Reflection's Edge

Outside the Box: Bringing Life to Your Story's Location

by James Lyn

It might sound odd, at first. Location with character, with personality, appearance, history? Attention is often placed primarily on plot and character development while location is just there to literally fill in the background. But setting is just as important to telling a good story, and a well-developed location can make the difference between a good story and a great one. It provides more than the setting within which everything happens; it can provide motivation, obstacles, and even mood. A well-formed location will effect the story just as much as the personality of the characters.

Where You Stand

The most obvious reason to carefully create a story's environment is that location allows the reader to envision what is happening. Describing the surroundings allows the reader to follow along with the author in ways the author intends. This is especially important in action scenes, where you have to convey in words all the aspects of the scene so the choreography comes across. If your characters are having a barroom fight, you want to give the readers a clear idea of what the location looks like so when one character picks up a pool cue and hits the other character, your readers won't be left scratching their heads over where that pool cue came from.

But even without that level of detail, describing the location is important. If you don't want your readers to think your characters are having their quest in someone's back yard, then you have to tell them about the forest they're in that is miles away from any towns.

But more than simply stating the basic facts of the location, making a location into a "character" requires attention to the more subtle details. Location lends color and emotion to a story. A location has history, mood, and atmosphere, and provides the physical restrictions and opportunities that can drive a plot and challenge or facilitate the characters' actions. Describing the location in detail can convey information that you would otherwise have to put into dialogue; having a prisoner locked in a solitary cell say "I feel claustrophobic" can be awkward, whereas showing the reader how damp, tiny, and cold the cell is will give the reader the same information in a much more dynamic fashion. The reader doesn't need to be told the prisoner feels claustrophobic; he's already feeling it himself.

It can also provide information about what sort of story is being told, foreshadowing the events to come. A light, airy location will encourage the reader to expect happy endings -- or an ironically dark ending. Location gives the author one more way to set up the reader's expectations to either meet them, or surprise them by providing the unexpected.

Giving careful thought to location can also provide unexpected bonuses or challenges for the characters. Forests, technologically advanced cities, spaceships or ocean-side villages all come with specific details which will shape a story and give it an added flavor of realism. The rules of a location can drive the story in small but important ways by simply requiring the characters to deal with their surroundings in order to meet their goals. Characters on a spaceship will have to do things differently than characters in a vampire-infested castle, even if they have the same overall goal of locating the mystical object and destroying it before it destroys the universe.

Creating and relaying a good location to your readers doesn't require an essay mid-story. When a location is well-created, it will show even when details don't get explicitly written into the story. If the details have been thought out, they have the ability to leap into a story unexpectedly and can lead to unplanned but interesting or even pivotal new directions. The un-stated details will still shape the story as it's written without leaving the reader feeling lectured to about the ins and outs of the surroundings.

For example, giving the reader a page of description on how the sea animals drive the city's economy can get boring, even if the information is important to the characters' daily lives. But if the details are clear in your mind as you write, then you can drop them in throughout the story to fill in detail. Or instead of saying that your character had a red jacket on, you could say his jacket was red like the color of the mudflats in summer. This piece of information might even be trivial the first time you mention it, but later in the story your character may be able to sneak along unnoticed because his jacket provides camouflage against the adobe walls of the buildings. If you had simply called the jacket "red" then your readers might be surprised to learn his jacket provides him with camouflage (indeed, they might be surprised to learn the local buildings could even be red-colored!).

Creating the Landscape

How do you create a location that does all these things, giving as much to the story as plot and characters? The first step is to consider the type of location your plot calls for. It may be obvious -- a science fiction story set on a spaceship has a very definite location. A story about cowboys on the range is set in the old west. But it may be more subtle, and changing the location from a medieval village to a city will give the story a different flavor that you may find you prefer. Deciding ahead of time will allow you to work out plot requirements before you realise you've given your characters no way to accomplish their goal.

Characters living in a medieval village, after all, won't get news of events until well after they've happened, simply because of the time it takes for news to travel on foot or horseback. By the time they hear that the princess has been kidnapped, it may be weeks later and the sense of urgency could be long lost. If they live in the city and frequent the same tavern as the castle security guards, they could hear about it the next day and set off at once feeling confident they will save her in time.

The second, and very important step, is research. Research other locations of the same type. This is extremely important if you are basing your story location on a real place, in which case you will need to have as many accurate details as you can get. Readers will recognise if your location pretends to be someplace it is not, and the flow of the story will be interrupted when a reader knows that a location is portrayed inaccurately.

Even if the location is entirely fictional, you should research similar locations as well as possible. You can't research human habitats on Mars, but you can read about current missions to Mars and proposed plans for habitats on other planets. You can get information such as the length of a day on Mars, how the sun appears, and what sort of atmospheric and geographic conditions there are to contend with. If your location is a completely fictional planet, you can still research the sort of details you need for your location -- the mass of the planet to determine how big it might be and how much gravity there is, or how far away from its sun it is and what sort of atmosphere, so you know what kinds of weather it has.

This doesn't have to mean becoming a astrophysicist in order to write a story set in space. But understanding basic facts of space from a layman's point of view will prevent the sort of absurdities that will annoy informed readers and even make them stop reading your story.

In addition to understanding the science of your location, it's important to know, well, the location of your location. Try imagining or even drawing a map of the area, and sketch out important landmarks and areas where scenes take place. These details will help you get the characters moving in the right direction -- if you know the castle is south of the inn, then you won't accidently have them walking towards the rising sun to go visit the king. It will also give you a feel for how long it takes to travel from one spot to another, and what sort of things will be seen along the way.

Describing the neighborhood that the characters are in also helps give life to a location. Just as background music will convey emotion during a movie, descriptions of the physical surroundings will give a 'background' feel to a story.

Tolkien described the Shire so richly that, in the end, Saruman's corruption of the land itself becomes just as tragic, and moving, as the corruption of other characters in the story. Other locations have just as much detail and personality, showing the reader what sorts of people and events take place, and providing metaphor and allegory for the story itself. Indeed, Fangorn forest has so much personality that it literally is alive, the trees and Ents themselves becoming part of the story in a way that wouldn't be possible if Tolkien had said merely 'and there was a thick forest over there.

A location's history and reputation are also parts of its character. Think about what major events have occurred in this location that your characters might know about, or have legends regarding. What do the people who live there think and feel about their home? Do they love it or resent it? Do people want to escape, or is it the place to which everyone else wants to move? Knowing the answers to these questions can help you decide how to describe the location and what sort of mood it creates. It's hard to imagine Batman living in a sunny farm town and maintaining his edge, but Gotham and the dark, brooding Batman seem perfectly matched.

Another exercise that can help develop characters as well as location is to write a paragraph or two sketching the different character's interactions with the location. Doing so can reveal things you hadn't considered before, which can be incorporated into the story explicitly or implicitly. The engineer's assistant may have only one line in the story, but if you let her talk about what it's like living in a tiny cabin near the ship's engines, it can give you a better feel for the overall ship, its atmosphere, and its crew.

Conclusion

There's a limit, of course, to the time any author has for research and not every short story will merit a week's investigation on the weather cycles of Pluto. But that said, even a little investigation will lend your stories a depth and realism that unresearched stories simply can't hope to achieve.

Details will lend credibility to your original location, and allow readers to believe the location really does or could exist somewhere. Details may seem small and irrelevant, but even the most trivial fact can have an impact on a story. You may chose to ignore certain aspects of daily life for your characters, but blatant disregard for the story's environment can make it harder for a reader to believe -- and enjoy -- your story. Realism, even in the most fantastical story, makes a story come to life.

©James Lyn

James Lyn has been writing fiction for nearly thirty years. Favorites include science fiction and horror, which is weird considering that he absolutely refuses to read or watch any horror. When not writing, he enjoys cooking, reading, and catching up on sleep.



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