Description & Setting

I liked the way the author gave advice. It wasn't packed with prose and it went straight to the point of many questions.

Decription & Setting teaches you to take two dimensional words on paper and turn them into a three dimensional world for your readers to explore. All the great dialogue, plot twists, and character development in the world can't save a character standing in front of a white backdrop. The book encourages writers to become masters at setting the stage. Description & Setting prods writers to keep their work as vivid as possible and offers helpful hints on how to incorporate sensory information into text. A great read and an ever better resource, this book and the Write Great Fiction series are a great tool for any writer.

After starting the journey of becoming a published author years ago, I've come across many "self-help" books on how to write a novel, and my experience is that 90% of them are a load of rubbish. This one fortunately for you and me, is not. If you're serious about becoming a writer and you've already begun the journey, then this is one for the collection. I'm not positive that you will come back to it afterwards like Solutions for Writers by Sol Stein or your English Grammar reference book, but it will help you write/tell your story better. Specifically it gives you examples of how to: 1. Show vs Tell (a common problem with most new authors) 2. Description (description for literature vs description for popular fiction) 3. Characters 4. Timing 5. Grammar (a very brief section that you'll probably already know if you've been writing for some time now) There is other useful info as well, but these are just a few. Lastly, unlike most authors in this genre, he does not solely reference his own books. He uses a wide range of writers encompassing literature as well as popular modern fiction.

Chock full of massive amounts of advice. A nice feature is an appendix with a listing of each chapter and all the points from it. So you can skim this appendix and see the entire book in about a dozen pages, there is about one page per chapter. I have been reading through many, many books in preparation for writing my own. This one is well worth the trouble of purchasing and reading. I keep it handy as I write.

As a high school teacher of advanced English classes, I found Rozelle's book helpful as well as interesting. His advice about using adverbs to strengthen the action allows the writer to fine tune it by showing, not just telling. His use of a combination of classic and modern literature as examples gives a complete spectrum. One of the most important aspects of the book is Rozelle's instruction of character description and how the setting helps to form the character. I plan to use the book in my classes next year.

As a creative writing teacher of an elementary gifted education class, I am always searching for ideas and suggestions that will prove helpful in assisting my students to become good writers. I'm so delighted to have found a book that actually offers clear techniques and specific exercises for my students. The exercises at the end of each chapter have proven to be helpful. Reading is one of my greatest pleasures and it is truly the rich and colorful description of the setting that invites me into and to become a part of the book. Thank you, Ron, for such an informative resource and a clearer understanding of how to create what I consider to be one of the most important areas of the book, if not the most important. For me, the setting is definitely a "read or not to read decision."