A Writer's Guide to Descriptive Settings

About This Course

You may live among the prickly pears, dust devils, and intense sun of the desert. Or you may reside in a small town nestled alongside cornfields. Or perhaps you live in the big city and take a train in to work every day.

No matter where you live, your surroundings have special physical, historical, and spiritual characteristics that you can--and should--rely on to breathe life into any work of fiction or nonfiction.

During this course, you'll learn to tap into the world you know in order to establish a realistic sense of place in your writing. You'll develop your eye for detail, and you'll find out how to collect the information you'll need to infuse your works with believable characters, memorable settings, and detailed descriptions.

This hands-on course is filled with a variety of valuable exercises that will help you hone your skills of observation, interviewing, collecting oral histories, remembering details and descriptions, reproducing dialogue and diction, using figurative language, developing realistic characters, and more.

By the time you finish this course, you'll be well-prepared to create truly unique works filled with vivid and meaningful observations of the people, places, foods, customs, and events in not only your local community, but also in places that exist only in your memory.


Course Revised June 2013

About The Instructor

This course includes a knowledgeable and caring instructor who will guide you through your lessons, facilitate discussions, and answer your questions. The instructor for this course will be Liz Rolfsmeier.

Liz Rolfsmeier has degrees in Magazine Journalism and English from Syracuse University and the University of Iowa. She has been teaching college literature and writing courses for the past eight years, and she has conducted various creative writing workshops throughout the years. She regularly writes feature articles for online and print publications.

Syllabus

A new section of each course starts monthly. If enrolling in a series of two or more courses, please be sure to space the start date for each course at least two months apart.

Week 1

Wednesday - Lesson 01

Observation and Data Collection

Friday - Lesson 02

Found Objects and Poetic Devices

Week 2

Wednesday - Lesson 03

The Natural World

Friday - Lesson 04

Gathering Oral Histories

Week 3

Wednesday - Lesson 05

People Watching and Creating Characters

Friday - Lesson 06

The Way Folks Talk

Week 4

Wednesday - Lesson 07

Place in Memoir

Friday - Lesson 08

Researching History and Culture

Week 5

Wednesday - Lesson 09

Foods—Oysters, Baba Ganoush, and Slumgullion, Oh My!

Friday - Lesson 10

Mapping Out Your Stories

Week 6

Wednesday - Lesson 11

Edit, Edit, Edit

Friday - Lesson 12

Offering Your Writing to Others

Requirements

Internet access, e-mail, the Microsoft Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox Web browser, and the Adobe Flash and PDF plug-ins (two free and simple downloads you obtain at http://www.adobe.com/downloads by clicking Get Adobe Flash Player and Get Adobe Reader).