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.

The frame of the picture

When building a world in a written work, the setting is very important. Particularly in works of fiction, where the reader needs to be able to immerse themselves into your story. Naturally many different universes already exists, ranging from claustrophobic underwater adventures, over vast expanses of space with myriads of planets, to a world very similar to your own, except a grizzly murder have just been committed.

As a first-time writer, the framework of the story may seem like a massive piece of work in front of you. You begin to worry about the amount of detail, does it hold up, is this world interesting and so on. In my experience, when you begin to worry about the writing rather than just letting it come to you naturally, then it’s time to take a break. Even if you haven’t even started writing yet. It doesn’t have to be a long break, sometimes even stepping back from your keyboard for a minute, (or even switching to a different tab, if you’re really lazy, I know that I can be.) and empty your mind. You don’t have to go all out and join a yoga-class to meditate, but, and this is important, do NOT RETURN TO WRITING UNTIL YOU FEEL LIKE IT. Obviously it’s much easier to say the phrase “don’t worry, just empty your mind”, than it is to actually carry the phrase out.

One of the advises to work past this worry, is to select an already existing universe, the more expansive the better. Instead of having to worry about how a brand new universe keeps itself together, when choosing an already existing franchise as your framework, you take that worry away. Sure, there isn’t the exact same pride in building on something you did not make from the bottom, but it is a great writing practice for you to use later on in your writing career. The ability to alter your writing style, narrative angle and genre, can boost your later works with the experience, that comes from putting a particular style of writing into practice. Early on in your writing career, perhaps before it’s even a career, you can also use the practice of writing in other existing universes, to start building your own writing style. For example, you’ve read George R.R. Martin’s “Game of Thrones” series, and while you liked the characters and the way the story moved, you found that Martin’s style of describing environments and scenes, was lacking something, despite not being able to put an exact finger on what that something is. Keeping that experience in mind, you can onward from here avoid making the flaw that, in your mind, Martin made in his writings.

Changing the setting

Rarely will you find a story changing it’s setting completely, though it has been gaining some more popularity, with movies and computer games affecting authors and writers. More and more stories have the story start out in the “real” world, only for the story to enter a fictional universe, within it’s own fictional universe. I would personally argue that this isn’t so much changing the setting, as it is adding a secondary and minor setting, a sub-setting if you like, to the story. The major point in my argument is that the story almost always “returns” to the “real” world either just once, or multiple times during the story. C.S. Lewis’ “Narnia” series is a great example of this. J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter” series is as well, though, admittedly, it’s less obvious than Narnia. The sub-setting, despite that I’ve just called it “minor”, can easily take up a larger percentage of the story than the “major” one. The reason for this, is that a story with more settings, is always remembered, when retelling it, as starting in it’s major setting. Allow me to put this into more graspable terms, using my two examples.  The “Narnia” series is about a group of English kids, who discovers a gateway into a different world, where fantasy creatures of all kinds live and dwell among each other. The “Harry Potter” series is about an English boy, who lives with an unfriendly foster-family, until he learns that he is actually a wizard, and journeys to another dimension, where witches, trolls, potions and broom-based sports are common.

Did you notice something just now? In case you didn’t, because it’s not often something you think that much about, let me clarify. The word “English” is occurring in both examples. Now you could argue that I am just paraphrasing the examples to get my point across, and you would not be wrong in that assumption. However, if you ask anyone (well, almost) to retell these stories by memory, you’d almost certainly get summaries resembling what I’ve just written here. In other words, it is not only me, but also several other people. This proves how a “major” setting is significant to a story, even when, taking “Harry Potter” once again, we, as a reader, don’t spend much more than around 15 % of the entire story in the “major” setting.

The main reason you don’t find a lot of stories with a 50/50 major and minor setting, or a full-on actual change of the setting, is that it requires more work. Putting a setting in, when starting the story, you’re building up a world, with locations, details, weather and other natural phenomenons. To change the setting, you have to abandon the previous one, and, essentially, build a new one up, only keeping scraps of the old one as reason for comparison and inducing flashbacks amongst characters. Writers generally do not mind scrapping a setting, but there needs to be a good reason to do so. Otherwise you’re essentially doing double the work for a single written piece, and having multiple story-settings going on at the same time, can quickly become an obstacle towards finishing the overall project.

Upholding the setting (don’t break the canon)

Once you’ve assigned something as “a rule” for your story, as part of the setting, most characters and events needs to follow these rules. If you find that events and characters more often than not, are breaking these rules, you need to change the rules to fit. Why not change the characters or the events to fit? That can work too, but unless you’re looking to create a plot-hole, especially if the event, or character, is reoccurring, I wouldn’t recommend it. This is where already existing universes restricts the writer, dictating typical means of transport, how advanced the technology is, fauna and flora as well as ethics and acceptable behaviour. Even in universes that are “potentially” unlimited, in terms of what COULD be existing in the universe, this restrictive setting is still active. For example, the “Star Trek” universe includes a multitude of different races, each with their own technological know-how, nature and ethical views. Because it, like many sci-fi stories, takes place in space, where the number of planets and other objects that have actually been discovered, is very, very low. It doesn’t take much logical thought to reason that there are so many more planets, even civilizations out there. But when writing in existing universes, we often have a tendency to build extreme “bubbles” within the already existing story. A bigger bubble, as in a more extreme setting, makes a bigger “pop”, and the bigger the “pop” the more your story is “heard”. But these bubbles also press against, and often through, the “rim of canon”; what actually exists within the universe already.

If you are writing your own story, with your own setting, you are also the one in charge of placing the “rim of canon”. YOU decide what goes. Can people fly? Does magic exist? Is the air polluted to a point where everyone needs to wear a gas-mask, or risk undergoing horrible mutations? Only your mind sets the rim of what is “acceptable” within YOUR world, YOUR story. However, just as in an existing story, you have to be consistent and follow the rules that you’ve stated for your world, otherwise you’ll create plot-holes, which makes your story seem rushed or even poorly written. Here’s the good news though; because it’s your setting, you can add rules to the setting at any point during the writing process. This is handy, as you can write up a rule to suit an event or character, so they fit into your setting, when they occur.

Going back to the writing practice that is trying to copy someone else’s writing style, another part of the “practice” is also to have an opinion on as many things as possible in the writing style you’re working with. Transitions, flash-backs, character introductions and so on. Essentially you’re going through someone’s story like a shopping center, when you stop to look at a “ware”, you look to your shopping check-list and ask yourself “Does this work, why/why not.” Eventually you’ll end up with a list of things you like about a style, and things that you might not like. And thus; you’ve taken the first step towards creating your own writing style.

The first steps…

Building a world from the bottom takes time, there is no getting around that. But when it comes to world building, regardless of whether you’re writing fiction or dramas, the thing writers struggle with the most, is getting the idea.

Rather than thinking that the writing process starts when you sit down to write the first couple of lines, any written work starts with shaping and getting the idea. To some people, getting ideas for a world setting comes as easy as making breakfast. But to others, or if you’re working in a team, a lot of suggestions can actually block the process entirely. The best way to handle this problem, is to allow yourself (and others) to make silly ideas. If you’re working as a team, this is crucial to even get the project started. It might feel like you’re increasing the workload later on, by adding more and more ideas to the project, but don’t worry; to most writers, deleting things during the writing process comes pretty naturally.

Unfortunately, there is no direct help to getting ideas. The best you can do is allow your brain to relax, and let yourself be open to suggestions. Another important thing is to not get caught up on being original. This is also something that you work out later in the process, getting it in your head before you even begin writing, means that you’ll be worrying about what other people create, have created, and will create. This is one of the most progress-destroying elements of writing, worry about the writing in itself, everything else doesn’t matter right now.