Activity 2 — Setting the Scene

Teacher's Notes

In Activity 1 you began a story with a fragment of real-life dialogue. Dialogue has a lot of energy and is one of the things that makes a story seem alive.

But fiction can also SLOW DOWN TIME. It's almost like magic. Try this exercise: Look around the room where you are for 30 seconds. Then close your eyes and SLOWLY RE- CREATE the room in your imagination.

Now close your eyes and RE-CREATE a room in the house where you live. What are the sounds there? The smells? What does it feel and look like?

Back to the story! Read over the dialogue you wrote, and imagine the place where it happened. It might be an actual place you know, or you may create a fictional place. Close your eyes for ONE MINUTE and explore the place in your imagination. How does it look there? What SOUNDS do you hear? Voices? Music? What SMELLS? How does it FEEL? What is the temperature? What are the textures?

Now go back to the dialogue you have written and WRITE A NEW BEGINNING that sets the scene for the dialogue. You might say, "The smell of rising dough filled the air at Ray's Pizza Palace. You could hear the sound of Ray's rock music from the seventies and Ray yelling at the delivery boy . . ."

When you finish this lesson, you will have a setting that slows down time with sense details plus the dialogue. It is okay to let it be real or made-up, but the reader wants to be able to see it, and hear it, and smell and feel it. And she or he probably wouldn't mind having something to taste, too!

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