I led the group through some writing prompts last month, and I think the most interesting one turned out to be a pair of prompts that both instructed the writer to imagine a character under stress (one prompt had a character facing an unseen threat, the other a character dealing with loss).  Both instructed the writer to describe the setting as a place belonging to that character — without actually referencing the character.

The results were intriguingly different.  With the character dealing with potential danger, even the familiar surrounds of home took on an ominous note in several of the participant’s pieces.  The effect of the character’s mental state — though this was never directly referenced — set the stage for action and built anticipation of what the next paragraph might bring.

The ones where the character was dealing with loss struck a different note.  The prompt instructed the setting to be a barn, and the pieces that came from that prompt had an inherently poetic feel.  Everything in the prototypical barn had the potential to become symbolic, from a stack of hay bales to an errant shaft of sunlight through a window.  Thus the description became distilled emotion.

It is so easy to write scenes where the details that fill in a space are generic, or randomly chosen.  Every space your characters walk through belongs to someone, even if it isn’t the protagonist of the story.  What objects might you see in the villain’s lair that could become symbolic or hint at her tortured backstory?  How can you make the local coffee shop your character visits interesting without becoming quirky for the sake of quirky?