Happy National Novel Writing Month! For those of you who haven’t heard of it, NaNoWriMo is an effort to help writers write 50,000 words for a novel in 30 days. (Why they picked the month with a major holiday in it, I don’t know. I would have preferred March, but I wasn’t consulted.) You can sign up at the official website or create your own goal and keep track of it yourself.
The Monday Sparks this month will be prompts for NaNoWriMo. Today’s prompt is a setting, but it can also inspire characters and plots as well.
Where are these rooms? The beds have been slept in, and one looks like a make-shift bed for a guest. A purse hangs on the couch-bed. Who lives here? Who is the guest? Why did the guest come? Was he expected or unexpected? Welcomed or received reluctantly?
For more prompts, check out all my Monday Sparks.
I’d love to hear your perspective on this scene!
This picture reminds me of The Hired Girl by Schlitz, right before Joan takes her deceased mother’s Catholic cross and flees her abusive father and apathetic brothers.
I’ll brainstorm if I can come up with an original idea for it!
I don’t know this book. Is it historical fiction?
Yes it is – the MC runs away and winds up working for a Jewish family in NYC in the early 1900s (I think). It’s written like a diary, and I couldn’t put it down. Emotional at times, built in comic relief, beautiful throughout 🙂 Let me know if you have a chance to read it!
Right now I can’t come up with a story for it, but the rooms look, at the very least, well-lived in, and have a somewhat mysterious air about them, though they used to be rooms a person would feel welcome in.
Your comment about setting reminds me of the short story “Desirae’s Baby” which I read several years ago for an English class. I believe the writer was Kate Chopin. The setting of the story–a gloomy mansion on a Louisiana plantation–gives you an idea near the beginning that the story isn’t going to end well, which it doesn’t. That shows the power of setting and description!
A movie that made good use of Louisiana as a setting is “Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte”. There’s a scene that was shot at a historic plantation under two rows of huge live oak trees. That scene has always stayed with me. Perfect for a Southern gothic movie.
I never saw the movie, but yes, that would be a perfect scene.
If you’ve never read “Desirae’s Baby”, it’s a good story. Because it concerns race and the way people reacted, it is certainly timely. The ending is also a surprise. It still has the power to affect me.