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While you're developing your characters, try putting them in various and surprising places. PLACE, aka location or environment, can have an enormous impact on your character's arc and development.

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As a writer, you can heighten the emotions, decisions, conflict and heart of your story by selecting the RIGHT place and improving its details. Setting is not boring--it is one of the three primary features that make your story what it is (next to Character and Plot). The Setting grounds your story and helps your reader come to the conclusion that "this story could not have happened anywhere else!!!"

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About the Prompts

You'll be experimenting with taking your character out of their "normal" space and putting them somewhere new and, likely, completely crazy. Don't worry, this will give you as the writer an opportunity to get to know your character even better. And it will also alert you to nuances about their environment that will help you develop a very STRONG SETTING. Your "normal" setting will become much more detailed and colorful thanks to this brainstorming.

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Share your writing from these prompts with me on Facebook and let me know what new details you've discovered about your setting.

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Writing/Setting Prompt #1

Take your character out of their "normal" setting and put them in a spaceship in outer space. What do they feel? How do they react? What do they appreciate about this new place? What do they miss about their normal place?

EXAMPLE: One of my characters is Sue--she's a warm, loving farmwife who, if she found herself in a spaceship in outer space, would appreciate the dials and measurements, because she is a nit-picker when it comes to proper measuring of ingredients for her famous biscuits and gravy. She would make sure the spaceship's gleaming metal toggles and dials and pokers and prodders were all in top working order because you can't be a good farmwife with poor equipment. And she would miss most having a kitchen sink--in gravity-less outer space, Sue would lament that there is no falling water from a faucet into a sink, and you can't make a hearty pot of chicken stew without a good enamel sink and faucet.

Writing/Setting Prompt #2

Take your character out of their "normal" setting and put them in an old pub in historic London. What do they feel? How do they react? What do they appreciate about this new place? What do they miss about their normal place?

EXAMPLE: Sue, a farmwife, would look sideways at all the people drinking beer, and would admire the gleaming wooden counter, appreciating its age. She would miss her own kitchen counters, especially the bright red cabinets holding all her jars of pickles.

Writing/Setting Prompt #3

A submarine

Writing/Setting Prompt #4

A garden-supply store

Writing/Setting Prompt #5

The Superbowl

Writing/Setting Prompt #6

A university classroom

Writing/Setting Prompt #7

A Western cowboy or cowgirl ranch

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