DAY EIGHTEEN Feraco Creative Writing 9 July 2010

Inspired by the Details  Using ONLY a description of a person’s hands, describe the following personalities, conditions, or character traits.  You may have the hands doing something, holding something, or just describe their appearance. You will want to give as much detail as possible.  Use the following sentence to launch your description (more than one sentence):  “I settled into my seat on the plane and looked around. Between the seats in the row in front of me I could see a woman’s hand on the armrest. I could tell she was __________ because…”  rich  dying  nervous  artistic  intelligent  athletic  beautiful  dumb

Inspired by the Details  Like the “boring word” exercise we did with poetry, the same thing applies to descriptions in short stories, particularly when applied to character development.  Use the basic structure of the following sentence and alter its diction to create the following characteristics  “The man picked up his car keys and walked out the front door.”  mean  nice  suspicious  crazy  conceited  immature  excited  paranoid  enraged  satisfied

Favorite Characters!  Choose a favorite character from a movie, book or TV.  Why do you like them so much? What about him/her makes them a great character?  Look at the list of characteristics we made a couple of weeks ago, and do a character sketch using the list we came up with  For example: Holden Caulfield – 16 years old – White/Caucasian – New Yorker – aspires to be the Innocence Keeper of the world, etc.

The World Comes to Life  Setting can be broken up into three main categories: location, time, and environment.  Location refers to any place the story occurs in.  It can be super-detailed (like the “writing room” exercise”) or a specific address, or it can be very general (like “the universe”).  Brainstorm a list of all aspects of location.  What about time?  Brainstorm a list of time elements.  Time can be clock time, day or night, century, date, month, day of the week, etc.  Environment can be like location, except it is more general  For example, weather or “a forest” would be environment  You need one in order to establish the other

The World Comes to Life  When creating a setting, you have four options about what to write.  Some place you definitely know  Some place you kind of know  Some place you could guess about  Some place you don’t know  First write about a place you definitely know, concentrating on details and description  (Your bedroom, bathroom, or a place you spend most of your time in)

The World Comes to Life  Next, write about some place you kind of know  This can be a friend’s house, a Starbucks, a city you have been to on vacation, etc.  You should know enough to write knowledgably but you will have to make up the little details..  Then, write about some place you can guess about.  This could include a tribal hut in Africa, a deserted island, a cave in the mountains, an Italian village, a medieval castle, etc.  You may have never been to this place but you know enough to guess and fill in details.

The World Comes to Life  Finally, write about some place you don’t know.  This may also be a place no one knows.  All fictional places fall into this category such as Oz or Narnia.  Also included would be planets in space, the bottom of the ocean, inside a volcano, or other places that no one really knows about.  Obviously, you will need to create details for these places.