It's Your World: Setting Your Novel - Page 4
© Kim Kay
Try to develop as clear of a picture of your location as possible. It may help if you base it on an actual location. That's a good way of making it realistic without having to adhere to a pre-existing layout. For instance, if you live in a suburban area named Homewood, you could create a city called Brookwood. Then, you could use Homewood as a guide but rearrange things as necessary. If, for plot purposes, the police station has to be only a block away from the high school, you can move it without risking the integrity of your novel. Or you could make the climate different. Or the street and place names. This can be a useful "compromise" between real and imaginary.
Once you have selected the perfect setting, done your research, and organized your information, you need to focus on the individual locations within your setting. Consider the zoom lens on a camera. Up to this point, we've used the wide angle lens to capture the overall setting. Now, we need to zoom in and look at it segment by segment. Take your main character's home, for example. Is it a house or apartment? Taking into account his/her income level and the area, how big of a home is it? How many rooms does it have? What does the yard look like? How is it furnished? Which newspapers and magazines are delivered? What pictures are on the wall? Are they framed? Are the sheets in the master bedroom cotton, flannel, or silk? What color are they? What would you find if you opened the nightstand drawer, the kitchen cabinets, or the hall closet? Give your characters props that are natural to the setting. For example, if you are in a community where the main industry is mining, your character may have one or more pairs of work boots in the closet. You may not use all of this in your novel but it will help you get a better understanding of your character and allow you to create a realistic setting.
One way of making the setting come to life is to employ the five senses. If I told you that I am sitting here typing on my computer, at my desk, in my office, you would probably get a general idea of what the room looks like. Based on your knowledge of offices and computers, you could come up with a "picture" but it would be flat. Using the senses, I could also tell you how the moonlight is streaming in through the window behind me, creating a ribbon of light across the writer's manuals stacked on the corner of my desk. I could also say that the classic rock station on my radio is overshadowed by the sound of my cats chasing each other across the shelves which hold my photo albums, books, and collection of Disney movies. I could tell you that the floral scent of air freshener is giving me a headache and that the glass of Coke I've been sipping on for hours is flat. Now, don't you have a better picture of my computer room?
