I love to write. I have a problem, though, with just jumping in and not dealing with the details. I’m working on a romance novel right now, just barely into the drafting stages. It started with my typically sit-down-and-write-it-out method.
I’ve been playing with writing a romance novel for several years, and for some reason I am now feeling inspired to follow through with that. But if I stick with just freewriting my ideas, I know I’ll have thousands of words, no plot, and a weird mix of attachment and resentment for whatever I come up with by the time I stop.
This is my normal writing process. This is why I haven’t finished anything since taking a fiction-writing course in 2010. Whoops.
This time, I’m taking a pause at just short of 7,000 words to assess what I’ve got. This means seeking advice from my friend (and fellow author) Milton Blackwell. This means coming up with goals and obstacles for my two main characters. This means thinking about setting, which is honestly the last thing I usually think about.
Setting has a huge impact on the story, the characters, and the overall final product, though. And this story is one where I cannot neglect the setting. Things like weather and traveling to other locales are going to be too integral to some scenes and moments of the plot, so if the setting doesn’t seem believable, the entire story will feel misplaced.
It’s funny to me that I tend to ignore setting when it’s so important to most of what I read. JK Rowling has a complex setting that is important for grasping the action in all of the Harry Potter novels, whether that means the overall world or one individual area. Would we have fallen in love with the magical world without the intricacies of Diagon Alley, Hogwarts, and Hogsmeade? Doubtful. Would historical romance, like Cox’s The Devil’s Own Desperado, work if we couldn’t identify the time period and understand how it influences the characters and their interactions? No.
So, why don’t I ever think about setting?
Even the book I’m currently reading, From the Moment We Met by Marina Adair, is highly influenced by its wine-country setting without that setting being overly prominent. The small town is integral to understanding Abby, her interactions with others, and the plot as a whole, even if that setting isn’t a focus of every single event of the novel. We have to remember where it takes place in order to understand why it’s happening how it’s happening.
Today, I’ve done a lot of talking about character development and plot, but none of that’s going to matter if I blow it with the setting. So here we go:
My novel, which is currently saved under the title “fucking story, bro,” is set in the present day in the Midwest. I’m not sure if I’m going to set it in a real town or in a fictional one, but I have a good idea of the kind of town it needs to be. If you’re at all familiar with Indiana, I imagine this area being similar to Plainfield or Avon, or even Bloomington if a situated closer a more major city. It’s close enough to the major city make traveling there easy, but it’s also removed enough that it’s not the city itself.
Of course, I could simply set it in a Plainfield, Avon, or any of the other little towns that are now connected to Indianapolis thanks to urban sprawl, I just don’t know if I want to. I like the idea of creating a town, an ambiguous sort of place with enough details to be believable but that also has an identifiable, this-town-could-be-anywhere feel. I think that comes from my love of Thomas Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49, which, if I’m being honest, probably should not be an influence on a romance novel.
Other authors, what advice do you have for developing your setting in a believable way? Readers, what do you want to know about a story’s setting in order to be engaged with it?
zadie z writes 
Create your own fictional town. The people who know you will assume it’s their town, your readers will find shades and nuances of their own small town experience, and with the creation of a fictional small town, you have complete and total control over what is and isn’t there. The only draw back to creating a fictional town is you may need to make a map of what businesses are where, who lives in the house on 5th and Maple, and at some point may have to explain why the United Methodist Church (or any other house of worship, for that matter) is a block off Main Street. I did a hybrid version of that for my historical novels. I took a real town that was actually on the map but isn’t even a ghost town now and brought it to life much sooner than it was founded and populated it with many more people than I think it even boasted.
That’s so interesting to know, Lynda! Creating a map is a great idea–and definitely something that I think I’ll have to do in order to make any setting I try to use work. Thanks for the tips!
Interesting question! I base my settings on real places but change them slightly. I’m definite a dialogue man though and think that settings should remain in the background.
“Setting in the background” is definitely how I tend to write. I love dialogue, and I have to get much better about what’s important to see and what’s not. That usually only happens after I write too much meaningless dialogue, though! 🙂