The Power of Persuasion

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From the course by Wesleyan University

Creative Writing: The Craft of Setting and Description

612 ratings

Wesleyan University

Creative Writing: The Craft of Setting and Description

612 ratings

Course 3 of 5 in the Specialization Creative Writing

In this course aspiring writers will be introduced to the techniques that masters of fiction use to ground a story in a concrete world. From the most realist settings to the most fantastical, writers will learn how to describe the physical world in sharp, sensory detail. We will also learn how to build credibility through research, and to use creative meditation exercises to deepen our own understanding of our story worlds, so that our readers can see all that we imagine.

From the lesson

Persuasive Settings: Why Description Matters

Writing a great short story is like conveying a dream. As we will see from studying one famous master, a "persuasive" setting is necessary in order to build mood, character, and even plot.

The Power of Persuasion3:59

Meet the Instructors

Amity Gaige
Visiting Scholar in Creative Writing

So what'd you think?

The Power of Persuasion is a short but packed essay.

I like how Llosa instructs us about an immovable fact,

that a story is only as good as the way that that story is told.

That's the story's power of persuasion.

You may have a great idea for a story, you may have the world's most riveting plot,

but the way you actually deliver it, the words, characters, events and

settings that you choose may end up making that story lifeless or

flat or cliched, despite your magnificent concept.

In this specialization, the foundations of storytelling, each of us,

your instructors Amy, Brando, Salvatore, and myself will be addressing a component

of how to tell your story in a persuasive and powerful manner.

Let's get back to Llosa.

In its persuasive efforts, the novel aims to reduce the distance

that separates fiction from reality, and once that boundary is elided,

to make the reader live the lie of fiction as if it were the most eternal truth,

its illusions the most consistent and convincing depictions of reality.

That's the trick great novels play: they convince us that the world

is the way they describe it, as if fiction were not what it is,

the picture of a world dismantled and rebuilt.

Llosa says we writers want to reduce and even remove or

rely the distance that separates fiction from reality.

We want readers to suspend disbelief,

because somehow in the state of suspension and disbelief,

what is written in a story feels as if it were the most eternal truth.

Isn't it crazy that fiction can sometimes feel more true than something true,

or for that matter, real life?

Why this is so is a subject of endless debate, but

if you didn't sort of agree that fiction can feel more true than real life,

you probably wouldn't be taking this course.

Something about great fiction transports us, overwhelms us.

In the writing of it and the reading of it, we often feel as if we disappear.

Here's something to think about and discuss with your peers.

How is it that fiction can feel truer than truth?

What does that statement mean to you, and have you ever felt it?

Back to Llosa.

Here is a doozy.

Bad novels lacking in the power of persuasion, or possessing only a weak

strain of it, don't convince us that the lie they're telling us is true.

The lie appears to us as what it is, a construction, an arbitrary,

lifeless invention that moves ploddingly and clumsily, like the puppets

of a mediocre puppet master whose threads, manipulated by their creator,

are in full sight, exposing them as caricatures of living beings.

Yikes, clumsy, plodding.

Well, none of us want to write like that.

We don't want to be mediocre puppet masters.

So how do we avoid doing that?

I believe that writing and life resonate.

Becoming better writers makes us better livers, and

becoming better livers makes us better writers.

And how to avoid mediocrity in both?

Well, let's start with our writing.

So, let's go over some basic definitions.

Setting, what is setting?

Setting is the time, place, and situation in which a fiction occurs.

1920s New York, present day Nigeria, outer space in the year 3000.

What is description?

Description is the mother of vivid fiction.

It under-girds everything.

In a sense, character is really a description of invented people, and

plot is really a description of events.

It is the method with which every writer delivers a vivid dream.

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