Preptober Class Part 2: Setting

Preparation for Nanowrimo continues!

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This is Part Two of my class on prepping to write 50,000 words for Nanowrimo in November. You can read Part One, on character, here. It also explains more about the madness that is Nanowrimo and why you should participate.

This is Part Two of my class on prepping to write 50,000 words for Nanowrimo in November. You can read Part One, on character, here. It also explains more about the madness that is Nanowrimo and why you should participate.

Today’s lecture session covers setting.

Setting

You might think that setting is easy. Choose a place to set your novel and there you are. Setting is indeed the location where your novel is set, and it is also so much more.  Setting is a fundamental of fiction along with character, plot, theme, and style, and it is crucial.   Think how different you feel and act in different places, the mountains vs. the ocean, for instance, or the city vs. the country.  We tend to have emotional reactions to places, perhaps for mysterious reasons we can't identify, or because of something that happened to us.  I tend to fall in mad love and mad hate with places for no discernable reason.  Like Boston, for instance—just never could quite bond with that city.  But I feel instantly in love with Chicago. So go figure.  The same is true for your characters and so why not use this?  Among other things, are reactions to place show our emotions and a bit more about our characters.

The following is a quote from Janet Burroway, author of Writing Fiction, which sums it up nicely.

"Our relation to time, place and weather, like our relation to clothes and other objects, is charged with emotion, more or less subtle, more or less profound.  It is filled with judgment, mellow or harsh.  And it alters according to what happens to us.  In some rooms you are trapped; you enter them with grim purpose and escape them as soon as you can.  Others invite you to settle in, to nestle or carouse.  Some landscapes lift your spirits, others depress you.  Cold weather gives you energy or bounce, or else it clogs your head and makes you huddle, struggling.  You describe yourself as a "night person" or a "morning person."  The house you loved as a child now makes you, precisely because you were once happy there, think of loss and death."