Zooming In and Out

​In this week’s Story Club, my young writers workshop, we investigated distance from our protagonist. Do we start a scene describing the rooftops of a town, zoom in to a house, and zoom in further to the character and what they are doing? This way of ‘setting the scene’ is often used in films.

I suggested the young writers take a scene, either a wintery one I supplied a picture of, or their own scene. And zoom in, in the way I demonstrated, or play with zoom in and out in their own way. As usual they had their own vivid and excellent ideas in mind.

One young writer wrote two short scenes that happen at the same time. One, from a character at the top of the Eiffel Tower, lit up on a wintery night. The second scene was linked to the same wintery night in Paris, from a young girl inside her house, the lights of the tower winking outside her window. This was an interesting way of showing two characters with literal distance through space.

A second young writer wove a beautiful scene set in Victorian London (starting a chat about the word ‘smog’ and what it means, too). The scene began with a rich house being set up for the morning, and zoomed in to the nearby dockyard where our poorer protagonist was getting ready for her morning fish-related work. I found this an amazing way to empathise with the protagonist and also understand her context of class struggle.

A similar type of empathy was evoked by a description of a cold, remote snowy forest zooming in to a small, pink baby all wrapped up in a bundle. The context of that tiny, vulnerable baby in the vast, freezing forest immediately sparked my concern for the little one.

So many wonderful story ideas came out of this workshop. I felt lucky to witness them! Thanks to the young people who shared their writing.

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