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

Overview Setting: Landscape

Workshop: An Introduction to Writing for Children and Young Adults

Setting is either used as a backdrop and almost invisible, or as a character itself. For example, the Hobbit’s landscape includes a man versus nature conflict. Then as we discussed in Moon Over Tennessee, setting can confirm a genre such as an Historical: establishes place, historical framework, season, time of day, moods, atmosphere.

Again, when the reader is able to visualize it that makes it authentic. The common place becomes memorable as in the Borrowers. The setting needs to be authentic whether real or imaginary.

Three main categories help to establish authenticity. First is Landscape: which includes climate, weather, topography, land-marks, amount of daylight.

Once you’ve set the setting you don’t need to repeat every time. You add touches throughout to keep the focus or can repeat an important part often if it’s going to matter. For example if a tapestry on wall hides the clues to a mystery, then it should be seen often.

To brainstorm some ways to choose your basic setting here’s part one of an exercise I sometimes give my workshop students. Write a brief few sentences about a character hanging laundry on an outside line.

Seems pretty ordinary—perhaps even dull. At the moment it is only a beginning point of a possible reality, giving perhaps character and place, but not yet a voice; and perhaps curiosity, but not yet an authentic emotional connection.

However, I have yet to have any sentence even come close to matching another as each writer chooses the unique aspects that interest them and apply to their story world.

The character: boy, girl, man, woman, human or alien—what kind? Are they bored or anxious? Normal chore or forced labor?

Hangs laundry: how?—By old-fashioned string and clothes pegs, or by magic, or electronically? Is it a difficult chore or easy?

Outside line: where?—Isolated mountaintop, crowded slum, spaceship balcony, or cookie-cutter suburb? Is it dark outside or light? Windy or not?

The chosen detail for each key focus brings up several shapes to a simple sentence. By knowing a geographic habitat and adjusting it to reflect our character’s story, we can take common territory and transform it into new ground—even if it’s the familiar chain store on the corner.

Action Steps:

1.     Do a sentence for each of the characters listed.

2.     Which details for each did you like best.

3.     Combine all your favorite choices into one sentence structure.

Share: What is your sentence?

Read deep, marcy