The Writer's Studio: Setting as a Character: Using Sensory Details to Write a Place that Propels Narrative

The Writer’s Studio is a free workshop series open to all students from all majors. Come study the art of writing in intensive, fun, hands-on workshops with dynamic faculty from the Creative Writing program, the Stanford Storytelling Project, and others. You will leave with an expanded understanding of what your writing can do.

Setting is often neglected as a source of power in narrative writing. In this session, we'll discuss ways to build a setting that calls on the five senses and helps propel narrative momentum by influencing character action. Generative prompts will include: writing from the perspective of place, writing across the five senses to generate description, writing inventories that fuel character thought and action.

Yohanca Delgado's work appears in The O'Henry Prize Stories 2022, The Best American Fantasy and Science Fiction 2021, The Paris Review, One Story, A Public Space, among others. She is a collaborator in Janelle Monáe's forthcoming short story collection, The Memory Librarian and Other Stories of Dirty Computer. She is a 2022 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow and a 2021-2023 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.