How Do You Write – Settings

Apr 27, 2010 | No Comments | @andrewmarcec

Last week we discussed the critical construction of character development.  We saw that there is a lot of work that actually goes into building a believable character, let alone one that can span generations of people and still be admired.  Now that we have our characters, what do we do with them?

Always a great question to follow and keep the mindset and flow going strong.  We know that with our characters we need to have an arc they should follow, called the “hero” arc.  However before we jump into all of that there is one more thing we must really sit down and think about before moving forward.  Where is this going to take place?

Setting seems trivial to most people.  Sci-fi is in space, fantasy in another realm, and everything else is on Earth…somewhere.

Vague settings make for weak stories, just as undeveloped characters are easily forgotten.  So we want to approach them in a similar fashion.

In “Oasis”, my monthly audio series that I’ve been working on for quite a while now, one of the hardest things I had to do was create a believable setting that felt both real, but at the same time fantastic.  I had the basic plot in mind, I now had the characters, so where would this be set?

I constructed my town once I knew that it would be set in the desert.  How do they survive?  Do they have livestock or are they a farming community?  How do they get power?  How do they get water?  All of these things I had to sit down and seriously consider before I dove headfirst into a description.  How would I know what to describe if I didn’t know how these things worked?

So with that let’s walk through just a couple key setting points you should ask yourself when constructing the perfect place for your story.

  • Where is this set?

Is your setting on Earth?  If it is, what part of Earth?  Get really specific with details.  If your story is noir fiction and you are looking to portray the image of steaming sewers and shadowy alleys don’t tell yourself its set in New Jersey.  Dig deeper, where would you be more likely to see that image.  The suburbs?  The city?  The slums?  It’s little details like this that will really help set the mood.

  • If this is not set on Earth, or is an unfamiliar setting, flush it out.

Really get to know the area you will be immersing yourself in.  Revert back to 7th grade social studies when you had to make up a fake political country.  Remember all the work you had to do?  What is the population?  Chief exports?  National flag?  Building that history really helps solidify this is real.

For example let’s look quickly at 2 different incredibly constructed worlds.

Discworld:

The Disc itself is roughly 10,000 miles (16,000 km) wide, giving it a surface area two fifths that of the Earth. Its principal geographic feature, other than its flatness, is the Cori Celesti, a great, 10-mile-high (16 km) spire of rock that lies at its exact centre and is the point of origin for its standing magical field. The Cori Celesti is also the location of Dunmanifestin, the home of the Disc’s many gods, a nod towards Mount Olympus. The area including the Cori Celesti is known as The Hub, a land of high, icebound mountains that serves as an analogue both to the Himalayas and to Earth’s polar regions (since, although the Disc has no poles as such, it is as far as possible from the Disc’s edge and thus the sun). The areas closer to the Rim are warmer and tropical, since the Disc’s sun passes closer to them in its orbit. At the Rim, a great, encircling waterfall (the Rimfall) sends the Disc’s oceans cascading into space.

Cardinal directions within the Discworld are not given as North, South, East and West, but rather as directions relating to the disc itself: Hubward (towards the centre), Rimward (away from the centre) and to a lesser extent, turnwise and widdershins (relation to the direction of the disc’s spin).

This is just a little bit of what the Discworld really is.  Terry Pratchett has created a completely real world, where you can almost believe that there is some giant turtle out in space with elephants on its back supporting a flat disc of a world that looks just like Earth in its surroundings.

Pandora:

When James Cameron set out to create Pandora, he hired linguists to create an entirely new language for the Na’vi to speak.  He also reached out and hired botanists to craft new, lush plant life that had never been seen before.  These plants have full botanical mock ups and have all been detailed in this book.

  • The more details the better

The more descriptive you can be about your setting, the more immersed your readers will become.  Going back to our noir story from earlier, don’t just tell us that steam poured out of the sewer grates that gave our hero hazy protection.  Describe the smells of that fog, describe the sounds.

Remember this is your world we are crafting, and you control everything.  Make it exactly how you want.  If you aren’t sure just how to start to approach your descriptions here is one exercise I like to use.

  • Setting Exercise

Go into an unfamiliar room.  Stand in it for 60 seconds taking in everything you can, imprinting it on your memory.  After the 60 seconds is up leave the room and immediately describe it on paper in as much detail as possible.  Once your description is done, revisit that room with your description and see how close you were.  You’ll be surprised at how much you can forget.

What are some of your favorite story settings?  What exercises do you do that help with your world building?

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