Story Haunts

Someday I'm going to write a story with this house as the setting. I've visited it about a hundred times and walked through nearly all of its rooms more than once. I've stood inside and sketched some of the remarkable features, and photographed every inch I was allowed to (the tour people frown on interior pics.) I once sat in the back garden and wrote a poem. Every time I visit Savannah I have to go see it, even if we just drive past the place.

The Owens-Thomas House may not be as pretty or popular as some of the other fabulous homes in the city, but it's haunted me since the first time I saw it. Why? I don't know. It's just one of those places where place + person = mystery connection.

While settings aren't my favorite story element, I always try to make mine interesting, and often invest them with some sort of personal connection. The twin staircases in the front of the Owens-Thomas House also lead up to the front entry of Walsh's Folly in Disenchanted & Company. Julian's house in Ghost Writer is based on one we rented some years back while looking for a home of our own. Even Lucan's nightclub in Dark Need from the Darkyn series once existed in real life; in my twenties I worked as a bartender in a place exactly like it.

Naturally your story settings don't have to be based on actual locations (would have been tough for me to do that with StarDoc), but it helps to have some knowledge of a real-world counterpart when you're working in a fictional location. This map I drew of the warehouse I used for a few scenes in Nightborn was not entirely invented; many of the interior features came from my memories of a warehouse belonging to a paper distributor that I once worked for about twenty years ago. That knowledge of the physical features helped me better choreograph the scene because I remembered what was inside, how the shelving and equipment looked, the sort of obstacles they'd create, etc.

As for the story I'm going to someday write about the Owens-Thomas House, I'm waiting for the right inspiration -- and in that setting can help, too. Since the house haunts me for reasons I don't know, it would work great as the setting for a paranormal story.

NaNoWriMo Prep III: Food and Fire

Home for Setting Starters

Benjamin Franklin once said that a house is not a home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as the body. I've always liked that quotation, and not just because I agree with it. Ben throws down a challenge for us to define exactly what is food and fire for the mind.

My guy and I are semi-minimalist homebodies, and over the years we've refined what I think of as the 3-C home: casual, comfortable and calm. We don't care about impressing people or following rules, which is probably why we have a country kitchen, a Mission bedroom and a beach cottage master bath. The high school kid has a red/black/white quasi-Asian/Anime cave going in her room. The guest room is serenely sea-nautical themed. My office is all about books and the job. Our living room has no particular theme other than a general air of "sit down and relax"; our dining room with its wall-size Victorian crazy quilt is half mini folk-art museum, half tea room.

The walls in almost every room are hung with quilts and art and family photos. I try to keep things tidy, but most days you'll see something one of us left out: a chunk of my latest manuscript, my daughter's sheet music, my guy's computer printouts. There isn't a harsh color or highbrow stick of furniture in the place. You will find dog toys in unexpected places because we're always playing with the dogs.

Whenever I come back here after being on the road, the minute I walk through the door I feel like I shed a thousand pounds. I know my guy feels the same, I can see it on his face when he gets in from work. Home is our favorite place to be, because home is all about us and what we love and the people we love to be with.

Back to the Mountain

While climbing to the top of your book mountain, you will be making stops in different places. Part of your job is to describe these places to your reader so that they can see them, too. While locations are not as active as characters or plot, they do provide the setting (and often the time period) of the story, so they're necessary.

I used to really dread writing setting, and most of the time I still have some bad moments. It's not as fun as writing characters, and it's very hard to find the right balance of showing the reader an interesting place without boring them to tears with endless or over-the-top description. I think the root of my problem is related to the way I've always researched setting: by using real-life models and locations. I'm always so engrossed in presenting the right/actual details that I forget to consider the characters who have to live or work or travel through there and/or what they'd want. This is why if a character of mine lives in Paris, they usually get a house very similar to one I've seen or visited in Paris.

What I've been trying to do lately is to temper the obsessing over details by making my settings more about the character than me. I came to this conclusion because I finally realized why writing settings for my StarDoc books was never a problem; I invented them from scratch based on my world-building and my characters.

At the moment I'm putting together an apartment for one of my female protagonists. She's nothing like me, so to create the right home for her I have to see it through her eyes and put it together using her heart. Although my girl is an edgy, ultra-modern young female, she has very feminine, secret longings for all things Victorian. Because she's lived alone for a significant number of years, she will have had the time and means to collect and arrange her living space with exactly what she likes.

Personally I couldn't deal with all this fussy stuff (I'd be dusting it for the rest of my life), but I know my character loves it. She adores rose-colored velvet and tatted ecru lace and milk glass and beaded lampshades and ruched satin. Her bathroom looks like a time tunnel to the thirties. She has little rose-shaped soaps in a porcelain bowl by the sink, a vanity table with a crackled mirror, crystal perfume atomizers and a bud vase with peacock feathers.

Finding the Food and the Fire

What makes this space a home for my character isn't about the stuff inside it, it's that it creates a space in which she can relax and feel happy and be herself. This safe-haven feel to her home is very important to her for reasons that relate to self-esteem, backstory and personality. Thus her home is about the person she is on the inside, this very old-fashioned girl who is romantic and loving and genuinely sweet. What's so cool about bringing this side of her out in her home is that it's the only place you would see it. The minute she leaves she puts on the edgy, ultra-modern persona, wearing it almost like armor, and to most of the outside world she is a completely different person (and her office is nothing like her home, because that's where she's on display.)

When you think about the settings you create in your stories, consider not just what suits your character's situation, but reflects on their personality as well. Think about what they do when they come home; what is their favorite room in the house, and why do they spend so much time there? (My girl doesn't cook so her kitchen is a bit like Mother's Hubbard's, but she loves spending hours soaking in her big bathtub, so the bathroom has everything she could possibly need or want in it, including a shelf of books, a mini-stereo and a cordless telephone.)

What are some of your concerns with writing setting? Do you have any tips on how to make it more effective or easier to put together? Let us know in comments.

Setting Building Tools: Nicholas Morine's Ideas in Creative Writing: Setting ~ Keith Gray's Creative Writing Masterclass 4: Setting (video) ~ F. Locke's Writing Creative Fiction: Setting

Also, PBW's Fun with Setting ~ Props ~ Virtual Design Ten

Image credit: © Virgil Graham | Dreamstime.com

Virtual Design Ten

Ten Things to Help Design Settings

3Dream is a room-space design generator that allows you to custom design and arrange a given space. Requires download of plug-in.

Although I was a big fan of Degraeve's Color Palette Generator, it doesn't seem to be functional anymore (at least for my browser/computer.) Hunting around for an alternative, I found another generator here at CSS Drive that offers light, medium and dark as well as full palettes for URL images or those you upload.

The Color Scheme Designer helps you figure out a variety of color schemes, from monochromatic to analogic and more.

Design-a-Room.net is very basic, but of all the generators I found it was the easiest to use and didn't require me to jump through any hoops at all. Good for laying out a rough floor plan.

Armstrong.com has an impressive online design-a-room generator that shows you how different types of floors look like in a variety of room styles and colors.

FloorPlanner.com (registration for free account required to use) gives you the ability to draw up your own floor plans online.

Mydeco's design generators give you a lot of predesigned options to create rooms and mood boards (idea collages.)

Sherwin Williams has a pretty amazing online color visualizer that allows you to upload your photo of a room and virtually repaint it with their products.

Small Blue Printer allows you to build your own floor plans online, view them in 3D, walk through the structure and print out the plans. To help give you ideas, there are four pre-loaded sample plans you can work with, too.

Totally Custom Wallpaper has an online wall covering generator that allows you to create your own wallpaper, mural or canvas using templates, stock images or your own photos.

Props

In Naming the World, a how-to with a collection of essays and exercises from writers/editors/teachers, author Nick Arvin wrote a piece about revision, specifically about how to revise physical objects in the story -- what he refers to as props -- to make them more effective as a story element. He mentions Chekhov's Gun, one of those literary theories they beat into our heads in high school.

According to Chekhov, no object in the story should be there without a reason:

"If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there." —Anton Chekhov (From S. Shchukin, Memoirs. 1911.)

I agree with Chekhov, sort of. I think of props as active and benign; the active ones are there for a reason, the benign there for the setting. Active props are probably the least-used story element in genre writing, and it's a shame, too, because when employed with some imagination they can be pretty effective. Not only as elements to provide some foreshadowing for the reader, but as inspiration for dialogue, focal points in an otherwise ho-hum scene, etc.

My new Darkyn trilogy is unusually object-driven. When plotting I always like to use unusual active props, so it's probably no surprise that I employed Mickey Mouse ears to inspire and put a fresh spin on what would have otherwise been a pretty standard confrontation scene (and if you want to see how I did it, head over to the stories blog and read the partial scene here.)

Most of the time I see great stuff in other writers' stories that is only described, and this kills me, because when I come across that mysterious urn of ashes or portrait of a one-legged man I start telling myself stories about them while I'm reading. Then I get to the end of the story and those great props are still sitting there, unused and covered with dust, like story clutter.

That said, not every prop in a story has to have a reason for being there. Some props are active and others aren't. Not all rifles go off; sometimes they really do just hang on the wall as part of the setting description. If we didn't have at least some benign props, every story would be written in a series of empty rooms, vacant lots and flowerless meadows.

What's your favorite type of active prop in a story? Do you think the rifle hanging on the wall always has to go off? Let us know in comments.

Googling the Street View

Google may make armchair tourists out of all of us now that they are offering their Maps with Street View. This search engine allows you to enter an address, move a little figure onto the map and (if available) see a street-level view of that location.

Here's what a street in Paris looks like (click any image to see larger version):



You can also move around your location, street by street, block by block, and zoom in and around in all sorts of interesting ways. If you've never had the chance to explore a particular city or other location and/or can't travel there, this allows you to take a virtual walking tour of most places (there were a few places I tried to pull up that only offered a still shot, so it seems Google hasn't mapped every square inch of the Earth (yet).

I can't tell exactly how old these street views are, but I'd say probably at least six months but no more than two years old (if there is a note of exactly when the images were taken I didn't bother to look for it.) While faces and license plates are mainly blurred out, businesses, signs and other details are not. Here's a street where I used to go shopping in San Francisco's Chinatown:



I think this service is especially helpful for writers if you want to include a setting in your story that is a real place you've actually visited but haven't been back to visit in a long time. There was this spot out on the west coast where I used to sit and watch the sunset that I wanted to use in a story. Unfortunately I lived there many years ago, and as much as I'd love to go back there, I don't have the time or justification for the expense.

Relying on my memory, I wrote the location into the story with a lone bench, some rocks and the water. When I pulled up that spot on the street view, however, I saw that someone had put up a big ugly fence near my bench:



It takes some practice to learn how to use the different symbols and zooms to move around your street view, but I think it's worth taking the time to play with and learn. Plus if you can't afford to take a research trip, it may be the next best thing to being there.

118 Years in 20 Seconds

I came across this while doing some online research on how buildings collapse, and thought it was very creepy and quite cool. It's like watching a haunted house in reverse:



Architect Albert Kahn designed and built this home in 1893 for William Livingstone, who contributed a great deal to the city and commercial shipping in the region.

The house was moved from its original location, and renovations to preserve it were made; unhappily none were ever carried out. In 2007 the house was finally demolished, but not before it became a familiar symbol of urban decay. Another video here shows it in worse shape, and documents a partial collapse.

Like I said, creepy. But cool.

Setting Porn

I have been diligently working on my intense dislike of writing setting by purposely studying how other genre writers do it, trying writing exercises to develop my focus on it, and otherwise forcing myself to deal with it like an adult instead of a whiny toddler. So far I've done okay. I'll probably always think characters are way more interesting to write, but I'm slowly getting away from wishing every novel took place in a featureless void.

During this process I've noticed a couple of things about how a lot of genre novelists deal with setting:

1. Most of it is largely glorious. Largely. Nine out of ten setting-intensive novels I read have drop-dead gorgeous settings in them that sound like the deserted island you should be living on, preferably half-naked, along with a nubile young sex-crazed adoring partner who wanders around after you all day asking in a sexy European accent if it's time to make love yet.

2. No unsightly neighborhoods. Trailer parks, slums, crack houses and other undesirable properties evidently do not exist in these worlds. In fact, you'd be hard pressed to find a little crab grass in these parts.

3. Everyone can comfortably afford to live in these settings. I don't know what these writers have done with the poor, the unemployed and the homeless, but they're not in these settings. I'm kind of wondering if they've been secretly rounded up and auctioned off to the literary writers.

4. Nothing ever goes wrong in these places. The weather is beautiful, the neighbors are nice, non-gun-toting folks and there aren't any bugs, snakes, wasps, rats, mold, mildew, dust motes, etc. No one has a water pipe burst or a stove blow up, no drug dealers hang sneakers from the telephone wires, and Wal-Mart never builds a superstore directly across the street.

5. Invisible cleaners secretly arrive to tidy up while everyone is sleeping or making love. Go ahead, laugh, then you give me a reasonable explanation as to why no one in the story ever does any housework and still the places remain 100% immaculate. I'm still waiting to see just one time someone produce a Swiffer or a vacuum or even a Handy-Wipe. No, it seems in these settings dirty dishes and laundry do themselves. Garbage spontaneously disintegrates before it can be identified as garbage. Toilets are never scrubbed, disinfected or even flushed.

I know the fiction world is supposed to be a big fantasy place where we can escape, but any setting that is too perfect just doesn't ring true to me. Maybe it's all technicolor adjectives and superb nouns affecting my vision, but sometimes it reads so fake I feel like I'm watching porn. So how do we keep our settings escape-worthy without turning them into over-idealized, utterly unbelievable porn sets?

I think part of it is in the small details. When I go on a research trip, I try to see as much of a location as I can -- but I don't just focus on the pretty parts; I try to see all of it. Visiting pre-Katrina New Orleans, I went to meet my editor at a fancy French Quarter restaurant, dodging empty go-cups that had been dropped on the sidewalks (which explained why the air smelled like a bar on ladies night) and spotting broken strands of sun-faded Mardi-Gras beads still hanging from some railings and tree branches. I spied hundred-year-old rotting wood door frames squeezed between glittery new gift shops and tired-looking cafes; I noticed some used heroin syringes in the gutter not two feet away from the entrance of that fancy restaurant.

Using senses other than vision can also bring out more realism in setting. The air in downtown Pittsburgh during a hot summer day has an acid tinge to its usual dank industrial waste stench. The old historic buildings in Philadelphia have some wood in them that has been touched so many times over the centuries it feels like glass. People passing you on the street in Miami smell of sweat, suntan oil, or too much perfume. I've heard more car horns blare simultaneously and smelled more urine in New York City than in any other spot on the planet. Every outdoor surface that had not been regularly swept or cleaned in Chicago has this dark grit on it, like finely-ground gun powder. Visit any small town in Central Florida in early spring and you'll almost get drunk on the heavy scent of orange blossoms. Sometimes in the heart of downtown Fort Lauderdale (around three a.m.) if you listen closely you can hear the waves hitting the beach.

Every location has its own feel to it. I used to compare one spot in Colorado to Disney World; incredibly clean, filled with colorful characters, but at the end of the day, all facade and way too expensive. In another town I lived everyone was so nice and polite I wondered if they were dumping Prozac in the water supply (the happiness in that place was so relentless it was creepy.)

I'm still figuring it out. In the meantime, I will keep working on not only how I write setting, but also what I think should go into setting to keep it realistic without dispelling all the fantasy/escapism for the reader.

Now it's your turn: what do you think needs to go into setting to prevent it from morphing into porn? Or would you rather have the porn? Let us know in comments.

Strange Houses

My guy and I love to drive around different towns and look at houses. I'm always checking out the architecture, while he evaluates the property and the landscaping. Since both of us have worked in the past as house painters (there, another bit of professional trivia you didn't know about me) we always talk about the color choices and condition of the exterior paint. This is yet another way in which we're totally boring, but it's one of the few hobbies we share and we think it's fun, which is all that matters.

Since getting more into photography, I've been taking the camera along with me on these drives to snap shots of unusual houses. I especially like small houses versus the big ostentacious McMansions; people who live in little places tend to be less uptight and more creative in their choices. For example, I was fascinated by the long, narrow windows and green roof tiles on this little house (click on any image to see a larger version):



I have to do a little research and find out why those windows are so narrow (probably antiques, and had something to do with weather conditions and/or cost.) I liked seeing the two chairs set out by the flowering shrub, too -- they're facing west, so I'll guess whoever lives in this small charmer likes to come out and watch the sunset.

Here's another home in the same neighborhood:



I can't say the pea-green exterior color, blue roof tiles and the red brick chimney do anything for me, but there was a definitely a castle-type feel to this one. Very stately for a single-family home. I wonder if the owner feels a bit like the ruler of a small kingdom.

Occasionally we'll spot odd things people have on their doors, in their yards or do to things around their home that I also photograph. One of the weirdest I've seen was the very strange fruit of this front-yard tree:



I know in Alsace the makers of brandy put empty bottles on the buds of pear trees so the fruit grows into the bottle (then they pick the bottle and fill it with brandy, and the effect of seeing a whole pear in the bottle is pretty neat) but I'm mystified as to why you would stick wine bottles into the trunk of tree.

When you're creating living spaces for your characters, you're generally concerned about the interior, where most of the action probably happens. But don't forget about the outside of the home -- if someone were to drive by your protagonist's house, what would they see? Adding some personal details and quirks like color choices, architectural features and even something as strange as wine bottles stuck in a tree can give the reader another glimpse into the personality of your character.

Small details can be just as fun to play with as the larger features, too. I thought one of the creepier house shots I took for the photoblog last year had excellent story potential. While standing outside a tea room to read the posted menu, I noticed a trio of suspicious-looking characters hanging out in the corner of one front window:



These cheesy vandals have since relocated from the tea room into one of my novels, because the moment I saw them I knew they were something that my protagonist would paint on one of her window frames. I just didn't know until I saw the real thing.

Snow and Trees

In addition to my NaNoNovel, I'm working on the third Kyndred book, and one major obstacle I have with this one is the setting for one of the early chapters of the novel: snow and trees, trees and snow. There are mountains (background) a road (lost early on) and one cargo truck (ditto) but that's about it. During the length of one chapter I have to move my characters through a setting in which there are no other people, vehicles, houses, towns or any sign of civilization.

This is the sort of place I think of as a non-setting setting, and it's one of the toughest to write because it seems like you have so little to work with. It's always tempting to start adding in things into this bleak landscape to remind the reader that the characters are still on this planet: critters (wild), caves (abandoned) and cabins (ditto) would be my first choices. But a magical distraction or solution to their immediate problem doesn't serve this story, so I have to work with what I have: snow and trees.

Fortunately I've visited several remote areas during winter, and I know I have a bit more than snow and trees to work with. There is the sky, various forms of natural light, water (streams, lakes, ponds) rock formations, animal tracks, and remnants of earlier passages (some hikers don't seem to know what trash cans are.)

Cold is always touted to mute the senses, and it does restrict my sense of smell, but I've found it also sharpens my hearing. You'd think a setting of snow and trees would be pretty silent, and it can be, but there's also the wind, snow falling, birds, echoes, etc. If you're in thaw weather, you hear water dripping, rushing, shifting debris and cracking as solid surfaces break up; if you're in a freeze you hear branches snapping, drifts collapsing and this odd crunchy sound ice-covered objects make when they rub together. In such places you also tend to regularly hear your own breathing and (occasionally) your heartbeat.

I find visuals help, too. I regularly go over and search Landscapes 2.0 for inspirational pics using keywords like mountains, snow and winter. Often photographers find things in otherwise deserted landscapes that are beautiful, poignant and even astonishing.

Once I put together all my visuals, notes and ideas, I found I had quite a bit more to work with than just snow and trees. But I'll admit, I'm glad it's only for one chapter. As much as I like snow and trees, I like great big fireplaces, warm snuggly quilts and huge steaming mugs of hot chocolate even better. So will my characters.

Related links:

How Setting Influences Story by J.C. Hewitt.

Fun with Setting by PBW.


Image credit: © Luminis | Dreamstime.com

Unique

If there was a twelve-step program for my most peculiar jones, I would probably have to confess something like this: "Hi, my name is (whatever it is this week) and I'm addicted to house porn."

Yes, sad to say it's true, but like the teen with the fashion magazine addiction in the film Mumford, I love to look through magazines with glossy photos of beautiful architecture, amazing floor plans, exquisitely furnished rooms and gorgeous landscaping. I think it's the lack of clutter that seduces me, plus the fact that everything looks like art instead of a place your kids can wreck, your guy will track mud into and your dog may upchuck on.

I know it's a silly, frivolous addiction, and I've done pretty well managing it. I don't let myself impulse buy them anymore, and I've whittled down my subscriptions to the two I can't live without (Architectural Digest and Veranda.) I really thought nothing could tempt me again. But today as I was at the grocery store shopping, I saw this new addition on the mag rack:



Yep. It's not just house porn, it's mansion porn. After I picked my jaw up off my sneakers I grabbed it and checked the price: $7.99 -- as much as a paperback novel. I wasn't going to pay that for a magazine just because I instantly fell in love with the cover. Then the magazine sort of fell into the cart and I didn't notice it was there until I checked out, and then, you know, it was too late to put it back without holding up the entire line, so --

All right. I bought the damn thing. It was just this one time, okay?

I didn't thumb through it, and I probably should have, because it's actually a real estate magazine for billionaires. Inside there are mansions. Chateaus. Islands. Enormous estates in exotic places. Practically every home listed comes with a beautiful name: Acqua Liana (cover)*. Lions Gate. Coeur d'Alene. There's even a castle in Umbria that comes with a title -- for eleven million dollars, you could become an Italian Count.

These are not ranch houses, obviously -- every other one comes with a heliport and two or three panic rooms and probably interior waterfalls. The house on the cover has a glass "water" floor, for God's sake. Imagine trying to clean that with your Swiffer. Or what would happen if your spouse happened to accidentally drop their bowling ball case.

But when I got home and got over the guilts for falling off the wagon, I settled down with a cup of tea and looked through all the lovely pictures to my heart's content. In the process I came up with five or six story ideas and solved a problem with one of my settings. Sometimes we're addicted to frivolous things for a reason.

But I also paid for falling in love with a beautiful magazine cover, because inside this was the only other image of that room:



But that's okay, I found another shot of it in this article about the mansion. And I might sketch it or paint it, and build my own house around it, and work a variation of it as a setting for my next book, but that's all. I promise. I mean, $7.99 an issue, that's just ridiculous . . .

Do you think they give you a decent discount on the subscription rate?

*It has a web site, too -- the mansion is listed for sale at $29,000,000.00 U.S.

Who Lives Here?

The July '09 issue of Architectural Digest has photo spreads on some amazing homes, including one Miami Beach high-rise apartment furnished in a frosty minimalist style, with almost nothing but snowy white furnishings and clear crystal accent pieces (interior designer Jennifer Post doesn't have photos of it on her web site, but it's along the same lines as the Stiles residence.

I thought the look was stunning -- like something from an alien world -- but I cringed when I read that the people who live in it have a Great Dane. Baby, you bring a dog into an all-white home, you'd better have stored up plenty of bleach and pet stain remover.

I spend a fair amount of time looking at homes, rooms, and different places we inhabit, either in real life or in magazines like AD. I've often said that I dislike writing setting so much that I'd rather have the entire story take place in a featureless void. I think that's like living in an all-white house, though, so I'm working on improving my attitude. Because I like characters so much, I gravitate toward unlikely details, or the ways people express themselves and/or leave their mark through the places they inhabit. One way to figure this out is to try doing it in reverse with the Who Lives Here? game -- look at a room, and try to guess what sort of person it belongs to.

For example, I can see a room like this and imagine the owner curled up with her cat and reading a good book. I imagine she's a woman who likes to put her feet up and relax (the ottoman), treasures her books but doesn't like to dust (glass doors on her book cases) and has a quirky sense of humor (the curtain fabric.)

I don't know how the owner of this studio/workspace keeps all those little bits organized, but it's safe to say she loves selection, color and variety. The letters spelling out ART on the wall are a very direct statement; that says to me that she's likely gotten some flack about the value of her work. All the bins and drawers remind me of a controlled pack rat who has learned the value of proper sorting and storing. And that lovely view from the window must provide as much distraction as inspiration.

When I first looked at this master bedroom I immediately thought "bachelor sports nut." But in all fairness the owner could be a man or a woman or a married couple (I know some gals like the locker room look.) I'm intrigued by the shelves of shoe boxes and racks of what looks like running suits -- who needs that many sneakers and sweats, and why? But I can tell that here is someone who has seriously nested, surrounding themselves with everything they love best, and who isn't going to apologize for it.

If you'd like to play the Who Lives Here? game, look at the following photo (and click on it if you'd like to see a bigger version) and tell me in comments who you think this room might belong to:

Fun with Setting

Because I do so much planning and prep work before I write a single word of a novel, I write up hundreds of pages of notes, outlines, character profiles, thread diagrams, setting specifics and plot schematics. I used to keep these in binders and file them away once I finished production on the corresponding novel, but then I started returning to worlds I'd already created in previous books and needed to pull them out and refresh my memory.

I don't like writing the same setting over and over, so when I needed to revisit a world I'd pull out my notebooks, read what I'd already done and build with that in mind as a foundation. When it became obvious that I'd be writing multiple stories set on K-2 and a couple of worlds in its surrounding solar system, I decided to split out all my setting notes in one separate notebook to keep straight what I'd done and what I planned to do.

I wasn't happy with just a big collection of notes, so when I decided to do another setting notebook for another multiple-story world (Joren) I wrote a little travelogue-type book for myself about the planet and made up a nice cover for it:



(You can tell this is one I wrote for myself because I misspelled planetary on the cover and never bothered to correct it.)

That was nice, and very organized, but it lacked something. To me a world isn't just about the physical characteristics, it's also about the people who have lived there. So when it became obvious I needed a setting notebook for my dome colony world Trellus, I decided to have a bit more fun with it. Along with my notes, maps and sketches I wrote a brief history of the colony, from the day the first settlers touched down to seizure and shutdown of the colony's infamous mining operations.



While the process evolved mostly from my need to be hyperorganized, by having some fun with the settings and treating them like subjects all on their own, I found the worlds became more real to me. I don't use everything I write in my setting notebooks in my stories, but I think making them has allowed me to write about the settings with a bit more enthusiasm than my usual attitude of "Why can't everything happen in a featureless void?"

I don't recommend every writer write a separate book on their settings for themselves, as that would likely take up too much time you can use for writing the actual novel. But it doesn't hurt to experiment with the ways you put together and maintain your settings. They're a bit like gardens -- the more you plant and tend to them, the more wonderful stuff will grow.

What are some of the things you do to flesh out your settings and keep track of what you've built for worlds you revisit? Let us know in comments.