Setting: Create a Vivid Story World
Setting functions as much more than simply stage dressing for your characters or plot. Crafted with care and thoughtfulness, it can provide a vivid world for your characters as well as help move plot, evoke theme, and build atmosphere. Setting shapes your characters, while providing context for their conflicts, goals, and motivations.
In this online writing course, you will learn how to world build in any genre, research setting, use setting to define character and drive plot, and discover techniques for weaving setting into other creative writing craft elements such as theme and voice. You’ll explore techniques for describing setting without stopping the action, slowing the pace, or breaking believability.
A vivid story world not only draws in your readers, including agents and editors, but also keeps them immersed in your characters and your story itself, while enhancing your story’s believability. With a powerful, authentic setting, they’ll keep thinking about your story long after they’ve finished reading it—and perhaps tell other readers about it as well.
If you want more online education, see the full list of WDU courses here.
Writer’s Digest Guide to Better Writing
Sometimes, the best way to improve your writing is to go back to basics, to revisit the things you should have been paying attention to in your high school English classes (we won’t tell!). Whether you’re writing freelance articles for publications, editing your novel draft, or trying to write more professional emails, the Writer’s Digest Guide to Better Writing offers more than 50 techniques, strategies, and grammar rules with practical, real-world examples to help improve your writing. Additionally, you’ll learn to tell the difference between the grammar rules that need to be followed for the sake of clarity, and those that can be broken or played with as you develop your writer’s voice.
Watch more than 350 expert writing tutorials!
With a growing catalog of instructional writing videos available instantly, we have writing instruction on everything from improving your craft to getting published and finding an audience. New videos are added every month!
Get Your Copy of the March/April 2024 Issue of Writer’s Digest Today!
Writer’s Digest
Whether fiction or narrative nonfiction, characters are a critical part of every story. But that doesn’t mean everyone agrees on how to create those characters or what a character needs to be in order to draw readers in. Do they need to be likable or is compelling enough? Should writers know their characters inside out, or just what’s going to be necessary for the story? In this issue of Writer’s Digest, writers will learn techniques for creating characters for novels, a series, memoir, and more.