Begins Wednesday, October 9th, 2024

The class will meet on Wednesday nights via Zoom, 7:00PM - 9:00PM Eastern

Open to All writers!

Led by James Sturz, author of the novels UNDERJUNGLE, set entirely underwater, and SASSO, set in the cave homes of Basilicata, Italy. His magazine and newspaper articles have run in more than 90 publications in the U.S. and abroad, including in The New York Times and The New York Times Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The New Republic, Outside, Men’s Journal, National Geographic Adventure, New York Magazine, Travel + Leisure, Playboy, Afar, Saveur, Organic Spa, and Yoga Journal, among many others. Sturz's work has been published in 18 countries, translated into nine languages, and been anthologized in ITALY: THE BEST TRAVEL WRITING FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES and BEST FOOD WRITING 2007, among others.

Learn more about James in our Meet the Teaching Artist series.

Creating a sense of place means treating your settings as characters themselves—not as backdrops, but as catalysts for character development and engines for change.

Have you ever felt in a book or story that the location was as important as any of its characters? Creating a compelling sense of place involves far more than a simple description of your location’s physical attributes. It can include unusual occurrences that could only have happened there; the sounds and smells, or wildlife or architecture, that tell you unmistakably where you are; the history that influenced the characters’ personalities even without their knowledge; and the way those characters transform as they move from place to place over time.

Over the course of this class, you’ll learn to create multidimensional settings that establish both voice and mood, and that give your writing whimsy and weight. James Sturz learned his craft by writing travel articles for the U.S.’s top publications and then began applying what he developed to essays and fiction, including two novels. This is a class on craft. Students may focus on a single piece of writing, or they may work on several pieces, across one or more genres.

COURSE READING:

James will assign material for students to read for Week 2. Thereafter, students will each present one or two published passages they’ve found especially meaningful and lead discussions about what they learned about storytelling from them, with an emphasis on their settings.

COURSE TAKEAWAYS:

In this class, students will:

1. Learn techniques for creating complex settings, relying on a five-fold process:

• Capturing the attributes and characteristics of locations by adopting the right mindset in the field and applying a series of prompts.
  
• Translating images and attitudes into words.    
• Researching locations to add details to your descriptions, while avoiding adding superfluous material.    
• Recognizing how your settings will shape your characters, and choosing elements that will help you achieve this.  
• Understanding the importance of never just saying what places are, but always what they are like.

2. Students will workshop their writing.

3. As part of the workshop process, students will critique the work of their peers, helping them to write better pieces themselves.

4. By the end of class, students will not just grasp the fundamentals of creating meaningful settings, but understand their individual strengths as descriptive writers—and then how to achieve the most in their own pieces.