Why Here? Creating a Sense of Space Video Download
Begin with the question: Why here? But that's only the beginning. Where things in your story are happening can be just as important as why things are happening. Nothing should be there “just because," so how do you decide the setting for any particular scene and how does that affect the characters involved? How much description is too much, and how much is not enough? We'll dive into description and setting in ways you may not have considered before.
Philip Athans is the New York Times best-selling author of Annihilation and more than a dozen other fantasy and horror books including The Guide to Writing Fantasy & Science Fiction and the soon-to-be-released Writing Monsters. His blog, Fantasy Author's Handbook (http://fantasyhandbook.wordpress.com/), is updated every Tuesday, and you can follow him on Twitter @PhilAthans. He makes his home in the foothills of the Washington Cascades, east of Seattle.
During this 46-minute video tutorial, you'll learn:
- To think of your settings as characters in themselves
- To show us a fascinating locale, not tell us it's fascinating
- How specific locations can affect the way your characters behave
- How to balance necessary information against the dreaded “info dump"
- To consider how your characters experience the world around them through all five senses
- That there's also a sort of “sixth sense",how do your character's feel about this place
- To use the environment to bolster action
Open to fiction authors of all genres.
