Settings TAKE YOU PLACES - Holes, by Louis Sachar - Brief Article

Tips and techniques to help young authors render time and place vividly

Read a few more lines of the Newbery Award-winning Holes by Louis Sachar and you learn that while there is no lake at Camp Green Lake, there are campers--and rattlesnakes and scorpions and a Warden (with a capital W). It's a vividly detailed environment that can't help but shape the lives of the characters inhabiting it. Share Sachar's thoughts on setting, below, with your students. Then use the activities and tips in the pages that follow to help them create settings in their own writing that give characters and plots a place to come to life.

Meet the Author: Louis Sachar

Stanley Yelnats is overweight. He gets teased in school, has no friends, and lives in an apartment that smells like dirty feet. Stanley also suffers from a family curse that involves his "no--good--dirty--rotten--pig--stealing-great--great--grandfather." As if that were not enough, a pair of dirty sneakers (that happens to be worth thousands) falls from the sky (actually an overpass) and knocks Stanley on the head, landing him at Camp Green Lake, "a camp for had boys." And that's where the page-turning plot begins to unfold. Here, Louis Sachar shares the importance of starting with a strong setting.

Ten years ago I heard Patricia MacLachlan, the author of Sarah, Plain and Tall, speak at a writer's conference. She said the most important aspect of a novel was the setting. At the time, it didn't ring true. Sure, setting was important, but it seemed far less so to me than character or plot.

Several years after that, I was ready to begin a new book. I had already written lots of books about kids in school. I wanted to do something completely different. I was sick of school. It was August, and the weather was hot, and I got the idea to write about a juvenile correctional facility, a boot camp for "bad boys," where the boys were required to dig holes, every day, under the brutal Texas sun. Thus, I created Camp Green Lake, where there was no lake, and hardly anything was green.

I didn't know what was going to happen there, or even who the main character would be. But I threw in some buried treasure, and deadly yellow spotted lizards, and the place seemed ripe for a story. Lots of different stories could have grown out of that place.

I never plan a story in advance, or make an outline. Holes could have evolved very differently. The characters could have been completely different. But I think that by starting with such a strong setting, whatever story grew from it would have been compelling.

Louis Sachar

Mini-Lesson #1: Make a Map

Read the excerpt from Miss Rumphius, below, aloud several times, and invite students to draw a map of the place they picture in their minds. If necessary, offer definitions of words such as headlands (a point of land, usually high up, that reaches out into a body of water) and hollows (sunken areas, or valleys, between hills). Let students share their maps, telling which words from the passage helped shape their images of the setting. If possible, share the picture book. Stop at the page on which the above passage appears. Let students compare their interpretation of the setting with the illustration in the book. Follow up by asking: What do you think your maps would look like if the author had simply said, "She went outside and planted some seeds"?

Skills: As students notice the details of a setting, they will begin to recognize how setting helps determine the mood of a piece.

Sample: All that summer Miss Rumphius, her pockets full of seeds, wandered over fields and headlands, sowing lupines. She scattered seeds along the highways and down the country lanes, She flung handfuls of them around the schoolhouse and hack of the church. She tossed them into hollows and along stone walls.

Miss Rumphius, by Barbara Cooney (Viking Penguin, 1982)

One Sense Leads to Another

While it's good to encourage abundant imagery in student writing, it can easily become scattershot. Remind children that in most situations, one sense naturally leads. Jumping into a cold pool, for example, we'll be more aware of temperature than of sound or sight. These exercises will help focus images:

* Sit or stand quietly in a favorite place and make a mental list of all the things you see. Write them down. Now do the same for the other senses. What do you hear? Touch? Smell?

* Pick a simple object that's part of your everyday life, like an alarm clock or a favorite sweatshirt. Describe it in terms of the senses it evokes. Does it make a sound? Have a smell? A special feel?

* Tell about an experience using just one sense. ("I heard the door slam, then I heard ..." Now tell about the same experience focusing on other senses ("I saw ..."; "I heard ..."). Which sense makes this experience most interesting? Which is naturally the "leading" sense?

Mini-Lesson #2: What Time Is It?

Children often think setting refers only to the place where the story happens--the playground, a baseball field, a friend's house, and so on. Use this activity to explore the way time may contribute to a story's setting. A story may take place in the past, present, or future. It may take place over a lifetime or in a moment. Read aloud the following excerpt and ask students to discuss how the author uses time to help create the setting. (The story takes readers on a journey into the past as a mother tells her child the story of all who have traveled the same "old, old road"--from her great-grandparents to mastodons and woolly mammoths.)

Skills: Students will see how time helps the parts of a story fit together.

Sample: My great-grandma and great-grandpa, just married and looking to farm, they came down that road.

Who came down that road, Mama? Who came down that road? Soldiers in blue coats, saddle high or marching, they came down that road.

Who came before the soldiers, Mama?

Pioneers and settlers, honey, floating the Ohio and clearing the wild-wood, they came down that road...

--Who Came Down That Road? by George Ella Lyon (Orchard, 1992)

Teaching With the Reproducible: Senses and Settings (page 56)

When we read, imagery stirs our sense memories to recreate the vitality of real life. Writers sometimes get lazy and want to put things in general terms. But we depend on our senses to clue us in to most situations, and good writers know how to appeal to our senses. Use the reproducible, page 56, to explore ways authors use sensory images to create settings. Encourage students to think carefully about how the words in each picture-book excerpt relate to different senses. For example, in a passage from A Chair for My Mother, by Vera B. Williams (Greenwillow, 1932), readers can see the blue tile of the diner where the narrator's mother works. They can feel the wet cloth washing the salt and pepper shakers. They can smell the onions she cuts up for soup (and maybe even taste that soup), and hear the jingle of coins as she puts them in the jar.

TEACHING TIP

When your students think about the places where their stories unfold, encourage them to close their eyes and imagine they are in that place. Then have them open their eyes and make a list of all the things they saw.

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COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group