Sample Excerpt from Strategy # 3

Eight Strategies For Innovative Settings

“For some minutes Alice stood without speaking, looking out in all directions over the country – and a most curious country it was… ‘I declare it’s marked out just like a large chessboard!’” Lewis Carroll

Historic Landmarks

Geography alone does not build up atmosphere and emotional connections in our worlds. Instead we also need to understand landmarks as potential maps and mirrors in order to recognize, choose, and transform their unique characteristics to our story. Our landmarks then become a natural part of our world rather than a stage prop of location.

A historic landmark can be public or private, such as a town cemetery or a century-old family plot on an estate. It may be internationally known like the Eiffel Tower or local as a statue in a neighborhood park. It can be natural or manmade.

A commemorative landmark can carry a sense of pride by one faction of a population and a long-held grief of failure for others. A historic landmark may have been created by whimsy such as oddly shaped trees, or odd-shaped dwellings, or a serious preventive measure against loss of life, as so many well-known lighthouses have provided.

A historic landmark can be of value to one individual, or to a nation, or to a continent. The fact that it carries a history makes it personal whether the reaction to it is positive or negative or neutral. Sometimes the landmarks can just be subtle reminders and other times a key influence. They have the ability to influence theme, character, plot threads, and setting.

The key is to make a personal impact that invades, lingers, and reacts.

Build Your Story: As you choose or incorporate specific landmarks (fictional or real) for your novel world, especially those that will remain constant through a series, begin asking these questions of each key spot you choose.

1. Is it natural?

2. Is it manmade?

3. What is the history behind it?

4. How might different characters personally react to it?

5. Is it considered to be holy ground? Why?

6. If so, is it open to everyone to visit or considered forbidden?

7. Which characteristic makes you curious? Why?

Sample Excerpt from Strategy #2

Eight Strategies For Writing Innovative Settings

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 Cristo, Edmund Dantes spends many years in prison. The site of his confinement is the Chateau d’if, a historical fortress built in the 1500’s. This landscape is cold, damp, rocky, and dark—a mirror image to Dante’s 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 and their emotional impact.

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 at once. So we pick out the best parts first, in case we get full. 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.”

Build Your Story: What literal climate, weather, topography, or daylight can become an emotional mirror for your character’s internal struggle?

                                                     Read deep, marcy

Sample Excerpt from Innovative Settings

Eight Strategies For Writing Innovative Settings

“The tourist may look at a place and think ‘What does it do? What is it like? How much does it please me?’ but the fiction writer must look at a place and think ‘What does it suggest? What does it mean to me? What does it mean to my characters?’” Jack Hodgins

Hodgins suggests that in order to achieve this perspective, a writer needs to construct a place—“real or invented”—rather than describe it. By choosing specific details you both impress the landscape on your reader and connect them to the meaning of your world. Think habitat.

“Stare at your world until you discover what it has to offer you,” he says.

There are many ways to develop this focused center in any scene. You can begin from the inside out by imagining the location of your setting visually and finding just the right pieces to fit the emotional core. Or you begin from a natural habitat and focus on the specifics that define your atmosphere and story questions.

For example, a setting on the moors can portray an image of beauty, wildness, danger, freedom, and loneliness. An added element might be the choice of dwelling. Is the habitat an ancient stone castle, weather beaten with crumbling bricks, a wooden hut, or a modern architectural masterpiece? How would each of these possible homes blend, or contrast, with the physical geography?

Deserts, oceans, forests, meadows, streams, canyons, and islands all have distinct characteristics. Even if your character will be interacting with all kinds of terrain there will still be one that is “home.” One that will quietly represent a direct heart highway, either toward security, or away toward uncertainty.

Too early in your story yet to decide which habitat best suits your purpose? Try this brainstorm. If your character were to transform into her emotional habitat, what animal or bird, flower or tree, body of water, type of wind would she become? Where would you most likely find that setting geographically?

Build Your Story: What in your character’s natural habitat could become a danger to him or her?

Read deep, marcy

Eight Strategies for Writing Innovative Settings,

New Workbook series launches NOW

Looking to make your settings memorable?


In Eight Strategies for Writing Innovative Settings, we’ll examine key strategies to create impact for the settings of our novels regardless of genre. Each section focuses on one strategy with three or four applications and creative writing prompts to customize to your work. Whether you are just beginning a project or ready to revise, these suggestions will give you critical perspective.

In addition, we will look at novel excerpts from a variety of genres to see how authors have built unique settings—and how we can apply these techniques to our own work.

Build Your Story: What questions do you want answered for your specific setting?

Write with Impact workshops are a compilation of techniques, exercises, and observations that will give your writing a fresh slant, prompt your creativity, and take your writing to a deeper level.

What exactly does it mean to write with impact? When we go deeper into our stories with heart-to-heart connections and associations, we can write stories that make an impact on our readers.

Read deep, Marcy 

Strategic Settings Launch

New Workbook series launches this week.

Looking to make your settings memorable?

In Eight Strategies for Writing Innovative Settings, we’ll examine key strategies to create impact for the settings of our novels regardless of genre. Each section focuses on one strategy with three or four applications and creative writing prompts to customize to your work. Whether you are just beginning a project or ready to revise, these suggestions will give you critical perspective.

In addition, we will look at novel excerpts from a variety of genres to see how authors have built unique settings—and how we can apply these techniques to our own work.

Build Your Story: What questions do you want answered for your specific setting?

Write with Impact workshops are a compilation of techniques, exercises, and observations that will give your writing a fresh slant, prompt your creativity, and take your writing to a deeper level.

What exactly does it mean to write with impact? When we go deeper into our stories with heart-to-heart connections and associations, we can write stories that make an impact on our readers.

                                  Read deep, Marcy