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    Finding Your Sense of Place (The Writing Life Series)
    Finding Your Sense of Place (The Writing Life Series)
    Finding Your Sense of Place (The Writing Life Series)
    Ebook46 pages38 minutes

    Finding Your Sense of Place (The Writing Life Series)

    By Janni Lee Simner

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    About this ebook

    Use setting and description to bring your characters to life and increase the emotional impact of your stories!

    Setting is about much more than providing a few scene-setting details and moving on. Discover why the descriptions that seem to get in the way of your stories are actually the most powerful tools you have to bring characters to life and make readers care about their stories.

    Two decades ago, acclaimed novelist Janni Lee Simner took her writing to the next level and began selling her work when she realized that emotion and description are, ultimately, the same thing. In Finding Your Sense of Place she shares insights and techniques to help you:

    • Understand why different characters see the same places differently—even if they walk side by side
    • Craft descriptions that help readers connect with your characters on a deeper level
    • Make room for descriptive passages that won’t bog your story down
    • Select the most powerful scene-enhancing metaphors
    • Research your story’s setting—whether your story is set close to home or far away, in the present day or a thousand years ago
    • Choose the descriptive details that best convey that setting to readers

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJanni Lee Simner
    Release dateJun 11, 2015
    ISBN9781311879769
    Finding Your Sense of Place (The Writing Life Series)
    Author

    Janni Lee Simner

    Janni Lee Simner lives in the Arizona desert, where the plants know how to bite and the dandelions have thorns. In spite of these things—or maybe because of them—she believes she lives in one of the most stunning places on earth.Her post-apocalyptic Bones of Faerie trilogy is set after the war between the human and faerie realms has destroyed the world, leaving behind a land filled with deadly magic. The first book, Bones of Faerie, was dubbed, “Pure, stunning, impossible to put down or forget,” by World Fantasy Award winner Jane Yolen. School Library Journal describes the second book, Faerie Winter, as, “A hauntingly exquisite portrait of a postapocalyptic world.”She’s also the author of Thief Eyes, a contemporary young adult fantasy based on the Icelandic sagas; of the kids’ adventure story Tiernay West, Professional Adventurer; of the short-story collection Unicorn Seasons; and of three more novels and more than 30 more short stories, including appearances in Welcome to Bordertown and Cricket magazine.To learn more about visit her online at www.simner.com.

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      Book preview

      Finding Your Sense of Place (The Writing Life Series) - Janni Lee Simner

      Finding Your Sense of Place

      I spent my first two and a half decades in deciduous, temperate climes—first in the suburbs of New York City, then in the suburbs of St. Louis. For most of that time, I took those landscapes of near horizons and sponge-wet air, of bright green trees and hazy blue-gray skies pretty much for granted. I would have said, if you asked me, that I knew that other places were different, that of course there were deserts and rain forests and arctic ice-scapes, but deep down, without realizing it, I assumed that my world was the world. I didn’t think about how it would really feel to be somewhere different, in spite of a cross-country camping trip to the west when I was thirteen.

      Then I visited Arizona for the first time, not as a teen, but as an adult. Specifically, I stepped onto a plane in the middle of a cool damp St. Louis autumn morning and stepped off of it into a scorching dry Tucson afternoon.

      I remember clearly the thick red wool sweater I wore that day. In St. Louis, its bulk had been a comfort as cold crept into the September days, turning the edges of the deciduous leaves bright with color. In Tucson, that same sweater suddenly weighed me down, not a comfort at all as it scratched my dry skin and trapped the desert heat. That heat burned against my face and the back of my neck. It sucked the moisture from my throat.

      I was amazed at how much difference a few hours could make, turning me from a person well-adapted to my surroundings to someone poorly adapted to them. I hadn’t changed during my short flight, yet I felt changed, from someone who fit in the place she was—without even thinking about it—to someone who didn’t fit.

      As I traded my sweater for a T-shirt and wished I had a pair of shorts to go with it (shorts? in September?), I noticed countless other details that told me I was somewhere new: Dull green cacti whose sharp spines were built-in keep-away signs, ready to draw blood if I strayed too near. A dauntingly huge sky, unbroken by any clouds, so low and close I was sure it would crush me if not for the dusty gray mountains that ringed the horizon, holding up the blue.

      I was in Tucson visiting a college boyfriend who’d moved there for graduate school. As I stared out the window of the shuttle taking me to his apartment, I began to understand that all my life I’d taken the setting I lived in for granted, and that I shouldn’t have taken it for granted, because no two places are alike. Because we fit—or fail to fit—into different places in different ways.

      More Emotion! More Description!

      It took me a few more years to put this understanding to use in my fiction, which I was just beginning to work on in a serious way. First I had to return to St. Louis, join a critique group there, and do a whole lot of writing and learning.

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