Craft elements of fiction crack#

She had lived in San Francisco with my mother in the ‘30s before moving back to Sonoma County and reuniting with my grandfather. I’m hearing the music, the tinny notes that pull my child body across the long sweep of grass toward a spinning blur of color-promising not only lions and tigers and dragons, oh my!-but also the salty sweet pink popcorn that my grandmother always buys me after the ride.

And not just any old place in the park, but its historic merry-go-round. I have no real clue who the characters are, whether we’re in first-person POV or third, or even if this is fiction or nonfiction, but boy, can I picture Golden Gate Park. The real action happens elsewhere.īut when it comes to writing my next story, I can’t get Golden Gate Park out of my mind.

Craft elements of fiction crack#

The word itself has an unimportant feel, reminding me of the long rolls of butcher block paper that we’d tempera-paint with branchy trees and turquoise skies that would crack when they served as a backdrop for the school play. I have a secret crush on him, as do most of the women in the room, I later discover.

He’s got an acclaimed novel under his belt and is finishing up another. The man’s hair is gelled to a gleam and his black, ripped-at-the-collar t-shirt is simultaneously chic and casual. Don’t worry about figuring out your setting until you’ve at least got one main character nailed down.” “Setting,” he says, “isn’t really one of the important craft elements. The professor slides the chalk in his long fingers, then taps it on the desk, raising a faint cloud of yellow dust.