Got places to go?
With your setting in place, and the overall idea of the story more or less worked out, you are now ready to start plotting down a couple of locations. Immersion comes from the reader imagining themselves as being “in” your world, your story. One of the best ways to achieve immersion, is to describe the story’s locations in detail.
Locations might not seem like a big part of writing, you make up the setting and you already have an idea of where you want you story to take place. But, do not be fooled, generic locations and lacking descriptions are very off-putting to the reader. I would say that you need a minimum of five locations, perhaps even more than that. I have never read a story that had less than five locations, obviously depending on the length of the story, but I am not saying it isn’t a possibility.
When I write I use what I’d like to call a tier-based location system (which you can read about here), thinking up a location it ends up in one of those tiers. The tiers are based upon how much detail I feel like putting into them, this is typically equivalent to how important for the story that particular location is. While it, obviously, is important to have a great amount of detail for the locations that are significant to your story, the opposite is also important. If you go to great lengths to describe every location with the same amount of detail, the locations that matters less to the story might end up disappointing the reader. For example, there is no point in describing that a single door is painted red on a street, if that door doesn’t play in to the story.
Keeping the narrative angle in mind, is also very important. Is there story told through the eyes and thoughts of a character? Or are we, as a reader, just drifting along, knowing what happens behind as well as in front of the characters? Presenting your locations as they appear in the story, from the perspective of your characters, typically means that you’ll have to cut some information and detail away. Other things, even if there’s no interaction planned with that specific location, are important to keep, because it helps establish immersion. For example, a young adventurer ambles up towards the castle through a muddied street, the high tower of the keep looming above him as he takes each step. At the dark-wooden gate to the castle’s courtyard, the man is stopped briefly by the screech of a crow. He looks up, but the tower is no longer visible here at the foot of the keep’s walls.
In the example I just used, I had the narrative as a third person perspective, but putting the adventurer as our protagonist, I give the reader a feeling of being right next to the adventurer, looking up at a castle wall, from it’s foot with him. Another thing I’d like to point out with my example, is how much focus I placed upon the tower of the castle. Not the castle itself, the castle walls or even the muddy street, despite the street being the location the story, at that moment, was actually taking place in. This story could easily continue without the adventurer ever getting up in the tower, but we have given the reader an impression of how the castle looks, without using that many descriptive words. We haven’t mentioned the colour or the state of the stone-work, in fact, it wasn’t even mentioned that the castle was built in stone. And yet, the reader have a pretty decent idea of how the world we’ve just put down, looks from the perspective of the adventurer.
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