Building Compelling Story Settings

About this course:

Dialogue, plotting and pacing are pillars of any good script or book. However, a strongly-evoked setting can lift a good story into a great one. Through this course, you look at striking examples of stories where the location was just as much a character as the protagonist. You take in such stories as a class and learn to articulate what makes your settings so striking. You look at photos of interesting locations and find all the right words to best describe them. And with visual media, you even “reverse-engineer” descriptions based on what you see, then compare your writing afterward to what the script dictated in the first place. As the course progresses, you are tasked to write stories in different media—prose, live-action, animation, graphic novel, etc.—with an eye to establish and extenuate the setting. Through extensive workshopping of material in class, you learn how to make location a signature aspect of your story, not just some arbitrary choice, and describe it in vibrant, compelling language.