So, I need to write a Vignette . . .

[Devor]

As part of a project that I'm working on, for reasons that I could explain at length but won't bore you with, I need to write a vignette for a setting.

I need to describe the physical setting in a way that stands alone and stands out, where nothing really happens but it's still got to be as compelling and evocative as I can possibly make it. Think like a panoramic shot of Middle Earth, as told in words. Maybe about 800 or so?

Does anybody know an example of a good, evocative, vignette of a setting?

 

[T.Allen.Smith]

Gormenghast, that is, the main massing of original stone, taken by itself would have displayed a certain ponderous architectural quality were it possible to have ignored the circumfusion of those mean dwellings that swarmed like an epidemic around its outer walls. They sprawled over the sloping earth, each one half way over its neighbor until, held back by the castle ramparts, the innermost of these hovels laid hold on the great walls, clamping themselves thereto like limpets of a rock. These dwellings, by ancient law, were granted the chill intimacy with the stronghold that loomed above them. Over their irregular roofs would fall throughout the
seasons, the shadows of time-eaten buttresses, of broken and lofty turrets, and enormous of all, the shadow of the Tower of Flints. This tower, patched unevenly with black ivy, arose like a mutilated finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven. At night the owls made of it an echoing throat; by day it stood voiceless and cast its long shadow.

Opening to Titus Groan, by Mervyn Peake

 

[Heliotrope]

Oh man, do I bore you guys with Hemmingway too much?

Nick sat against the wall of the church where they had dragged him to be clear of machine-gun fire in the street. Both legs stuck out awkwardly. He had been hit in the spine. His face was sweaty and dirty. The sun shone on his face. The day was very hot. Ronaldo, big backed, his equipment sprawling, lay face downward against the wall. Nick looked straight ahead brilliantly. The pink wall of the house opposite had fallen from the roof, and an iron bedstead hung twisted toward the street. Tho Austrian dead lay in the rubble in the shade of the house. Up the street were other dead. Things were getting forward in the town. It was going well. Stretcher bearers would be along any time now. Nick turned his head carefully and looked at Rinaldi. "Senta Rinaldi. Senta. You and me we've made a separate peace." Rinaldi lay still in the sun breathing with difficulty. Nick turned his head carefully away smiling sweatily. Rinaldi was a disappointing audience.
- In Our Time

For me, I find vignettes most compelling when told through the eyes of an observer. The observer gives judgements and opinions to the scene, which can be helpful.



Good luck!

 

[Heliotrope]

Another interesting one by a Canadian author I love, not so much a setting, but a vignette of an entire generation full of personality:

The sun came out after the war and the world went Technicolor. Everyone had the same idea. Let's get married. Let's have kids. Lets be the ones who do it right.

It is possible, in 1962, for a drive to be the highlight of a family week. King of the road, behind the wheel on four steel-belted tires, the sky's the limit. Let's just drive, we'll find out where we're going when we get there. How many more miles dad?

Roads are endless vistas, city gives way to country barely mediated by suburbs. Suburbs are the best of both worlds, all you need is a car and the world is your oyster, your Edsel, your Chrystler, your Ford. Trust Texaco. Traffic is not what it will be, what's more, it's still pretty neat. There's a '53 Studebaker Coup! - Oh look, there's the new Thunderbird....

"This land is your land, this land is my land...." A moving automobile is second only to the shower when singing, the miles fly by, the landscape changes, they pass campers and trailers - look, another Volkswagon beetle. It is difficult to believe that Hitler was behind something so friendly looking and familiar as a VW bug. Dad reminds the kids that dictators often appreciate good music and are kind to animals. Hitlar was a vegetarian but evil. Churchill was a drunk, but good....

- Anne Marie MacDonald The Way The Crow Flies

 

[Devor]

So, the closest thing I can think of to what I need to do is the opening scene from Beauty and the Beast, where Belle goes through the village and meets just about everybody, and by the end you feel like you know the whole village. I need a narrative that really makes you feel like you understand the setting.

Maybe I should google vignettes of something like "life in New York City."

 

[Heliotrope]

Little town, little quiet village. Every street, like the one before. Little town, full of little people, calling out to say....

Bonjour! Bonjour!

There goes the baker with his tray like always....

* even belle had an opinion on everything....lol

 

[Devor]

* even belle had an opinion on everything....lol

I listened to it before I posted, and I noticed that, too.

The story I'm trying to tell is the one for the Scriptorium. It's told differently - I'm hoping to make it into a website, not a novel - so I'm not following the normal storytelling rules. I want to tell different parts of the story in different formats and really play with the ways you can tell stories.

When it comes time to actually present the setting, I need something that fits into the story in its proper order, but can also stand alone as its own page on the site as a reference or to be shared around. As I understand it, that's pretty much a vignette.

Ideally, there would also be other "guidebook" areas of the site. But I really want something that hits the emotional beats. And I'm not aware of even one good example of what I'm looking for.

 

[ThinkerX]

Fritz Leibers opening for the Fafhrd and Grey Mouser series. Gave an overview of much of the world in just a few hundred words.

 

[Heliotrope]

Hmmmmmm... Vignette poetry is my favourite medium. I tend to write poems about scenes... Here is a favorite of mine from my all time favorite author Margaret Attwood... I wonder if that could work for you? A stand alone peice from the perspective of a character?

Morning in the Burned House | Academy of American Poets

 

[Devor]

Hmmmmmm... Vignette poetry is my favourite medium. I tend to write poems about scenes... Here is a favorite of mine from my all time favorite author Margaret Attwood... I wonder if that could work for you? A stand alone peice from the perspective of a character?

Morning in the Burned House | Academy of American Poets

My poetry abilities aren't worth squat. Also, I'm looking for something more upbeat, busy, kind of wonderful.

 

[Heliotrope]

Lol. Ok. Point taken. I love this kind of thing so I will continue hunting for you. I know quite a few novels that are written totally in vignette, with a different story in each chapter compiling a whole. I'll see what I can find for you....

(Off the nerd with the masters in lit goes to do her favorite thing... Literary research...)

 

[MineOwnKing]

Great laughter rang from all sides. I wondered what the spirit of the Mountain was thinking; and looked up and saw jackpines in the moon, and saw ghosts of old miners, and wondered about it. In the whole eastern dark wall of the Divide this night there was silence and the whisper of the wind, except in the ravine where we roared; and on the other side of the Divide was the great western slope, and the big plateau that went to Steamboat Springs, and dropped, and led you to the eastern Colorado desert and the Utah desert; all in darkness now as we fumed and screamed in our mountain nook, mad drunken Americans in the mighty land. And beyond, beyond, over the Sierras the other side of Carson sink was bejeweled bay-encircled nightlike old Frisco of my dreams.


It seemed like a matter of minutes when we began rolling in the foothills before Oakland and suddenly reached a height and saw stretched out ahead of us the fabulous white city of San Francisco on her eleven mystic hills with the blue Pacific and its advancing wall of potato-patch fog beyond, and smoke and goldenness in the late afternoon of time.”


― Jack Kerouac, On the Road





It was a clear steel-blue day. The firmaments of air and sea were hardly separable in that all-pervading azure; only, the pensive air was transparently pure and soft, with a woman’s look, and the robust and man-like sea heaved with long, strong, lingering swells, as Samson’s chest in his sleep.

Hither, and thither, on high, glided the snow-white wings of small, unspeckled birds; these were the gentle thoughts of the feminine air; but to and fro in the deeps, far down in the bottomless blue, rushed mighty leviathans, sword-fish, and sharks; and these were the strong, troubled, murderous thinkings of the masculine sea.

But though thus contrasting within, the contrast was only in shades and shadows without; those two seemed one; it was only the sex, as it were, that distinguished them.

Aloft, like a royal czar and king, the sun seemed giving this gentle air to this bold and rolling sea; even as bride to groom. And at the girdling line of the horizon, a soft and tremulous motion- most seen here at the Equator- denoted the fond, throbbing trust, the loving alarms, with which the poor bride gave her bosom away.

Tied up and twisted; gnarled and knotted with wrinkles; haggardly firm and unyielding; his eyes glowing like coals, that still glow in the ashes of ruin; untottering Ahab stood forth in the clearness of the morn; lifting his splintered helmet of a brow to the fair girl’s forehead of heaven.

-Melville



The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable waterway. In the offing the sea and the sky were welded together without a joint, and in the luminous space the tanned sails of the barges drifting up with the tide seemed to stand still in red clusters of canvas sharply peaked, with gleams of varnished sprits. A haze rested on the low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness. The air was dark above Gravesend, and farther back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth.

-Conrad

 

[kennyc]

As part of a project that I'm working on, for reasons that I could explain at length but won't bore you with, I need to write a vignette for a setting.

I need to describe the physical setting in a way that stands alone and stands out, where nothing really happens but it's still got to be as compelling and evocative as I can possibly make it. Think like a panoramic shot of Middle Earth, as told in words. Maybe about 800 or so?

Does anybody know an example of a good, evocative, vignette of a setting?

One of the best I've ever seen (though I'm sure others might not think so) is the opening/first chapter of The Grapes of Wrath.