words per minute
21
luchiray87
00:00
Speed
Writing Devices - Narrative
Setting
Effect: To briefly orient the reader so that they know the bare minimum -- as the setting isn't particularly interesting or relevant
1) (1) When people ask me what I do--taxi drivers, hairdressers--I tell them I work in an office. - Eleanor Oliphant is Completely fine, Gail Honeyman
2) (1) It was toward the middle of the summer that I met Donald Shimoda. - Illusions, Richard Bach (layered with characterization)
3) When Mr. and Mrs. Dursley woke up on the dull, gray Tuesday our story starts, there was nothing about the cloudy sky outside to suggest that strange and mysterious things would soon be happening all over the country. - J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter (layered with creating curiosity)
Effect: using description to create a setting so the reader will feel they are there
4) Squinting at his surroundings he saw a plush Renaissance bedroom with Louis XVI furniture, hand-frescoed walls, and a colossal mahogany four-poster bed. Where the hell am I? The jacquard bathrobe hanging on his bedpost bore the monogram: HOTEL RITZ PARIS. - The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown (layered with wish fulfillment)
5) (6) Three minutes airborne and we circled a farmstead, barns the color of glowing coals, house of ivory in a sea of mint. A garden in back for food: sweet-corn and lettuce and tomatoes growing. - Illusions, Richard Bach
6) (2) Everything reflected light and contributed to the heightened brilliance of the late afternoon. The trees in the neighbor's field had all donned translucent mantles and each now stood unique but unified in their presentation. - The Shack, William P. Young
Effect: To establish the setting in such a way that the reader knows that it will play a crucial part of the story, practically a character.
7) (1) March unleashed a torrent of rainfall after an abnormally dry winter. A cold front out of Canada then descended and was held in place by a swirling wind that roared down the Gorge from eastern Oregon. Although spring was surely just around the corner, the god of winter was not about to relinquish its hard-won dominion without a tussle. There was a blanket of new snow in the Cascades, and rain was now freezing on impact with the frigid ground outside the house. - The Shack, William P. Young (layered with personification)
Effect: Sometimes, a setting is not quite a place. It can be something else, like a vehicle, a time period, a strange situation.
8) (3) I took my sandwich and walked around his plane. It was a 1928 or 1929 machine, and it was completely unscratched. Factories don't make airplanes as new as his was, parked there in the hay. Twenty coats of hand-rubbed butyrate dope, at least, paint like a mirror pulled tight over the wooden ribs of the thing. Don, in old-English gold leaf under the rim of his cockpit, and the registration on the map case said, D. W. Shimoda. The instruments were new out of the box, original 1928 flight instruments. Varnished-oak control stick and rudder-bar; throttle, mixture, spark advance at the left. You never see spark advances anymore, even on the best-restored antiques. No scratch anywhere, not a patch on the fabric, not a single streak of engine oil from the cowling - Illusions, Richard Bach