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Place, setting and timeframe: all work to anchor your characters in particularity and crystallise your story’s meaning and momentum. Place – where you locate your fictional world, and why – works as an essential element in rendering a physical and psychic atmosphere for your reader. This one-day workshop will explore many of its potent possibilities.

This course will explore aspects of place, including locations, objects, people and atmospheric details, and discuss how writers can modulate these aspects as social and psychological contexts which enrich their work. Often it is place, not character, that initially provides anchor points for a writer whose work feels otherwise vague, generic or abstract. Participants will study examples of how place is rendered compellingly in prose, and experiment with some writing exercises and prompts of their own.

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Expected Learning Outcomes

Participants will gain:

1. An increased awareness of specificity and skilful modulation of ‘narrative distance’;
2. More confidence with handling imagery, avoiding cliché and controlling subtext; and
3. A sharing of common problems and pitfalls, and some ways to avoid them.

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Participant Requirements

Participants must have written short stories or have a novel in progress as part of their creative writing experience, and have thoughts to share about structure, characterisation and setting. Please bring a notebook or pen.