Writing Active Setting Book 2: Emotion, Conflict and Back Story by Mary Buckham

Author:Mary Buckham [Buckham, Mary]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Cantwell Publishing, LLC
Published: 2013-03-09T05:00:00+00:00

Police Constable Moir, on duty until midnight, walked in and out of shadows. He breathed the soft cold smell of wet wood and heard the slap of the night tide against the wharves. Acres and acres of shipping and forests of cranes lay around him. Ships, he thought romantically, were, in a sort of way, like little worlds. Tied up to bollards and lying quiet enough but soon to sail over the watery globe as lonely as the planets wandering in the skies. — Singing in the Shrouds — Ngaio Marsh

Did you get the wonderful sensory details Marsh employed in the setting above? The atmospheric details, the wistful sense of intrigue one has when thinking about a voyage from the perspective of a person trapped in the routine of his nightly rounds, all serve to heighten the sense of impending conflict and all in four sentences of setting. The reader is in the scene, but this dockside vignette is not simply to show a cop on his beat. It uses this POV character to show the reader the subtext by using specific word choices — in and out of shadows, little worlds, watery globe, lonely. What if Marsh had skipped these and her other word choices?

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