4th Class

Let’s try something different today, I said to the class, then asked my friend Joyce, who was sitting beside me, to write two sentences (which I took from my student's work) on the whiteboard: “I run curving over the lawn out towards the street. I fly and fly, my blood starts pumping, and my teeth clench with the thrill of being chased.”
By looking at these two sentences, I said, what else can we add to draw the reader into the character’s world? Look at the list on the board. I pointed at the list next to the two sentences:

• physical setting that invokes one of the senses (hearing)
• dialogue
• first-person point of view
• action that provides a sense of real time (night or day, etc)
• detailed physical character description

We can add two or more of the senses, right? I said. What are the five senses?
Touch, smell, sight, taste, hearing, one student said.
How about adding smell? I said. We know there is a lawn.
The lawn might not smell pleasant, another student said. Since it is night time, the lawn might not smell fresh.
What does this tell you about the air the character is breathing? I said. What about the sense of sight? We know there is a street. We can assume there is a streetlight, right?
They nodded. If there is a streetlight and if it casts a shadow of a tree over the character’s feet, I continued, what does that tell you? They just looked at me, then at the board. What I am saying is that you don’t need to say it directly to the reader that there is a tree somewhere near the character. The streetlight casting the tree shadow says that already. It is all shown through the character’s surroundings.
Afterward we went over the last item on the list. I was glad that they had digested the technique that makes up a scene and applied it to our workshop. Hooray!