the film to talk about the obvious and not-as-obvious GMC's of Dorothy... At first, Dorothy just wants to have help in defending Toto against Miss Gulch (is that her name? I don't wanna go back and rewatch again, so we'll just say it is). Nobody will listen to her, Aunt Em and Uncle whomever are working on saving chickens since their incubator broke, and the farmhands are all working trying to fix a wagon and feed the pigs. Really now, we see Dorothy wants a "place without trouble" which she interprets quite literally, but we can also see that she wants a place of acceptance. This is a very real goal for children, most of their behavior can be explained in terms of mistaken goals which really are about the motivation to feel accepted. (See Jane Nelson's Positive Discipline for more on that). Dorothy's journey is beset with conflict, first from Miss Gulch, then from the wicked witch, then even from the wizard who sends her to kill the wicked witch (what a task to send a child on!), which is really his way of getting rid of her because he doesn't think she'll succeed. Ultimately what she seeks is love and acceptance, and as Glenda tells her in the end, she's always had that right with her the whole time (as with the shoes).

My characters are El, Jer, Gav, Ginger & Caroline and I will be working on their GMC's as well as more advanced character development I need to do.

Posted by tracy at 04:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We're getting ready for nanowrimo.org's 2007 fun-strava-ganza!

So here I'm going to blog about our lessons and how we're working on our nanos.

Lesson one: Mapmaking

Both kids made maps, although ds's is still very much a work in progress. I'll scan and put them up in a bit.

Here is dd's:

Posted by tracy at 04:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)