Five Weeks, variable days/times
$185 members/$215 non-members Berkeley
Setting in fiction plays an important role in theme, plot, and even characterization. Whether your write sci-fi, romance, historicals, erotica, thrillers, mysteries, or literary fiction, the setting can make or break your story. “Setting is not a simple backdrop, like a green screen on which a film is shot,” says instructor Jess Wells. “It’s no accident that your intrepid hero has to ride through a narrow mountain pass: it’s the way you force friend and foe into a meeting. It’s helpful that your main character is the village doctor, hosting family after family during their crisis in a little room in the front of the house. Even the relentless dark and biting wind of a distant planet illustrates both the physical challenges facing the colony of scientists, as well as their brooding cruelty to one another.”
How do you create well-drawn, complex settings that will do justice to your fictional world? What elements go into the creation of effective, efficient settings that work hard for your story? How can a setting be drawn in a way that adds to the challenges of the protagonist’s quest? How can a setting allow the you, the author, to control the movement of your characters and to introduce a diversity of characters and events?
“We’ll look at the opening pages and/or the maps of a slew of well-known books from different genres,” says Jess, “including The Lathe of Heaven, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Red Dwarf, Perfume: Story of a Murderer, The Hobbit, and The World Beneath.
“And then for fun, we’ll take a free-form map and create a world ‘setting’ of our own. Once we’ve gained a greater appreciation of the artfulness that the creation of a great setting requires, we’ll tip our hats to the amazing power of all the wonderful fictional settings that transport us, transfix us, and even let us smell the flowers of a foreign land.
Jess Wells has published more than sixty short stories and three novels, including The Mandrake Broom, a historical that dramatizes the fight to save medical knowledge during the witch-burning times in Europe 1465-1540. Her first novel, AfterShocks, is a modern psychological drama set immediately following an 8.0 earthquake in San Francisco. And The Price of Passion, her second novel, is literary erotica following a woman’s journey around the world. In each volume, setting is an important component of the story. Jess is a recipient of a San Francisco Arts Commission Grant for Literature and a four-time finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards.
