Admittedly, the experimental rewrite of my main WIP has been slow going, and it’s not because I’ve been busy. That’s just an excuse. It’s one scene in particular that I’ve been stuck on, and I couldn’t really figure out why until today.

It’s an issue of setting. The scene stalling me is one with a setting that’s crucial to the exposition and world building of the entire series, and I’ve been hung up on getting it just right.

This self-imposed pressure to write something perfectly the first time is definitely a problem—and maybe something I’ll talk about in a future post—but my point is this: I’m struggling to convert the time period and place into coherent, engaging words.

Setting is one of the most challenging things for me as a writer (as you may remember from my post on day 3 of the Writer’s Digest challenge), and that’s something I’ve been working to fix.

My realization today sent me to Google to expedite that process, and I came across a Writing Forward post by Melissa Donovan. In it, Donovan provides some tips and a few writing exercises targeting setting, so over the next couple weeks, I’ll try them out—and, to hold myself accountable, I’ll post them here. Stay tuned!