Book Review: Finding Your Sense of Place by Janni Simner

Learning how to write emotions was one of the hardest skills I had to learn as a writer, and something I’m still trying to improve on. (Sadly, statements like “Mary felt afraid” are actually terrible at showing Mary’s fear.)

Finding Your Sense of Place by Janni Simner focuses specifically on how to use setting and description to create emotion. For Simner, setting should never be in a story simply to establish place. The details chosen for a setting and how they are used in connection with the characters are her favorite way to give a sense of the characters’ emotions.

Simner also dives into how to research the authentic setting details you will need. Ideally you get to visit a place, as she did when writing a book set in Iceland, but if that is impossible she has other techniques.

At the end there is a bonus essay, “Into the Fog: Icelandic Land and Lore,” which is beautiful to read, and makes me want to visit cool places for my stories.

Quick read–about 40 pages, and I highly recommend it for an exploration of setting and emotion. It’s available for $3 for Amazon Kindle; the author has links to other vendors selling the ebook on her website.

Related:

In my blog post Writing Powerful Emotion Beats in Fiction I discuss 10 ways to show character emotion. Setting is one of them, but there are 9 others.