Show, Place & Win: 10 Questions About Writing Settings
Many thanks to author Bharti Kirchner for the following outline of the talk she gave at the San Francisco writers conference. It provides a helpful perspective for thinking about how to write about settings.
What do we mean by place or setting? It’s where the action is happening. It’s a context for the character and events. Note that the place has multiple layers.
When you start a novel, ask yourself the following questions:
- Could the story happen here? If I changed the setting will the story change, the characters change?
- Is my setting limited? Is it domestic or panoramic?
- How does the character interact with the environment? (Happy with it? Out of place?)
- How much description?
- What atmosphere do I want to create?
Writing what you know vs. writing what you’re interested in.
Be specific.
Use your senses.
You can invent a place.
Sprinkle in information about the setting throughout the novel.
A Comment from Mike
Whether books are set in cities like New York, London, Paris, or San Francisco where readers like to spend time; or places like Japan in Arthur Golden’s Memoirs of a Geisha or an Italian monastery in the eleventh century in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose that immerse you in another kind of world, settings can be an essential part of a book’s appeal.
If you’re writing a memoir, then you’re stuck with where events took place. But if you’re writing a novel, you can set your story whereever you and your readers would like to spend time. And if that involves tax-deductible trip, so be it! Happy trails.
Bharti Kirchner is the author of eight books — four critically acclaimed novels and four cookbooks–and hundreds of short pieces for magazines and newspapers. Winner of many awards, she has also appeared in eight anthologies. Bharti has been generous enough to donate a scholarship for literary fiction for the 2012 San Francisco Writers Conference, February 16-20. Details about the scholarship will appear in the free conference newsletter. To sign up for the newsletter, please visit www.sfwriters.org. To get free feedback on your work, join San Francisco Writers University, Where Writers Meet and You Learn at www.sfwritersu.com.
