Part III:  Setting and Locale…or where the hell are we?

Any novel exists in time and space and also in some kind of place.  As the writer, your job is to describe that place in such a way as to give the reader a sense of being there, without boring the reader to tears with details that belong in National Geographic.  Or in an atlas.

My current project is called The Farpool.  Much of the story takes place on an oceanic world and involves people who live underwater and don’t look (or act) like you and me.  I find in efforts like this that drawing a map of the place helps me get a feel for this imaginary location and also helps me be consistent with the details.  Here’s a map of this imaginary world, which is called Seome:

 

I originally did this by hand, re-did it in Corel Draw, converted it into a .png file and here’s what it looks like.  I also have done a hand-drawn map of a fictitious coastal town on the Gulf side of Florida, where other action in the story takes places.

But that’s not all. 

Because I am so anal about being prepared, I have something like nearly a hundred pages (originally hand-written…remember The Farpool comes from a story I wrote 30 years ago, so much of this was done when Reagan was president) of details of the setting.  I’ve got notes on language and key words, more detailed maps of sections of the map above, notes on the biology of the Seomish, how they live and love, how they organize themselves, their culture, cuisine, sports, religion, politics, all of it using many of the words I made up in their fictitious language.  In fact, I plan to incorporate some of this detail in a series of Appendices at the end of the main body of the story…there are science fiction readers out there who eat this stuff up. 

Now, am I just slightly nuts to be doing all this?  Do you really have to do all this for a setting?  No, of course not.  If your setting is present-day Earth, circa October 2015, maybe just a few notes will do.  Readers will ‘get’ your setting if it’s like the world they live in.  But that’s my whole point.  My story largely takes place in an imaginary world 6000 light years from here and the people are intelligent fish.  I need enough detail to convince the reader that this is (or could be) a real place and so it has to be internally consistent.

In the world of science fiction, this is called ‘world-building.’ 

How much of all this gets into the story?  Obviously not 100%...it would read like your 9^th grade World Geography book if it did.  The art here is putting enough setting and place background in to convince the reader that this is real…to immerse the reader in an alien place and time and not have him get totally lost.  The operative word here is verisimilitude…resemblance to the truth.  Enough detail to grab the reader and make him suspend disbelief, but not too much, not enough to drag down the story or cause the reader to shut the book (or shutdown the ebook reader) and sigh: I’ll do this another day.  When that happens, you’ve lost for good. 

To belabor an earlier point: your story outline is the foundation of the story.  It should drive everything.  The setting is all the pretty buildings and flowers around the place.  The people live, work and play among all the pretty buildings and obviously react to them.  You, the storyteller, are a juggler.  You sit on a three-legged stool (outline, people, place) and juggle the details like a juggler handles balls (or chainsaws or whatever…it’s a metaphor, okay?).  

In the next post, I’ll provide a chapter excerpt from The Farpool and deconstruct what I did and why.  Nuts and bolts…that’s what I’m all about in these posts.  Like Geppetto, the shopkeeper, that’s me.  (Look it up).

See you next week.

Phil B.