Setting the scene

I’m writing again on my schedule after a bit of a slip. I started the day with a short fiction-writing exercise, followed by work on articles.

I started an outline about the AEIOU framework. The originator refers to it as a categorization heuristic. I’m using it as a tool to help me prepare to write a scene.

When writing a scene you need to pull semantic and episodic information from long term memory and drop it into working memory. I’m preparing for this by thinking about the setting ahead of time as if I were an ethnographer. I could observe an actual location, or even watch a video, but often it’s enough to brainstorm and dig through my own memories.

The framework breaks observations down into five categories.

• Activities: These are the goal directed activities the users are trying to accomplish in the environment. If someone is riding a bike, that is not an activity. Why are they riding a bike in that space? Are they passing through as they ride from point A to point B? Are they riding in circles for exercise? Are they racing other cyclists? These are very different activities.
• Environment: These are the features of the environment that define the space. A store, for example, has a counter that separates the employee area from the sales floor. It can be difficult at times to distinguish environment from objects, but think of environment as what would be left if someone moved out and wanted their deposit back.
• Interactions: These are the discrete interactions between the users, environment, and objects. Activities are composed of interactions. Let’s say the activity is “purchase a souvenir.” The interactions are “enter and exit store,” “look at items and price tags,” “pick up items and carry them,” “set items onto counter,” “give money to cashier,” and “accept bag from cashier.” For this reason, interactions are a much longer list than the Activities list.
• Objects: These are the objects in the environment which may include aspects of scenery such as signage or shelves. These should be referred to as generically as possible. Write down “snack items” without going into too much detail unless there’s a good reason to distinguish between different kinds of snacks. For example, maybe the healthy snacks are kept closer to the front of the line in a school cafeteria. You may also want to note locations for those objects.
• Users: Who are the people that come to the setting? For example, types of employees and customers. Keep these users as generic as possible. Even if you are working on a setting where only specific characters are seen, you should refer to them in generic terms at this point. You’re not creating your story, you are making a resource to help you prime semantic memory and you don’t want to hem yourself in with specific details. Even a detail that doesn’t apply to your character might trigger some other thought in your mind as you write the scene.