Setting is the physical world your characters inhabit, the place where their stories play out. The temptation is to treat it like a simple container for the action, a stage set, but truly effective setting does many kinds of narrative work. It helps convince us of the physical reality of the story, its materiality, but it also expresses emotion, reveals character, shapes the action, and connects to theme, the big idea hovering unspoken behind events.
Through a mixture of lecture, discussion and creative exercises, this session will show you how to create effective setting. We'll analyze how outstanding fiction and nonfiction writers like Jack London, Raymond Carver, James Baldwin and Annie Dillard use setting to deepen character and story, followed by exercises designed to help you explore and develop your own use of setting. Open to all levels of experience and all genres, no preparation is needed. Just come to class ready to write, explore, and share.
ROBERT ANTHONY SIEGEL is the author of a memoir, Criminals, and two novels, All Will Be Revealed, and All the Money in the World. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Smithsonian, The Paris Review, The Drift, The Oxford American, and Ploughshares, among other publications, and has been anthologized in Best American Essays 2023, O. Henry Stories 2014, and Pushcart Prize XXXVI. He has been a Fulbright Scholar in Taiwan, a Mombukagakusho Fellow in Japan, a Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and a Paul Engle Fellow at the Iowa Writers Workshop.
Robert taught creative writing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington for 22 years, advising MFA students on writing their first books. He has also taught at Hollins University in Virginia, Tunghai University in Taiwan, and the LaSalle College of the Arts in Singapore, and is a regular at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival. He holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop, and a BA from Harvard.
