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[ POINT BY POINT — A QUICK AND EASY REFERENCE TO MATERIAL COVERED ]

CHAPTER ONE: THE IMPORTANCE OF DESCRIPTION AND SETTING

• Good writing is never entirely dependent on the setting, but any work of fiction without a clearly depicted time and place will almost certainly fail.
• Your fiction should have a setting rich enough to match the story you intend to tell.
• Fiction is essentially made up of two things: the craft that a writer uses to create a story and the unique voice in which he or she conveys it.
• Improvement in writing can occur when you focus on three things: the underlying craft of fiction (the tools of the trade, so to speak), models (examples of published authors' works), and wordsmithing (the careful selection of each and every word).
• Giving the lay of the land (actually describing topography and geography) is one way to introduce your setting, and it will work especially well if you intend for that land to play a vital role, almost as a character in its own right, in your story. MODEL: John Steinbeck, East of Eden.
• The use of intricate details is another option. Here, though, you would do well to consider the audience you are aiming for: literary or popular. Readers of literary fiction will be more receptive to long passages of description while devotees of more mainstream or popular stories and novels want less of that and considerably more action. MODEL: Don DeLillo, Underworld.
• Yet another way to introduce the setting is to appeal to the reader's five senses, paying special attention to what things look, taste, smell, sound, and feel like. MODEL: Margaret George, The Memoirs of Cleopatra.
• The tone (the prevailing attitude or mood) will determine how your fiction will be perceived and to a large extent what will actually happen in your story or novel. MODEL: Jack Finney, The Night People.
• Your close attention to and crafting of description — of your settings, characters, and their actions — must be maintained throughout your entire story or novel, not just at the beginning. MODEL: E. Annie Proulx: The Shipping News.
• Within the context of your writing, you have to send an invitation to your readers. Something in the situation you are presenting, in your characters, and in your writer's voice has to be compelling enough to bring them in and keep them on board. MODEL: Robert Frost, “The Pasture.”

CHAPTER TWO: LEARNING TO PAY ATTENTION

• Good writers are persistent and meticulous harvesters of detail. MODEL: Morley Callaghan, That Summer in Paris.
• When you look at everything with a stronger magnification, you'll end up with more bits and pieces of data than you'll ever use. So you'll have to come up with ways to hold on to them, and then locate them when and if you need them.
• The more time you spend searching for these details, the more interesting and useful details you're likely to come up with.
• One good way to do this is to focus on a time and place in your past. Think of it in present tense — not past — and take plenty of notes, making sure you include sensory details.
• Another approach is to focus on a setting in the present. Select a place where you don't go often or know anyone, so that you won't be influenced by preconceptions.
• A small notebook, kept close at hand most of the time, should be one of your constant tools. Jot down any details, dialogue, descriptions, arrangements, etc. that might be useful to you in your writing.
• Maps, floor plans, or schematics of places real or imagined will help you to better visualize your setting so that you can make it realistic for your reader.
• Movies and television and radio programs are great sources of visual images, intricate details, and the employment and delivery of language that will be useful to you. Other sources are newspaper and magazine columnists as well as daily comic strips that follow an ongoing storyline.
• When looking for details, always be on the alert for any bits of irony. Your readers get plenty of irony in real life, so they expect it to occur in fiction also.
• You need to keep a journal or diary into which story ideas regularly go, as well as bits of overheard dialogue, new dialogue that your characters come up with, details of places or situations, techniques you've picked up from other writers, and anything else that has anything to do with your writing.
• Once you've sharpened your observation skills and taken notes about what you've seen, you need to create the little world in your mind where your story will take place. Because if it doesn't exist there, it won't stand a chance of existing in your reader's mind.

CHAPTER THREE: USING ALL THE TOOLS IN YOUR KIT

• The crafting of fiction is a slow and deliberate undertaking in which you will need to employ, often and well, many of the literary devices and approaches available to you.
• Adjectives and adverbs are the spices that good writers use to flavor their writing. Too little or too much spice can spoil a dish; the same rule applies to modifiers. They should be tested constantly to make sure they're doing exactly what you need them to do. MODELS: Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls; Robert Cremins, A Sort of Homecoming.
• Punctuation marks are road signs for your readers, put there to show them where you want them to pause, continue, speed up, and stop altogether. This requires that you listen to your fiction.
• Exclamation points should be used sparingly, so as not to diminish their effectiveness. MODEL: Luanne Rice, The Perfect Summer.
• Use colons to alert your reader to something that is coming up: a list, a definition, or a clarification. MODEL: Edward Rutherfurd, London.
• Semicolons and dashes will prove useful in the important business of giving your sentences a variety of lengths and structures. MODELS: Jeffrey Lent, In the Fall; Clare Francis, Night Sky.
• Parentheses provide a way for you to tell your reader something outside of the story proper. MODEL: Vladimir Nabokov, King, Queen, Knave.
• One of the most effective ways to convey a particular image to your readers is to show them what it is similar to.
• Metaphors and similes are excellent ways to imply similarity, and you should use them often. Just make sure you don't get carried away and over use them. MODELS: Alex Haley, Roots; Aidan Chambers, Postcards From No Man's Land; Ken Follett, The Hammer of Eden.
• Sometimes you'll need to lay out an exact comparison, not an implied one. That's when an analogy will work better than a metaphor or a simile. MODELS: Lori Aurelia Williams, When Kambia Elaine Flew in From Neptune; James Michener, The Eagle and the Raven.
• When using an allusion, make sure it is wide enough for your readers to pick up on. MODELS: Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle; Tony Kushner, Angels in America; Anne Rice, The Tale of the Body Thief.
• Personifications provide excellent ways for you to paint a visual, active image in your reader's mind. MODELS: William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet; Ann Packer, The Dive From Clausen's Pier; J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.
• Symbolism should occur naturally in your fiction, with no need for you to intentionally plant symbols. MODEL: Aaron Elkins, Fellowship of Fear.
• When employing onomatopoeia, weave it into the fabric of your sentences, letting the sound words have their effect in small doses. Avoid using them as one-word sentences followed by exclamation points. MODEL: Zane Grey, Riders of the Purple Sage.
• Cadence is good; repetition is bad. Cadence provides a flowing, musical aspect and taps home strong images, while repetition is simply saying something you've already said. MODELS: John Grisham, Bleachers; William Gay, Provinces of Night.
• Flashbacks, backstories, and future stories are good ways to establish setting and provide description by diverting your readers' attention from the present plot to another time and place. MODELS: William Styron, Sophie's Choice; M.M. Kaye, The Far Pavilions.
• Foreshadowing provides small clues of what's to come, and. is quite an effective way to keep your reader interested. MODEL: Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones.
• Readers get tired of sentences of the same pattern and length coming one after the other, and the same is true of paragraphs. So give them a variety. MODELS: Patricia Cornwell, From Potter's Field; Shelley Mydans, Thomas; D.E. Stevenson, Miss Buncle's Book.
• Let moderation and a sense of balance determine which literary techniques and devices you choose for your story or novel.

CHAPTER FOUR: SHOWING, TELLING, AND COMBINING THE TWO

• Use a combination of showing and telling in your writing, but tend to show more than your tell. MODELS: Toni Morrison, Sula; Masuji Ibuse, Black Rain.
• In your fiction, plug your readers' into images — situations and emotions — that they can relate to. One of the best ways to do this is to immerse them in those images by showing rather than telling. MODELS: Kathleen Cambor, The Book of Mercy; Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain.
• Sometimes a combination of showing and telling works best. MODELS: John Gardner, Grendel; Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles.
• Don't tell what you've already shown.
• Deciding when to show and when to tell becomes an instinctive process, but you should always test each passage or image to see if it might not work better in the other way.

CHAPTER FIVE: SENSORY DESCRIPTION

• The success of your story or novel will depend on many things, but the most crucial is your ability to bring your reader into it. And that reader will be most completely in when you deliver the actual sensations of the many things that comprise your fiction.
• The extent to which you should do this will be determined somewhat by the audience you are aiming for. Readers of literary fiction will tolerate lengthy passages of sensory description in order to get a wide canvas on which the story can take place. Readers of popular fiction want the description also, but they want it more quickly. MODELS: William Goyen, The House of Breath; Joy Fielding, Whispers and Lies.
• The danger of using the sense of sight is to use it too often, to the exclusion of the others.
• When making your reader see something, present it in a way that he or she might not have ever seen it before. MODELS: Cormac McCarthy, Cities of the Plain; Walter M. Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz.
• Be careful not to overdo the uncommon, unexpected bits of visual description. They usually work well the first time, but not so again.
• Occasionally you'll need the reader to see only slight differences between things. MODEL: William Martin, Cape Cod.
• Smell is the most nostalgic of the senses, so use it to great effect. It can be used to nudge a character's memory, to symbolize something else, to describe something that is difficult or impossible to describe, and to help establish your setting. MODELS: Gore Vidal, Washington, D.C.; Marly Youmans, Catherwood; Larry Watson, Montana, 1948; Patrick Suskind, Perfume.
• When using the sense of touch your job is to make the reader recall exactly what it feels like when something occurs in your story or, if they haven't experienced it, what it would feel like if they did. MODELS: Dick Francis, Longshot; Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters.
• When it's time to inflict a bit of pain and suffering in your fiction, put more emphasis on your character's reaction to it than on the actual description of it.
• Sometimes describing the sense of touch won't show what a character feels, but what you want your reader to feel. MODELS: Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible; Ron Rozelle, A Place Apart.
• The sense of taste can be used to center the reader's attention on a thing, and to help establish a character in the reader's mind. MODELS: Jessica Danes, “Hot Tea,” Houston Chronicle, January 8, 2003; Gore Vidal, Washington, D.C.; Irving Stone, The Agony and the Ecstasy.
• Often showing what something doesn't taste like is effective. MODEL: Tracy Chevalier, Girl With a Pearl Earring.
• Let a character's preference for one taste or another make him or her clearer in your reader's mind.
• Let the sounds that surround you all the time work their way into your stories and novels. MODEL: Louis L'Amour, Guns of the Timberlands.
• Sometimes the absence of sound is the best way to convey what something sounds like. MODEL: Robert Frost, “Stopping by Woods.”
• Good writers spend much of their time thinking in metaphors; this is especially true when it comes to the sensory detail. MODEL: Robert Penn Warren, All The King's Men.
• One way to help describe your characters is to let the reader know what kind of music they listen to, maybe even what their favorite songs are. MODEL: James Baldwin, “Sonny's Blues.”
• Use sounds to make your reader curious and build suspense. MODEL: Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety.
• The sixth sense, intuition, is an excellent way to help describe a character or situation. MODELS: John D. MacDonald, The Deep Blue Good By; Mary Higgins Clark, Stillwatch.

CHAPTER SIX: DESCRIPTION OF CHARACTERS

• The characters in your fiction are the actors that will take to the stage in your reader's mind. So breathing life into the characters represents some of the most important work you'll do as a writer.
• Straightforward physical description is the most common approach. MODEL: Carson McCullers, “A Tree, A Rock, A Cloud.”
• Mixing physical traits with subtle clues about attitudes and personality is another method. MODEL: William E. Barrett, Lilies of the Field.
• The use of an extended analogy is yet another option. MODEL: Flannery O'Connor, “Good Country People.”
• Providing an image of what your characters look like can come in very short doses or longer ones. MODELS: William Faulkner, “A Rose for Emily”; David Westheimer, Von Ryan's Express.
• Often it is quite effective to simply quickly tell what somebody looks or acts like. Brevity occasionally wins out over elaboration. MODEL: Anne Lamott, Crooked Little Heart.
• Load your description up with little telling actions and references that help build your overall story. MODEL: Kent Haruf, Plainsong.
• Putting real people in your fiction can be therapeutic, but it can also be risky. So be careful.
• If you choose to use a historical character in your story, do your homework — about both the person and the historical era. MODELS: Walter F. Murphy, Upon This Rock; Herman Wouk, The Winds of War.
• When using yourself as a model for a character, use only descriptions that are called for in a particular story or novel.
• One way to describe characters is to let them describe themselves. MODEL: John D. MacDonald, The Deep Blue Good-By.
• Sometimes, letting the character either dabble in a little wishful thinking or make reference to something they like about themselves provides good description. MODELS: Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway; Irving Wallace, The Seventh Secret.
• A character's dialogue can be the strongest description you can give. MODELS: Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop; Allen Drury, Advise and Consent; John O'Hara, Ourselves to Know.
• You'll need to know exactly what motivates your characters before you can convey them or their situations to your reader. MODEL: Richard Stark, Comeback.
• Showing characters' moods is an effective way to describe them. MODELS: V.C. Andrews, Into the Garden; David Guterson, East of the Mountains.
• Emotional or behavioral flaws are common in real people, so they'd better be in your characters also. MODELS: Pat Conroy, The Great Santini; Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.
• Physical imperfections in characters should provide more than just cosmetic description; perhaps they can be motivating or make a character not be motivated. MODEL: Robert Phillips, “Night Flowers.”
• Avoid overplaying character stereotypes, but draw on reader's preconceived notions from time to time. MODEL: F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Rich Boy.”

CHAPTER SEVEN: TIME AND PLACE

• Nothing so solidly anchors a work of fiction in reader's minds as knowing when and where something is taking place.
• The credibility of your setting depends entirely on your description of it. MODEL: Ernest Hemingway, “In Another Country.”
• One way to bring your reader into the setting is to give them a large view of it — a macrocosm, or bird's eye view. This can be done quickly or in great detail. MODELS: John Steinbeck, The Moon Is Down; Ron Rozelle, The Windows of Heaven; Stephen Harrigan, The Gates of the Alamo; Thornton Wilder, Our Town.
• Another — and much more commonly used — approach is to give the reader a microcosm, a world in small. MODEL: Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer.
• Remember to let your reader know what the weather is doing at any given time in your story; it's an important, and often overlooked, aspect of your setting. MODELS: Belva Plain, Her Father's House; William Martin, Harvard Yard.
• Just as important is letting the reader know about the geography — its actual description and its influence on characters' personalities. MODEL: A. Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of the Speckled Band.”
• When describing weather and geography for particular places, do your research.
• Whether or not your setting works for your reader is not dependent on whether or not it is physically possible, but on how well you establish its credibility within the context of the story you are telling. Let your characters and their motivations and actions drive your fiction, not the setting.
• Beware the comfort zone, where your characters are cozy and comfortable in the setting you've provided for them. Your story has to be constantly moving.
• Frameworking — the inclusion of several things into a larger context or frame — is an ancient and quite effective way to tell a story. If you choose to use it, make sure that your major emphasis is on the specific story you are telling, and not on the wider framework.
• Good fiction allows the reader to be immersed in a particular time and place for a while. Your job is to deliver those settings.

CHAPTER EIGHT: DESCRIPTION AND SETTING IN SPECIALIZED FICTION

• The story you are going to tell will more than likely work within several of the genres of fiction.
• Because of that, it is important that you read some good examples of each genre, and keep an open mind when reaching your decision.
• Historical fiction is a hybrid of both history and fiction, so you'd do well to do the necessary research to get the historical facts right.
• Though the readers of historical fiction usually know how certain things will turn out, the characters must not have any such knowledge.
• One way to describe a particular historical location is to provide details about the place itself. MODEL: Irving Stone, The Agony and the Ecstasy.
• Another way is to describe small actions or events that are indicative of the time and place. MODEL: Colleen McCullough, Caesar.
• In mysteries, setting and description can help establish the mood of suspense and provide foreshadowing. MODEL: Janwillem van de Wetering, The Maine Massacre.
• When writing science fiction and fantasy, your settings can be as fanciful as you want them to be, but they must be — first and foremost — a stage upon which your characters do something that your earthbound reader can relate to. MODEL: Isaac Asimov, Foundation.
• Readers of Western fiction expect considerable action, and they expect it to take place outside. Give your reader plenty of vivid description, and invoke the rough, wide-open spirit of the West in your description of characters. MODEL: Elmer Kelton, Joe Pepper.
• Readers of romance novels and stories want elaborate descriptions of clothing, de´cor, and characters. MODEL: Amanda Quick, Affair.
• When writing horror, suspense, or thriller fiction, use foreshadowing extensively, and focus on your character's fears and suspicions. MODEL: Stephen King, Salem's Lot.

CHAPTER NINE: USING DESCRIPTION AND SETTING TO DRIVE THE STORY

• Your setting should be more than just a place for your story to play itself out. Aspects of it should impact your characters, their actions, and your overall plot. MODEL: Eudora Welty, “A Worn Path.”
• Let setting and description magnify a specific theme. MODELS: Greg Tobin, Conclave; C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy.
• Mood and tone can also be conveyed by setting and description.
• One way to accomplish this is to let the mood emanate from the setting itself. MODEL: Nicholas Meyer, The Seven-Per-Cent Solution.
• Another possibility is to let your description of your characters' actions determine the mood of the story. MODEL: Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon.
• Showing the prevailing mood, by either the surroundings or some action, is more effective than telling it.
• Use setting and description to enlarge conflicts in your fiction. MODEL: Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome.

CHAPTER TEN: WORKING THE MAGIC

• First impressions are just as important in fiction as in daily life, perhaps even more so. So you must begin the careful weaving of craft and voice in the first sentence and paragraph. MODEL: Gregory Maguire, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West.
• Often, in order to end up with fiction that comes off as realistic, the author has to modify what is total reality. The many realistic details that you gather will ultimately need to be adjusted, enlarged, narrowed, or changed in some other way in order to fit in your story or novel. MODEL: Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman.
• Wherever you find your title — the Bible, poetry, song lyrics, dialogue of your own characters — make sure what your choice is a very good one. That title will be the first taste the reader has of you.
• Titles can be particularly helpful in establishing your setting.
• The primary purpose of your first sentence is to make the reader want to read the second one, so it should be a real grabber. It needs to be engaging, maybe a little quirky, and it wouldn't hurt if it had a bit of mystery or foreshadowing. MODELS: J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring; Edith Wharton, Summer; Jeffrey Archer, First Among Equals; Frederick Busch, A Handbook for Spies.
• The disparity between your specific setting and a much larger one — which includes not only bigger pieces of geography, but prevailing customs and philosophies — provides an excellent opportunity for you to firmly establish the time and place where your story takes place.
• A good way to check if you are balancing story and voice is to print out manuscript pages you've just written, put them aside for a while, perhaps overnight, and then give them a fresh reading.

CHAPTER ELEVEN: TOO LITTLE, TOO MUCH

• Be as watchful for things that you leave out as you are for things you put in. Anything that is not directly serving to move your fiction along is clutter and should be removed.
• If you have two characters in a scene — even in a scene that is dialogue driven — you shouldn't need more than a grand total of two dialogue tags.
• Rather than resort to the use of adverbs in dialogue tags, show what you would have conveyed with the adverbs in the characters' words and their actions.
• The only acceptable use of cliche´s is in a character's dialogue or in a very colloquial narrative voice, and even these should not be overdone. Creative writing should be creative, and there is nothing creative about resorting to cliche´s.
• Avoid using modifiers that simply tell; find ways to show a trait in a character, place, or situation.
• Avoid repeating words and phrases, even words that have different meanings but sound somewhat alike.
• Readers of fiction don't want to be taught lessons, they want to be told a story. Neither do they want to be preached to. So avoid being didactic, and don't overemphasize the moral implications of a situation.
• Don't use passive voice.
• When you wander off track, and end up discarding paragraphs or pages of text, don't throw them away. What doesn't fit in one story might work beautifully in another.
• Description simply for the sake of description is clutter. Any details that you provide should be ones that will help your reader better see a character, place, or situation. Always consider what readers need to know and avoid giving them useless information.
• Sometimes the best description is no description. Look for places where you can leave much, or all, of something to the reader's imagination. MODEL: Saki, “The Interlopers.”

CHAPTER TWELVE: DESCRIPTION AND SETTING IN THE WRITING PROCESS

• Wherever you get your story idea, setting and description should factor into your selection. The place and time where your fiction will take place will impact every aspect of it: characters, plot, mood, conflict, and theme — to name just a few.
• Once you've got the idea, setting and description should be constantly on your mind when making your plans. Look for things that you will want to emphasize in your description and make notes.
• A writer who is serious about his or her task should set aside a block of time each and every day for writing. It shouldn't be used for planning, researching, revising, or editing. Neither should it be used for thinking about writing. It must be an inviolable time for wordsmithing.
• During the actual process of writing, it is essential to have any ancillary materials — maps, plot graphs, outlines, floor plans, character trait lists, photographs — close at hand so you won't have to take time to look for them.
• It is not essential that you write everything in chronological order. It might be best to start with the strongest image, or scene, in your mind. Then write around it.
• Revision is your refiner's fire; it is the polishing of your work to its brightest shine. So build in enough time to make a proper job of it.
• Attempt to see your setting through the eyes of a reader who has never seen it before.
• In the early stages of the writing process — the formation of the initial idea, the planning, the first draft — you need to work without any input from others.
• Then, it's essential that you get helpful feedback from readers that can point out what's working and not working in your manuscript. One dependable reader that you trust might be all you need, or it might be a good idea for you to locate a writer's group in your community, one that workshops manuscripts on a regular basis.
• Don't worry about agents or publishers or marketing your wares when writing. Just concentrate on writing well.