At the Indie Writer’s Festival, I had the privilege of attending a writing workshop hosted by Avi Jones. Jones is the author of Swim and Max, both of which took six years to make. The writing exercise that he led us through was amazing and eye opening. It taught me in a practical way how to combine sensory details, a character’s motivation and the setting to create the mood and tone of the story.
I loved how Avi combined theory and practicality to teach something. He broke down the instructions, gave us examples and answered all of our questions. It was really easy to learn something like ‘object correlative’ and how setting informs the mood, tone and atmosphere of the story through his examples and the prompt that he had led the group through.
The way he structured his writing, the sequence of events that he had led us through is something that I found invaluable and have continued to use in my own writing. I cannot enthuse about this workshop enough. It is one of those workshops where you cannot just read someone else’s notes but you need to attend it yourself. That being said, I will share something from my notes.
The setting of the story correlates with the emotional state of the character and the overall tone of the story.
The way the setting is described, including word choice, diction and imagery, creates the overall mood and tone of the piece and the main character only serves to continue carrying out this tone. It is not only the knowledge, but being able to apply this knowledge to my writing that I found the most invaluable and helpful. Thank you Avi Jones and thank you Te Manawa!