Tag: setting

Book Setting

A primary factor of any story is the setting in which it takes place. The where of your story will be not only a backdrop to the action, but a central cog moving events taking place. The weather, people, environment: all contribute to a good story, meaning an author will devote hours of writing and development time to their setting.

What makes up a setting?

The dictionary definition of setting is the location something is or happens. In a book, there is much more to it, though location is a sizeable part of the equation. It also tends to be the easiest decision to make, at least in the broad sense.

When you have an idea for a story, in most cases you already have a rough idea of where you want it to take place. Are you writing a historical fiction pirate story? Your setting will most likely be the Caribbean ocean. Is your story about the first generation of human enrolling in an intergalactic school after mankind enters into a pact with other races? Your setting will probably be on an alien planet. This part is simple enough, but only the first step of journey.

Once you have the general idea of when and where your story will take place, it’s time to dive into location specifics. This part will absolutely take research, even if you’re writing about the city you grew up in. What plants grow in the region? What are the rivers like? The topography? The last thing you want to do as a writer is add a plot hole by introducing a plant or animal into your story which absolutely could not survive in the environment you have it set in.

It is also important to look into what sort of housing is available in a given region. Indiana won’t have adobe houses, but Texas will. Your icy alien planet will most likely need heavily insulated, practical buildings as opposed to open, glassy show pieces. Environment will also dictate jobs, needs, and behaviors.

Once you have the environment and cities planned, the people who will be part of your world also need to be thought up. Depending on your needs, you will have to decide how each community your characters will interact within is going to function. What diversity is present? If you’re in a pre-Civil War southern town in America the answer will be not much. If you’re in present day New York City, the diversity will be much higher.

Even if you create a planet, if you’re not looking for a homogeneous masked society where any one person can be mistaken for another, looking at real life statistics for the distribution of social groups, morals, customs, and other aspects will make your writing far more believable. Speaking of morals and customs, what are those? People are hard pressed to agree on those even when they try; it is unrealistic for any place to be of one mind. Unless you’re dealing with a hive-mind situation.

Challenges with Setting

As you may have guessed, this is far from an all-inclusive list. Each piece of what makes up a good setting for a story can be given a full-length 1,000-word article. Similarly, an article could be devoted to each different challenge presented during setting construction.

The first coming to mind when going over a list like this is just how much more an author will need to come up with than will ever reach the novel page. You might not spend a long time detailing plants in your book, but you had better know what kinds are local to your organic herbalist. The local customs of your alien race may seem trivial, until you have them all acting in a certain way but can’t pinpoint why. Multiple book and movie franchises will release some of this lore in exploratory compilation works. Other than that, much of it won’t reach the page.

Skipping out on the research stage can create an entirely new laundry list of problems, primarily with consistency. Why did this group act differently than that one? How can your character tell one person or group from the next? How did a parrot get involved in a story set in Michigan? Even if you plan on handwaving the event through science, magic, or irresponsible pet ownership, it helps to know what needs to be handwaved and how soon to avoid alienating your readers with a mix-up.

The Great Awakening Setting

The setting for my current WIP, The Great Awakening, is our present-day earth. I haven’t made any extensive changes to what you might experience on the streets today. What I did include is an alternate, sealed away history (so it won’t be remembered or contribute to how the world runs), plus a process of change taking place throughout the story to relearn lost information and return the world to how it once was.

That, of course, doesn’t eliminate my need for research. Most events take place in Washington state. I’ve never been far west of Indiana, so there were definitely things I’ve had to learn about the weather and where the most desolate locations are; to name a few.

I’m also trying to be slightly nebulous with some facts, not wanting to single out any place too specific to free up the imagination. However, that doesn’t mean I didn’t look up what sorts of trees grow in the national parks in the state, nor does it completely erase some subtle clues to real-life counterparts to some background characters, even if I only give then a title.

There is also time travel involved in my story. Ancient time travel. To make it believable, my main character is going to have an opportunity to learn a dead language from one of the few ancients who still remember it before hand so she will have a reason to understand what is going on once she enters the past.

If you’re a writer, what is your favorite part of world building? What part could you just as soon do without? For readers, what book or movie has your favorite world building? The worst? Thank you so much for reading and commenting! Have a great day!

Starting the Plot

Welcome back! I want to take a minute to thank everyone who has read my last piece. I was not expecting to see so many views in just a few days so early on!

In my last post, I talked about finding the Main Five of a story: the Character, Setting, Objective, Opponent, and Stakes. These are the foundational pieces of a story; you can’t build a novel, movie, game, or anything else without knowing the who, what, when, where, and why. Now that the foundation is set, where to go from here?

The simple answer is plot. The less simple question that follows it, how do you come up with the plot? Personally, I didn’t have a great deal of trouble with this step other than having far too many ideas for any sane person to work into a story. However, I’ve had friends who will know one or two things that they want to transpire in their final masterpiece but don’t know how to string them along and link them together coherently. Between some of my own trial and error and getting a few others involved, I think I have a good two-part suggestion for anyone facing similar struggles.

Premise and Synopsis

So the first step in part one is to create a premise and a synopsis to help guide you and keep you on track. That way, when you are pulling together the main plot points later you have a cut-and-dry guideline to keep you moving in the right direction. This way, unlike me in some early cases, you don’t wind up sobbing at the cutting table when you realize you’ve written three or four books at the same time and none of them are going anywhere near a coherent conclusion.

I found many different websites offering the premise and synopsis advice, which is where I came across the concept to mull over, but none of the ones I found had what I considered to be a satisfactory answer as to what these should encapsule. I knew they were supposed to be short (a sentence for the premise and a paragraph for the synopsis) but that was the primary advice. About your story and short… not so helpful as it would turn out.

Part of the problem may be me and my over-wordiness or my uncanny ability to get sidetracked into a spiraling cyclone of writing whenever I set my hand to the pen or keys. My sister has the opposite problem, as more of an artist than a writer, yet having the need to write the basics of a story so she can craft her comic around it, she doesn’t get nearly as overblown as I do: which is where I finally realized what the answer to the issue was. In trying to get my sister to write more than three words before coming back to ask again how to proceed, I introduced her to the premise and synopsis in the following way.

For your premise, write a sentence containing all five of your main five as they will be presented in your story. If your main character is Joe the paperboy, your setting is New York during the 1920’s, your objective is helping Joe’s mother with her cancer treatment, the opponent is the loan shark who works with one of the local mob bosses, and the stakes is Joe, his mom, and his dog will all die if he fails, your premise might look something like this:

Joe needs to help his mother pay for her cancer treatments but the local mafia’s loan shark wants more than a paperboy in 1920’s New York can afford, putting the lives of him, his mother, and their dog at stake.

Simple, right? “What about the synopsis, then?” you may ask. The best way to think of it is a paragraph detailing the relationship of each of the main five to the other. This will put you a step deeper in explaining your story while still limiting what you can put in it. This was a life saver for helping me to keep on track. Don’t worry about a love interest, don’t worry about the mentor, or anything else. Just stick to those main five in a small paragraph. Here’s another quick example of what I’m talking about.

Joe is a 15-year-old paperboy who lives in New York in the 1920’s. Joe’s mother has cancer and can’t afford her treatments on her small maid salary and Joe’s paperboy money. Against his mother’s warning, Joe goes to the local mafia to get a loan from their loan shark who just so happens to be the 20-year-old bully who has harassed Joe since he was three. The loan shark is a dangerous and evil man who wants to give the loan for 350% interest with only one year to pay it off. There is no way for him to pay it back, but Joe can’t stand the thought of losing his mother so he takes the deal. Now he has to pay off the loan quickly or the shark will kill him, his mother, and their dog for good measure.

That almost sounds like it could be on the back cover of a novel or movie, doesn’t it? And we only know five things with just a bit of added information to flesh out the idea. Now we can look at this for the rest of our drafting process to make sure our story stay’s on track. If we come up with a great idea for Joe to find a wife, but it won’t happen until he’s 18, that’s going in a sequel so put it aside. If you come up with a story about some of the mafia members who don’t really factor into that exact synopsis, their story belongs in a spinoff.

The Flurry

Step one of part one is complete, but I can’t very well leave it alone at that. Don’t worry, this next part is straightforward which is why I didn’t think this needed to be it’s own part or article. I’ve made the mistake of skipping this part, possibly because it’s often forgotten or assigned to a different stage of the process, but this is the best place for it in my personal experience.

After you have your premise and synopsis on paper, you probably have a great number of ideas buzzing around in your head. After all, before the antagonist was just a loan shark and now he’s a loan shark who has made your protagonist’s life miserable for twelve years. For that reason, it’s the best time to put those trains of thought to good use before they careen off the bridge of distraction into forgetfulness cavern or get turned around and wrecked in the tunnels of overthinking plot classifications.

That’s why for the second half of this tip I want you to do the exercise of many names at this point. Some call it brain storming, other info-dumping. I’ve heard it called the morning minutes, word vomit, and a litany of other monikers. It’s like icee-pops: everyone calls them something different. The concept is completely the same in all instances. You set a timer for five, ten, or fifteen minutes (the most you can tolerate in one sitting) and you write.

Take those five foundational stones and the premise and synopsis mortar that bind them together and write about them. Just ideas. Why is the loan shark a bully? How long has mom had cancer? Why does the loan shark hate dogs? Where is dad? Why didn’t Joe find a better solution to his problem? Whatever questions come to mind, answer them. Don’t worry about anything like the hero’s journey, or three act structures, or anything that will come later. Just write like you took fifteen minutes on the first question and have fifteen minutes to answer the last three.

That is part one of the two part plot point outline: premise, synopsis, flurry of writing. The next article on Monday will pull together what to do from that point. Yes, I did say Monday and that is because Fridays are my days for building up my bestiary! I’ve always loved mythical creatures and as a fantasy author my works do and will include so many of them! I want to have a place to display my takes on these myths and legends, and will likely include other fantasy elements later on like my plants, races, languages, worlds, and the like.

Thank you again for reading! I hope to see you around and to pass on more of my writing tips and stories.

The Main Five

            Hello! In an internet full of writers and writing advise, thank you for stopping by my blog. I’m just getting started with blogging and writing so I thought the best way to get the ball rolling was to start by explaining my writing process as I work my way through it. If I’m lucky, I’ll inspire a few others along the way!

            I’ve wanted to be a writer since at least high school, maybe a bit before, but I’ve been writing down ideas and dreams for far longer than that. From writing sequels to movies like Monsters Inc or Treasure Island to trying to create original works inspired by my favorite novels like The Chronicles of Narnia and the Redwall series, I dabbled in many different projects when I first started out. Back then I could just cascade words onto a page without worry, following each new idea as it came to my head, following the story along. Going back and rereading those works, I cringe at all the dropped plot threads and magically appearing plot devices. For this reason, when I sat down to be serious about my writing, I decided that I was going to go against every fiber of my being and write… an outline. *Cue dramatic music*

            Yes, despite my younger self’s insistence that outlines were overly complicated and super boring, I found many different people who encouraged an outline to not only fix my old problem of inconsistency but also my more recent problem of knowing where I am and where I want to be, but having no clue how to get there. This is called sagging middle syndrome and it’s one of the most frustrating walls I’ve come across. To make things even more complicated, I started loathing the plot of the book I had been sitting on for so long that I had to yank out important characters and ideas and start basically from scratch.

            There I was, a huge pile of scrapped notes and a browser full of pages of advice from different bloggers and writers. I wanted to throw up and throw all my dreams of writing away as I struggled to piece together where I should even get started. Taking a step back, I started to think about every book I had read and every movie I had seen and picked up on some major points that needed to show up every time. Clicking through the web pages I had saved, I noticed they were mentioned there as well.

            It dawned on me that part of my problem was that I only had half an idea where my story was going. I was missing key elements that are so vital to a story that it was no wonder I was struggling.

The Main Character

            Who will the story be following mostly? I knew this from the beginning because I had yanked her from the smoldering heap so full of edge and angsty teen regret that I had to scrap it. It’s impossible to have a story without someone to follow, and at least one of those people should stand out above the rest as the reader’s window to the world of your novel. This character, the protagonist, will have the most page time in the book so make sure they aren’t completely unbearable.

            So, who is your protagonist? Are they a hero? A princess? An anti-hero? A villain? Yes, I did just say villain. It is entirely possible to make your protagonist a gnarly villain, bent on destruction and world domination. The preface “pro-” means “for”, not necessarily good. If the story is written for the villain and you follow the villain and their musings more than anyone else, then the chances are that your villain is your main character. That can be pretty cool if done correctly, so good luck.

The Main Setting

            Where will this story be primarily happening? Is it a modern-day high school slice of life? Are you writing a romance in the Victorian Era? Or are you fighting invaders on the moon 500 years from now? For now, you want to decide what planet, where on the planet, what year, and if there is anything unexpected about your setting.

            My WIP is set here on earth during the current time. As I am a fantasy writer, you can be sure there are a few unexpected things in the mix. Most notable for the start of the book is that people are gaining elemental powers. This is very different from my old piece and is being a bit difficult to manage, mostly because when you’re in this setting everything sounds like its political in one way or another no matter how hard you try to avoid it. It’s an interesting challenge though, trying to keep things fun while still acknowledging some of the inescapable parts of our reality.

The Main Objective

            Where will this story be primarily happening? Is it a modern-day high school slice of life? Are you writing a romance in the Victorian Era? Or are you fighting invaders on the moon 500 years from now? For now, you want to decide what planet, where on the planet, what year, and if there is anything unexpected about your setting.

            My WIP is set here on earth during the current time. As I am a fantasy writer, you can be sure there are a few unexpected things in the mix. Most notable for the start of the book is that people are gaining elemental powers. This is very different from my old piece and is being a bit difficult to manage, mostly because when you’re in this setting everything sounds like its political in one way or another no matter how hard you try to avoid it. It’s an interesting challenge though, trying to keep things fun while still acknowledging some of the inescapable parts of our reality.

The Main Opponent

Otherwise know as the antagonist. Who doesn’t want your protagonist to succeed? This is usually a villain of some sort; the big bad, the terrible rival, the deadly warlord. However, if your protagonist is a villain, your antagonist is most likely going to be a hero or king or whoever is trying to stop their plans of villainy. Does the list end there? Not in the slightest!

            There are three main types of conflict that can arise in stories: Man vs Man, Man vs Nature, and Man vs Self. Any would work as the main conflict and, by extension, the source of the main villain. For this I decided to stick with the simplest to write, in my opinion, Man vs Man. My newly created antagonist is a crusty old man who has a goal to wipe out large swaths of the population by leading them astray and playing a good guy.

The Main Stakes

            The last of the main five is the main stakes of the story. In other words, what will happen if the main character doesn’t achieve his or her objective? Will the world end? Will little Suzy get trampled by wildebeests? Will the character lose everything they have to the needle in their arm? Why should the reader care about what happens during this book? What is on the line that the main character is fighting for? In my book it’s global annihilation on an unprecedented scale, of man, beast, and plants alike. No one is safe!

            Once I had all five of these elements laced together, the plot started to unfold itself before me. Next time, we’ll talk about how I managed to find a plot thread from all of these. Thanks for reading!