Irvine Valley College

Online Creative Writing Workshop

Writing 10 - Introduction to Creative Writing

Spring 2012 - Ticket # 64580

Marjorie Coverley Luesebrink, Instructor

 

Week 4:  

And have a Room of Their Own

Online Lecture for Week 4:  

The standard nomenclature for the "surround" of a poem or story is the "setting."  However, the word "setting" has different meanings to a writer and to a reader or critic.  A reader/critic usually sees the "finished" product; therefore, when they want to describe the setting, they just say the poem is "set in the Lake District," or a story is "set in modern Houston," or "set in Georgia in the early days of the Civil War."  That is fine for the reader/critic, but it doesn't help a writer much in thinking about how to actually create these worlds.  For a writer, the "setting" has several functions.  

First, of course, location in the most concrete sense:  Houston, Texas, Athens, Georgia, a planet in another galaxy, Tintern Abbey, whatever.  Second, the landscape provides the space/time for the story or poem to take place - we might need a house, a garden, a railroad line, a bedroom - in short the scenes or props that form the background of the work.  

But landscape has another, and crucially important, function, especially at the beginning of a piece:  it signals the "possible world" to the reader.  In Katherine Mansfield's short story, "At the Bay," every detail of the landscape points to that place.  The details are excellent and they build a vivid picture of a local scene.  It's difficult to describe the negative in writing, but you could notice that, in Mansfield's story, no detail takes us away from that place - every detail is part of this self-contained world.  That is appropriate for a short story - and sometimes for a poem.  But often we want to indicate right at the beginning that the world the reader must imaginatively create for the story or ideas needs to be larger.  If we are going to do this, we need to do it right away.  A kind of rule of thumb - if your characters are going to the stars in Chapter 2, you better mention them in Chapter 1.  

The "possible universe" also refers to what is possible (or will be possible) in the world of the story. [Here you might want to look at the little exercises I wrote to demo this - one where the possible world has to include fairies, one where the possible world will admit to space travel.]

We know that audiences have changed in the last century.  In 19th-century novels, the author would typically begin with several pages, maybe even much of a chapter, that were mostly "scene setting."  You know what I mean: the long description of the drive to the old plantation, the magnolia trees and the Spanish moss on the cypresses, the abandoned little slave cabins along the road, the remnants of fields of cotton blanketing the low hills, the white-hot sky above.  And then the plantation house:  two-storied, with wide eaves and deep porches, closed shutters.  The wood a weary green-gray with the patina of moisture and time.  That kind of thing, but for pages!

Now, of course, readers do not need a long description of the old plantation house; chances are they have seen one in TV or the movies.  So the writer can merely sketch the significant details and assume that most readers will be able to fill in the rest of the picture by default.   Nevertheless, scene setting still gives the author a chance to do some really important work right at the start to make the boundaries of this "possible universe."  I could give you endless examples, of course, but once you see the concept of using the landscape to demarcate the extent of the story or poem and its possibilities right at the start, you will be stunned with how frequently this is done in things that you read.

I wanted to include an example of a poem to give you an idea of how this "possible universe" might occur in poetry.  In "To Be Here As Stone Is," Stephanie Strickland is writing about art - about the painstaking dedication, the will to fabricate.  Note how she starts with a kind of fragment scene of a waterfall, or a ripple coursing down a perfume bottle.  She moves, then, to the idea of the making of glass (this section is just part of the first section).  The concept of the poem extends from the tiny ripple on the glass to the waves of light in deep space, and so this beginning serves to "expand" the possible universe.  [Note also the "mythic time" frame, which is the invention of glass fabrication.]  The poem is from Stephanie Strickland's print book True North - which is also a hypertext in Storyspace published by Eastgate Systems.  It also has a separate life as a stand-alone Web poem.  The Web version is a collaboration (Stephanie and me) and you can see it online, with all of the "place" clues at the site: To Be Here as Stone Is.  

Gloss of green on a stone-- 
Cold waterfall, a ripple down
the uneven globe of this tiny
amphora, this ampoule for
perfume scored by a comb
in the molten bottle:
fountain strands of
sea-green jade and sea-light
opal in sheaths of fire
remelt, re-fuse to new luster
in which bubbles shift and
drops of vapor, sealed in
glaze, at each angle catch
light--catch light! That cry--
annihilation made, outbound
forever till it hits your eye
and ends, a green glow, all
you see, extinguished
starlight, starlight only.
Focused by stone, cleaved,
bruted, brilliant-cut. No
stone like that exists, before
1600. No world--until us--in
chains of glass, hostage to
signal: 

to see the rest of the poem, go to the site above.

To see more of Stephanie's work, go to her Home Page. (<http://stephaniestrickland.com>)

I will be happy to answer more questions about the "possible universe in your work."

 

Return to Week 4.

 

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Marjorie Coverley Luesebrink, your Instructor, is a Professor of English in the School of Humanities and Languages

Irvine Valley College, Irvine, California