Plot, Setting, and Mood

Ingredients of FictionPlot, Setting, and Mood

elements

OF

LITERATURE

Setting

• Setting

• How is Setting created?

• Setting & Character

• Setting, Mood & Tone

Setting

• Most stories take place in a particular time and place• Setting is created through

– Details that suggest the time of day, year, season, or historical period

– Descriptions of characters, clothing, buildings, weather and landscapes

Setting

Mood

• Another element that contributes to the world of a story is the mood, the feeling or atmosphere that a writer creates for a readers.

• Mood is developed through a writer’s use of imagery and choice of words and details. Setting details, in particular help to establish a mood.

Plot

• A story is more than the setting. The real power of a story comes from what happens in that world.

• Most stories follow a plot, a chain of events that traces a conflict, or struggle between opposing forces.

• The conflict can be internal, taking place within the mind of a character, or it can be external taking place between the character and an outside force, such as another character, society, or nature.

Stages of a Plot

• Exposition (setting, characters, mood)• Rising action (complications, problems)• Climax (turning point in the story e.g character taking

a decision)• Falling action (showing the results of the previous

decision/action)• Resolution (final outcome/denoument)

Stories & Poems

• The Bass, the River, and Sheila Mant• Harrison Bergeron• Everyday Use• Searching for Summer

• Poems• Exile (Julia Alvarez)• Crossing the Border (Joy Harjo)

Reading a Poem• Poems create images with words. The images are actually

the pictures that come to mind when you read the words. • Imagery-writing that creates images by describing• Specific images are created by comparing through similes,

metaphors, and personification.• Personification-’the winter evening settles down/with smell

of steaks in passageways’ (T.S.Eliot)• Simile-’Nothing would sleep in that cellar, dank as a ditch’

(T.Roethke)• Metaphor-’I’m a riddle in nine syllables/an elephant, a

ponderous house/a melon strolling on two tendrils’ (S.Plath)

Activity: What is similar?

• All the world’s a stage/and all the men and women players…

• When the hounds of spring are on winter’s traces…

• The sun gnaws the night’s bone/down through the meat and gristle

• The scarlet of the maples can shake me like a cry/of bugles going by…

• Hope is the thing with feathers/that perches in the soul

• The wind stood up and gave a shout/he whistled on his fingers and/kicked the withered leaves about

• The skin prickles,outraged as a cactus/at this cold