Sense of Place-- Sheena

FUTURE GIANTS by Alisdair Miller

found at http://theartofanimation.tumblr.com/

http://41.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m99rmmuaie1qaay1oo1_500.png

Alright. Alright. Fine. I'll stop showing settings and start talking setting.

 Setting is nothing without the characters, but characters are also nothing without the setting.

Facebook: UrbanExplorationUS / Via architecturalafterlife.com

Setting is obviously an important part of any story. It can reflect the inner landscape of the characters. It can show status, wonder, magic, artistry, but most of all it gives the characters a place to live.

I'm not naturally good at setting, so these are the things I've had to learn through observation and study.

You ready?

1. Write what you know 

Use the places you know really well in your fiction. No one will notice that the floor plan of that spaceship story exactly matches the layout of your high school + the back kitchen of that job you worked one summer. Writing is a way to capture the moments, places, and people that you know and love. If there's a place you love, add details of it to your story. It's like adding pieces of your soul.

If you find yourself stumped, then you probably need to travel more. I think a lack of travel is directly responsible for my lack of skill at setting. But with the magic of the internet, finding setting inspiration is just one google away. Search historical.... Boom.

Stairway, Wolf Castle, Wales photo by aurelien

How can you not want to write a scene here on this staircase?

2. Make stuff up

If that is the way your creativity runs, this, I've been told, is really fun. Also it's kind of the job.

Start from the ceiling and work your way down. Focus on the way the light hits it. Create visual interest through words. Paint a picture with nouns and vowels, and who am I kidding? This is not the way my creative brain works. I can tell you how a character brain functions, how a system of magic works, but trying to design a building or a room, and I'm dead on the page.

 But every artist there ever was took inspiration from somewhere, so if you find yourself lacking creative setting inspiration, go look for some, and then add your own spin to it. That's what I do.

3. Design is in the details

But too many details and the reader gets bored. A good rule of thumb is mention the three details that set the mood of the scene.  Remember senses go beyond sight, and sprinkle in sounds, tastes, and smells. Be specific about one thing, and go general about everything else.

For example:

The only straight lines were the streaks of sunlight coming in from the window at the top of the stairs. Everything else, from the filigree ironwork railing along the side, the alcove above it, and those white marble steps, were curved and open like it was inviting you in for a cup of tea. The moment I saw those curved stairs I wanted to sit a few steps up and let that sunlight warm the pages of a musky book in my hand.

4. Set the scene with the attitude of the POV character. 

It's more interesting to know how a character feels about a room then the laundry list of details about a room.

For example:

Not,

 The curved marble staircase led up to a window.

But,

The curved stairs were cold beneath my bare feet, each step echoing though the corridor. I put my course hand against the smooth carved railing, and I knew I did not fit here. Even the sunlight at the top was damning as it streaked pointing fingers at every moth chewed hole in my dress and pock mark in my cheek.

5. Steal like an artist, not like a thief. 

A thief steals from one source, and artist steals from many and calls it inspiration.

So keep your creative eyes out. Read a lot. Search for good setting inspiration through art, pictures, and google street view.

When I was writing FUNNY TRAGIC CRAZY MAGIC I had to write a scene I had set in Paris. Problem is, I've never been to Paris, but other people have, so I had to get the details right.

Answer #1. Buy a ticket to Paris.

Nope. Too poor.

Answer #2. Google Street View.

I spent a few hours on Google digitally walking up and down the streets of Paris, and the I wrote my feelings about the place, and how I thought Larissa would see it.

The thing is, if you write about feelings, then you are never wrong.

And that's how you get setting right.

~Sheena

p.s. a fun exercise for you. Find an image of a setting that feels inspiring, and then describe it in different characters POV. Sometimes the trick to learning something as fundamental as setting is to practice. If you can't find an image you like, try describing the room you are in as your characters would see it.

A Sense of Place - Karen

This month we Prosers talking about a sense of place.

One of the more interesting things about traveling, particularly in this day and age, is being able to see and get a sense of places where people live in other parts of the world. Thanks to the magic of airbnb and trip advisor and the like, my family has stayed in a thatched-roof miller’s cottage on the banks of a river in Ireland, an old coachhouse/waystation in North Wales, a roomy flat in the center of Paris, and this summer we’ll stay in an apartment on the east coast of Scotland.

Each of these places gives to me, the writer, a chance to consider the small details of daily life somewhere completely other than my home. This works even though I don’t tend to write fantasy or even anything I can set in Ireland or Paris (perhaps I need to find a way to do that!) Most of my novels are set in space, in or on spaceships or space stations or on other planets entirely. Really, in seeing how others live I’m trying to integrate into my own subconscious the small details that might be different and noticeable. Because the small details that are different and noticeable to me in Paris might be similar to small details a character would notice are different in her new apartment on a space station in geosynchronous orbit around Earth or Jupiter. Might be the same as how a person living on a moon base has to adjust how she cooks because the utensils are different.

In Ireland, our first international trip in a decade, having stayed US-bound when the children were young, I woke up first in my family, desperately in need of coffee. We were in the miller’s cottage right on the banks of the King River just south of Kilkenny City in a small town. A two-pub town. We love how Ireland measures town size by # of pubs. A two-pub town was so small there was only one tiny convenience store and nowhere to buy pre-brewed coffee. That’s right, not a Starbucks in sight, thank heavens.

The cottage was picture-perfect adorable, completely with wood burning fireplace and resident kitty, Felicity, who jumped into our window the first night and promptly curled up at the foot of the bed my daughter was sleeping in.

But that next morning while the rest of the family slept off jetlag, I was up and coffee was a moral imperative. There were coffee grounds and mugs, a jar of sugar, the works, but the only way to make the coffee was a contraption I knew in theory was a French press, but had zero – absolutely zero – idea of how to operate.

I wandered around the small kitchen looking for other clues to its use. There was an electric teakettle. A measuring scoop in the coffee bin. Nothing else coffee-related that I could see.

Remembering that one of the reasons we booked this particular quaint little cottage was it’s internet connection, I googled French press coffee and sat in a 200 year old cottage and watched a video of an Italian guy making coffee.

From that moment on, I became a French Press convert. And I’ll never forget that moment of panic, my need for coffee significant and my ability to turn the grounds in front of me into actual coffee limited by my lack of knowledge of how to use a kitchen implement that was clearly everyday to the people who lived here, but foreign to me.

The best part was, everywhere we went after that we saw and used French presses to make our coffee. We were served French press coffee in restaurants, found French presses of all sizes in other flats we rented. This has only continued as we traveled to England, Wales, and France itself. Kind of hilarious when you think about it, to a European, it was the most basic way to make coffee, but in my Keurig-filled suburban life, I just hadn’t encountered one before.

I can assure you I’ve become a complete French press convert, in case you were worried. All my coffee at home is made via French press. I pick out grounds with a care previously exercised for only the finest wines and fresh produce. I have several French press pots, each working slightly differently and each appropriate for a different kind of coffee.

There are other things we’ve learned in traveling to other places. Like how washcloths just aren’t a part of every household’s linen supply. The whole duvet thing in Europe (which, for the record, I love.) The idea of a toilet being in a whole different room from the rest of the “washing up” elements we consider typical of a bathroom. In one flat, the toilet wasn’t just separate from the shower, it was on a completely different floor! We have a growing collection of street and informational signs that are meant to convey things like how to avoid poking your eye out or plummeting to your death. But my lesson about the most basic of morning rituals has stuck with me.

A sense of place

It's almost the eve of our summer vacation, which this year is a trip to France and Belgium, including bucket-list items like staying on Mont-Saint-Michel. Not familiar? It's this place:

Yeah. This place. Swoon. 

And it got me thinking about all the ways that *place* matters in fiction. It was at a Dean Wesley Smith workshop where I first learned that "setting is the opinion of a character." Meaning, the setting that your characters are in can be reflected through the way they think about the place. Not just objective facts, but the subjective reality of each character's thoughts and opinions about where they are. 

This lesson was really driven home to me in a class I took with Mary Robinette Kowal (awesome classes, Dean's too, highly recommend if you can swing it. Both offer online classes.) Mary had us do one exercise of just free-write describing the room we were in. No rules, just writing. THEN after that free-write period was over, she had us go back and free-write the description of the room *from the perspective of a firefighter.* Different room, entirely. No more about the color and subtle lighting or the contents of the bookshelves. Instead it was points of entry/exit, flash points of flammables (all those books!) It was a fascinating exercise and one I encourage you to do. It may be the standard fare of creative writing classes in college, but I never took a creative writing class in college, I came to writing later in life. I needed the lesson! 

So places in fiction matter quite a lot. And the way our characters think about them is a great way for us to introduce aspects of character to the reader. I often make it hard for myself. Much of my books are set in space, mostly aboard spaceships and space stations. I can't easily weave in natural details of the foothills when I'm talking about a spaceship the size of a school bus. But again, the setting is the opinion of the character. Here's a bit from my novel CONVERGENCE, which is coming out in paperback this summer! 

Anya watched each person slip through the membrane, their bodies disappearing through the opaque barrier bit by bit, first a foot, a leg, one arm, a torso, last the trailing arm and wisps of hair. They membrane swallowed each person whole, like the belly of a jellyfish. Anya stifled a shudder. It would be her turn soon enough. 

Her parents went next. "Bowden, Madeline. Bowden, Zach," the door hushed. 

Swallowing, Anya prepared to go through. She eyed the membrane warily, wondering if it was all just a ruse and if she was going to find herself swallowed whole by some gigantic space-beast. She hoped the digestive enzymes would kill her quickly. She sighed and stepped up as the last of her dad's brown hair disappeared. 

Hopefully one of the things conveyed by this bit of description is Anya's overall wariness about the space station (the membrane is between the transport ship she arrived on and the space station proper.) Earlier paragraphs included much teen pouty-ness about being dragged off-planet to live on a space station. Poor kid, you feel for her already, don't you? :)

How have you woven a sense of place into your fiction? How do you find the characters illuminating aspects of their character by showing how they feel about their setting?