Location, Location, Location: How Setting Influences Character, Theme, and Plot

We’ve moved online! All workshops will be conducted through Zoom, an interactive platform that allows you to participate in exercises and contribute to group conversation in your workshops. You’ll receive an email with a Zoom link to your workshop 5pm the day of the workshop.

Member Price: $65
Deadline to Register: August 19, 5 pm
Instructor: Shoshana Akabas

Setting is often dismissed as simply providing a backdrop for the story, but the setting has the potential to be more than just the location. In this workshop, we’ll look at how writers paint a vivid scene and use setting to challenge characterization, reinforce themes, and even drive the plot. In addition to reading and discussing fiction excerpts, we’ll do some writing exercises that will help us see setting in a whole new light and make the most of it in our future writing projects. We’ll study examples in fiction, but narrative writers of any genre are welcome to join.

Recommended Reading:

• Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
  
• Ponti by Sharlene Teo
• Run Me To Earth by Paul Yoon
• “There Will Come Soft Rains” from The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury

Shoshana Akabas is a New York-based writer and teacher. She holds an MFA in fiction from Columbia University, where she taught writing for four years. She’s received artist and research fellowships from Jentel Foundation, Gladstone’s Library, and National Geographic. Most recently, her writing has been featured in The Washington Post, The Kenyon Review, The Believer, Electric Lit, and American Short Fiction. www.ShoshanaAkabas.com