Showing posts with label "world building". Show all posts
Showing posts with label "world building". Show all posts

Thursday, August 04, 2022

Setting

One the past month or so I (Donis) have been trying to start a new series set in a fictional resort town patterned after Eureka Springs, Arkansas, which if any of  you Dear Readers have visited, know is one of the most beautiful little mountain towns anywhere - a resort spa retreat for the wealthy since the mid-1800s. This has caused me to spend a great deal of time trying to figure out how to evoke the beauty of setting - and it's also driven him to me how important setting is to the unfolding of your plot.

In fact, setting is one of the most important characters in the book. (I stole that from William Kent Kreuger) Setting is the location of the plot, including the region, geography, climate, neighborhood, buildings, and interiors. A setting is more than just a place; it's layered into every scene. It's the season, the time period, the weather, the light, the people in the background, and the history. 

I always loved to read stories set in exotic locations and historical settings. I love to go to a place and live there for a while. I love a book that entices you into its world, that says “come in...join us...stay awhile”

Setting is more than just a backdrop to the plot; it’s part of the drama. It’s the autumn leaves crunching underfoot, the sunset in your eyes as you drive down the highway, the musty smell and dark shadows in the library stacks. Setting is about drawing the reader into a story, making them feel they are walking in the footsteps of the characters.

Things happen as they happen because of where and when the novel is set. Setting  acts on the characters. It’s where they live their lives, and you as the author had better know all about it--its rules, how it looks, who else lives there.

My two current series couldn't be more different in setting – one on a farm in Oklahoma, a world so real, so elemental, the other in the moviemaking world of 1920s Hollywood, a world so fake, a not-so-pretty reality hidden behind a beautiful illusion. Makes a huge difference in the way I evoke the two worlds.

Rhys Bowen said that when she begins a novel, she often doesn’t know the complete cast of characters, who’s going to get killed or how, or who did the deed, but she knows where the story will unfold.

The very night before I heard Rhys say this, I was reading P.D. James’ book, Talking About Detective Fiction, and came across this :“My own detective novels, with rare exceptions, have been inspired by the place rather than by a method of murder or a character." 

She then describes a moment when she was standing on a deserted beach in East Anglia. She could imagine standing in the same place hundreds of years ago, until she turned around and saw a nuclear power plant, and “immediately I knew that I had found the setting for my next novel.”

Even if the murder unfolds the same way in two novels you'll have two very different mysteries if the victim is killed in a beach house in Thailand or in a prep school auditorium (custodian find body of beautiful young girl stabbed to death and left on floor of high school gymnasium. Bum stumbles into trash filled alley and finds beautiful young girl stabbed to death and left by the dumpster behind the dive bar); if the suspects live deep in the moors, or in Manhattan across from Central Park; if the detective lives in a fifth-floor walk-up on the south side of Chicago or in a mansion in Beverly Hills. 

If Miss Wonderly had walked into Spade and Archer Detective Agency on the first floor of the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota, The Maltese Falcon just wouldn't have been the same. 

Saturday, February 21, 2015

Guest Post: Diane Vallere

I'm delighted to welcome Diane Vallere as this weekend's guest. Diane is the current President of the Los Angeles chapter of Sisters in Crime and my partner-in-crime for our recent "Paint and Polyester" bookstore tour.


After two decades working for a top luxury retailer, Diane Vallere traded fashion accessories for accessories to murder. SUEDE TO REST, the first book in the Material Witness Cozy Mystery Series, has been nominated for the 2015 Lefty Best Humorous Mystery Award. Diane also writes the Mad for Mod Mystery Series, featuring a midcentury modern interior decorator who has modeled her life after Doris Day movies, and the Style & Error Mystery Series, featuring a former fashion buyer. Diane started her own detective agency at age ten and has maintained a passion for shoes, clues, and clothes ever since.

Jury Duty

Last week I asked my Facebook friends if I was the only person who got excited about Jury Duty. The replies came fast and furious. Turns out there are two kinds of people in the world: those who dislike Jury Duty, and mystery writers.

Admittedly, I have two reasons for liking Jury Duty:

1) it feels like research, and
2) it gets me out of the house.

Much research can be done on the internet, but I think there’s something to be said for research that is done in person. You can read about what happens in the jury selection process from start to finish, but you won’t fully appreciate the experience unless you catch a subway at 6:30 in the morning, stand in line for half an hour before they scan your belongings, sit in an uncomfortable chair staring at a photograph of a flamingo (occasionally wondering about the significance of said flamingo photo in a Los Angeles courthouse), watch the people who ignore the sign that says “take a packet and sit down” and form an unnecessary line at the front window.

Plus, you’ll miss the blue carpeting that is stained with a previously-spilled cup of coffee and the scent of the popcorn being sold at the concession stand outside of the Juror Room. You will rarely get this kind of chance to see a snapshot of the people who are a cross-section of the town where you live, pretty much a crash course in human nature.

The thing about research is that it fuels two parts of our manuscripts: the facts and the world-building. Facts can be looked up. World building can be made up. But for both facts and world-building to come alive, you need to deliver the complete experience to your reader. It’s not just the words of dialogue that matter. Creating the setting where a dialogue takes place is important. Whether it’s a historic courthouse for a civil trial or a dingy community center for a town hall meeting or a fancy restaurant that has altered their hours to accommodate a club meeting, when a writer pays attention to what it feels like, smells like, and sounds like—in addition to what it looks like—the reader falls that much farther down the rabbit hole. Their surroundings fade away because we gave them a new place to hang. Even if it isn’t paradise, it’s sometimes the place where our characters hang, too.

And don’t underestimate that getting-out-of-the-house thing, either. Works wonders for a stuck manuscript!