When Place Has Agency: Setting & Space in Fiction

When Place Has Agency: Setting & Space in Fiction is a four week craft class for writers who want their settings to do more than hold their stories. In this course, we explore how place can guide emotion, shift power, complicate relationships, and push a scene forward.

Instead of treating setting as a static backdrop, we’ll approach it as an active force with its own presence, mood, and intention. Through weekly mini lectures, generative prompts, mentor text close readings, and guided revision, you’ll learn how to build scenes where the world interacts with your characters, shapes how they feel, and influences what they choose.

Across the four weeks, we’ll explore atmosphere, spatial tension, movement, blocking, sensory detail, and how characters physically relate to the spaces they inhabit. By the end, you’ll have new work, strengthened scenes from works in progress, and a clearer sense of how to make environment work harder…