Build Your Story: 8 Strategies for Writing Innovative Setting with Impact
Landscape
Landscape includes interior and
external sites, emotional connections, literal space, and geographic
background. It includes the climate, weather, topography, and amount of
daylight. Each of these areas has the capacity to silently boost the sacred
connection between reader and character by allowing the reader to identify with
the literally tangible, yet subtle details.
For example, in the movie The Count of Monte Christo, Edmund
Dantes spends many years in prison. According to the above list, his landscape
is cold, damp, rocky and dark. His literal landscape also becomes a mirror
image to his emotional life. Even when a landscape is confined to one room or
is a silent backdrop, we can use its natural attributes to influence our
scenes.
So how does this translate to
practical application? We begin a piece at a time and build the world from
emotional resonance. We not only draw out our physical locations, but doodle
out the emotional impact they have on our characters. We brainstorm each setting’s
location, even if only as a brief two-minute list. If you see something that
triggers an emotional reaction, but you’re not sure how to use it, then put it
in the resource pile for later.
When you read for research, pick
out the parts that intrigue, comfort, challenge, or frighten you. And
temporarily leave the rest behind. Keep a list going as to where you found that
information, so if you need to return for more details, you’ll find it easily.
It’s a banquet laid out before us and we can’t possibly eat it all. So we pick
out the best parts first, in case we get full. Or try to cram more information
into the story than it needs. The parts that stir our hearts, the parts that we
react to emotionally, become our map routes, our mirror reflections, and our
atmosphere internally.
Externally we discover our
connections through landscape, as Elizabeth George explains it. To her
landscape is “the broad vista into which
the writer actually places the individual settings of the novel, sort of like
the canvas or other medium onto which a painter has decided to daub color……when
we discuss landscape we’re also talking about….the emotions that are evoked by
the setting.”
She
continues, “…landscape is the total place experience in a novel.”
The Chateau d’lf used in The Count of Monte Christo movie is a
real place, built in the early 1500s as a military fortress and later turned
into a prison.
Share: What literal climate, weather,
topography or daylight can become an emotional mirror for your character’s
internal struggle?
Read deep, marcy
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