writerjenn

The same neighborhood as described by four different characters:

1. There's the house with the scary dog. There's the house with the car that's the color of a lime popsicle. Here's the sewer grate where I lost my ring. That's the school bus stop on the corner . . .

2. Over there is the house where the cute guy lives. There, that blue house, is where the other cute guy lives. Ick, don't even go over there! That's where the creepy guy who snapped my bra strap lives. And this is the house where I babysit the twins . . .

3. The people next door blast blast their stereo all night. They never shovel the walk when it snows, either. On the other side of us, that man is always home and in his sweats. Doesn't he have a job? Behind us somewhere is a house with a dog that never stops barking . . .

4. There's the smell of cut grass, and dog turds baking in the sun. There's the sound of the ice cream truck, "Pop goes the weasel!" tinkling all day until you could go insane. I'm saving up to go to Rome.

These characters aren't part of any WIP of mine. This is just a brief exercise in point of view, and the relationship of character and setting, based on some voices that came to me while I was walking down the street. If I were going to turn the above into a story, I would work to make the voices even more distinctive. But here's what I wanted to get at with this exercise: what each character notices about the setting is related to that character's identity. Once when I was blogging about description, cedunkley of the blog Ten Thousand Years left me a brilliant comment about "describing what the specific POV character would notice. This allows me to personalize the description or choose even what gets described."  I think today's exercise helps illustrate that point.

Sometimes we think of setting as static, a backdrop into which we plunk our characters.  But setting changes depending on who's experiencing it.  Characterization and setting play off each other; we learn about both through their interaction.