Writing Exercise: Try Resetting Your Setting

Sometimes scenes refuse to come together.  They are missing that element that makes them special and feel downright boring. Sometimes the characters or plot are to blame, if the conflict isn’t driving them toward a goal then you have a problem. Assuming your plot is awesome, try this:

Reset Your Setting

Setting is often the last thing a writer will consider when creating a scene in their story. With so much other awesome stuff going on it’s easy to overlook. For this exercise, take an existing scene, or one that you are preparing to write, and place it somewhere different. Ideally this place should be a place that adds a distinct emotional tone to the scene.

Have a chase scene in a busy metropolis? Take it through a cemetery or a department store. See what happens when your hero trips over a gravestone or gets tangled up in a rack of lingerie.  A spooky graveyard scene adds more moments for your hero to experience horror. Fighting against a pile of underclothes is downright funny. Neither of these emotional beats would have happened if the hero been stuck on Main St.

Lover’s quarrel in an apartment? Take it to a bakery or a roof top observatory. Let the smells of the bakery comfort the hero and bring back memories of the good times, or the sight of the drop off tighten their already frayed nerves to the breaking point.

Have fun with it. The worst that could happen is that you can’t use the scene and have to try again. The best, however, is that you end up with a scene that’s memorable and interesting.

Whatever happens, Happy Writing!

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Want to see more writing exercises? Here’s a handy link.