The power of setting
How where you set your story can make a difference
Hello and welcome to Making Crime Pay! I’m Nicki Thornton - I’m an author. I share my creative journey here and what I am learning along the way. This is mostly about the writing craft (with a little snippet about a fantastic new bookshop!)
Thank you for being part of my community. Thanks to everyone who is reading this and everyone who kindly supports me and my writing.
Nicki
Favourite question to authors: Where do you get your ideas?
I have to answer this question quite often and it is a tricky one!
So I answer it by saying I think most of my stories start with a setting.
It is true that I usually start with an image in my head, a scene. I ask myself where this is, who is here, and what has happened to bring them to this particular place.
I’m delighted to say I’ve had some lovely comments about my latest book The Floating Witch Mystery – and quite a few of them have mentioned the setting, or world-building – particularly asking whether it is set in a real place. Which is why I thought I would share these thoughts today on setting.
You want to take readers on a journey
Story-telling is all about bringing readers with you on a journey. You need to build a bridge between your imagination and theirs. When I read I like to picture where the action is taking place, so I do the same with my writing.
There are plenty of wonderful novels that describe setting so well and in luxurious detail, but I am not that kind of writer. So I am pleased when readers say they can really imagine my settings and they love my world-building.
I think my best tip about setting isn’t that I make it more than just describing a place visually, or even using the other senses. I work hard so that setting becomes part of the story, is even central to it.
A sense of place has personality and can enhance reader experience. So my approach is to weave setting into the story so that it feels vital to the action rather than slowing down the action (which is often how readers can view description!)
I work out what is important for readers to see, hear, smell, feel or understand. So I need to know why have I set my story there?
What about it sparked my imagination? What about that setting means it is vital to the story?
Setting – imagination vs reality
Another question I often get asked is if my settings are real.
My first book, The Last Chance Hotel, was inspired by walking in a wood and there was a spooky, dilapidated house. I love abandoned buildings – and this really get my imagination going.
Why would anyone build a house in such an inaccessible place?
But the whole rest of that setting was made up, yet I kept drawing on that initial thought and curiosity and intrigue it sparked. I want to engage reader imagination and atmosphere and emotions are important to that.
The Floating Witch Mystery is about the loss of not living in a place you love any more. I had recently moved house and missed the river. That found its way into the story.
The setting may not be wholly real, but it helps the reader to imagine if you can engage all their senses and their emotions, so I often like to visit somewhere that is close to where I imagine my stories taking place and make notes.
The Floating Witch Mystery is about a small island community of just four buildings on a tiny island in the river between a lock and a weir. The river exists, the island exists, the weir exists and the path over the river exists, even the lockkeeper’s house.
But the rest of it I made up. I drew in bits and pieces to create the setting I wanted, but drew from my reality.
How else do I get across setting in a simple way?
I also write books set in a magical world, so it’s also important for my readers to understand the magical system. But again, you don’t want to weigh down the story with too much.
How much is too much?
Writing for children and the simplified story-telling and short word count means you have to think through carefully why you are including particular details and if you can convey things in a simpler way.
World-building is extra challenging!
Focus in on those important, telling details
I often use routines and rituals as a great way of showing setting. They happen all the time, as we go about everyday things. Life is full of small rituals. The commute to work, the school run, what we eat for dinner, would all be very different if we lived in a different country or a different culture.
I often use food as a way of conveying many things for the reader to pick up. Whether your characters will delight over a home-made cake or complain about being hungry can be great shorthand to creating and understanding setting.
I love drawing maps
I have a basic idea in my head of where things are, but one of the fun ways I make my world seem more real to me and help me see the details that are important is that at some stage of my writing a book, it will involve drawing a map! Sometimes it’s an outline of a house and the juxtaposition of rooms, sometimes a street, whole village, or even wider.
Think about how a different setting would make your story different
Many stories focus on universal themes and setting can also be a great way of making a story that feels different.
Don’t forget setting can be a time as well as a place
A novel set on a space ship, or in Regency England, or in a remote wood where a murder has taken place – will be very different books, even if you wrote pretty much the same story.
Many Shakespeare plays get updated – my favourite being Ten Things I Hate About You, which is a retelling of one of my least favourite Shakespeare plays – The Taming of the Shrew.
I hope some of this helps with anyone who is trying to write – because there are a lot of us out there! Let me know your best tips about setting.
My final thoughts on why I have been thinking about setting: I was delighted to attend another launch this week, this time not of a book, but of a bookshop.
The Poetry Pharmacy moves from Shropshire to London
Several years ago I met Deb Alma who launched The Poetry Pharmacy in Shropshire - a bookshop focusing on Deb’s strong enthusiasm and belief that poetry is for everyone!
She stocked poetry alongside books that celebrated things like emotional well-being, nature and mindfulness in a delightful bookshop and cafe filled with locals and walkers.
Deb’s vision to make poetry accessible and meaningful for anyone - even if they would not consider themselves to be someone who liked poetry - led to her being really creative.
She took some of her favourite lines of poetry by theme. She rolled up up and sold them as poetry pill bottles for particular ailments of the soul, from indecision to empty next syndrome.
Take one quirky, original idea
Several years on and the bath bomb company Lush heard about it and put these little lines in poems to be released in the middle of their bath bombs for added well-being.
And on Friday, a branch of The Poetry Pharmacy opened inside the Lush store on Oxford Street. What a journey!
Deb’s infectious enthusiasm for the power of poetry will reach so many more people from this bold step to move from nature-rich Shropshire to central London.
What a perfect setting, far from the natural world, to meet a need for enrichment of the soul!
I wish Deb and all the team the very best of luck for their bold and exciting adventure.
Thank you for reading!
Nicki