Today I started creating my first setting card and this is something I have struggled with in the past. I’m the type of reader who tends to skip over descriptive passages of settings, characters’ physical appearances, etc., when I read and have no interest in any of that. I supply the descriptions from my own imagination. But I know that not all readers are like that, so I need to at least provide the bare bones of what my settings look like – and more important, what emotion they need to represent.
Today, I was writing the setting description for my opening scene, in a location that represents both hope and aspiration, as well as denial and restriction to my hero. It is her fathers worklab and she wants to be part of what he does, but he constantly pushes her away because of the danger of his work.
When I write the scene, I plan to include the minimum description necessary to convey both my hero’s hope and her sense of oppression, but in order to do that, I need to know more about the location, including the arrangement of the items within it. For now, I don’t know how much I need to know, so I think today’s setting description was overwritten, but as I get a few of these under my belt, as well as the actual scenes that go with them, I hope to get better at that process.