Writers in the Storm

by Julie Glover

We writers spend a lot of time thinking about our characters, knowing that their backgrounds, personalities, moods, and more impact the story in so many ways. Setting can do that too. It can convey personality, mood, tension, and conflict; reveal or reinforce character and themes; and make a story more relatable and alive for readers.

So how can we use setting to its full effect?

Consider Your Characters

When choosing where to set your story or specific scenes, ask a couple questions about your characters.

Where are your characters most likely to be found? What does your character’s home look like and contain? What’s their workplace like? Where do they hang out with friends? Do they spend time in nature? How could you describe those settings to illuminate who your character is?

Where are your characters least likely to be found? Putting them in such settings provides opportunities for tension and conflict. How your character copes with being outside their comfort zone tells a lot about who they are.

Mark of the Gods, the first book of my co-written supernatural suspense Muse Island series, starts with main character Piper Prince in a federal prison where she works as a forensic psychologist. Despite the chaos of criminals, she’s in control there, feeling confident of her mission and ability. But to track her long-missing parents, she flies to a tropical island where various mythical creatures live among unsuspecting humans. Unlike those other humans, she can see their true selves. Slowly but surely, Piper’s sense of control crumbles, as she moves from a place where she’s most likely to be found to a place she never knew existed. The island and its individual locations helped uncover Piper’s strengths, weaknesses, and desires while presenting fresh challenges that pushed the story forward.

You can also put these two questions together in a single scene. In our latest novel, Heir of the Chaos, we needed a setting for a pivotal conversation between two longtime friends, one of whom happens to be the Egyptian goddess of fertility. So, we chose a place where she would be found but he would not. The goddess summoned her bestie, Finn, to the one and only nude beach on the island. Admittedly, that setting was also fun to write, but opting for that location substantially increased the tension of their interaction.

A Well-Known Example

Unless you’ve read our Muse Island series (which you should!), those examples may not be as useful as one you’ve seen—or at least heard about.

Let’s consider what the choice of setting in Star Wars: A New Hope tells you about its main character, Luke Skywalker, in each of these scenes.

Luke would, of course, be found on his home planet of Tatooine, which looks like this:

That setting reinforces that Luke is an orphan, somewhat lonely, and likely seeking an adventure outside this desert planet. It conveys a feeling of emptiness in his life.

Once he leaves the planet, he finds himself in completely different settings, such as the Mos Eisley cantina:

Here’s Luke at the bar:

How brilliant was this setting? Luke looks out of place (which he is), and the cantina's vibe is a mixture of hedonism and danger. At any moment, someone could lose an arm.

We also have the opportunity to see how the other characters engage in this setting—for instance, the calm of Obi Wan and the shadiness of Han Solo.

Finally, consider all the scenes in movies where people are trapped. Star Wars: A New Hope took it to nth degree.

It’s not just that the walls are closing in on Chewbacca, Luke, Han, and Leia. Making the trap a garbage compactor reinforces the idea that the Empire views the Rebels as trash to be discarded.

Settings Have an Arc Too

As you can see in Star Wars, settings have an arc too. We can trace the story and character growth through changes in setting. Luke begins on an empty planet, lands up in crowded cantina, and ends up fighting alongside friends in an Empire stronghold. The settings follow his growth.

For each scene you write, think about where you are in the character arc and the story’s progression. A story structure arc might be helpful in determining what kind of setting to choose. Let’s take a fairly simple one with a baseline, rising action, a climax, and resolution.

If you’re following an arc like this, you don’t want your most tense setting to be in the rising action section. You want to save your OMG setting for the climax. But also, you will need some calm settings in places, as your character steps back and reflects on what’s happened and how to move forward.

In Power of the Song, book two in our Muse Island series, we begin in Piper’s new office—not as comfortable as her previous one, but a safe and calm space nonetheless. As action rises, she finds herself in a forest of faerie (a bit unusual, but trees are still trees), a creepy hotel (where the vines get out of control), and a police station (with a not-so-friendly sheriff). In between, we return to Piper’s office for breathers. As tension ramps up, though, so do the settings. After the climax, we return to her office again, creating setting bookends.

Of course, there are other narrative arcs. In Star Wars: A New Hope, the final scene couldn’t be more different from our introduction to Luke Skywalker on his desert planet home. He’s now surrounded by friends, filled with purpose, and hailed as a hero. And that setting is perfect for his character arc.

Be Intentional About Setting

If there’s one takeaway from this post, it’s this: be intentional about setting. Choosing a setting that reveals your character, sets the right mood, creates tension or conflict, and follows the characters’ growth can enhance the story in more ways than you realize.

Ditch the neutral settings. Get creative! Consider your characters and the arc. Look at examples (beyond Star Wars) for inspiration.

And if you want some great resources on writing setting, you’ll find plenty here by typing “setting” into the search bar.

How have you used setting to challenge or reveal character? What other examples come to mind that demonstrate good use of setting to show story progression?

About Julie

Julie Glover is an award-winning author of young adult and mystery fiction. Her contemporary YA includes Sharing Hunter, Daring Charlotte, and Pairing Anton, releasing in the next couple of weeks! She has also co-authored five supernatural suspense novels and two short stories in the mythology-based Muse Island series under her pen name Jules Lynn. She's especially excited that this series is finally available in print!

A native of Texas, she now lives in Denton with her hottie husband, her loquacious cat, and her large collection of cowgirl boots.

Image credit: Michelle Maria from Pixabay

by Jaime Buckley

You know the feeling.

You finish the draft, you let it sit for a week, and then you read it again with fresh eyes. Somewhere around the middle, it goes soft. The ending lands with a polite thud.

You can't point to the problem, but you know it's in there. It's a cold draft in an old house and you can't find the open window.

So you hand it to a beta reader.

They shrug. "I don't know. It just didn't grab me."

And you walk away with a vague bad feeling and nothing you can actually fix.

I've been on both ends of that conversation more times than I can count.

What years of fixing broken stories (mine and plenty of other people's) finally taught me is: most of the time, the hole is a decision.

Most holes start before the page

When a story breaks, we go looking in the sentences. We tighten the prose, cut adverbs, punch up the dialogue, and rewrite the opening for the ninth time (for me, the 20^th) because, of course, THAT'S the problem.

Sometimes that helps. Usually it doesn't.

Because the problem started somewhere upstream of the page.

It started with something you meant to decide and never did.

• The motive you planned to settle "later."
• The reason your hero can't simply walk away from all this.
• The clue you knew about but never actually planted.

Those are decisions.

Do you know what makes them so hard to see? 

You can't fix a decision you haven't made yet. 

Chew on that.

No amount of polish will paper over it, because the reader feels the empty space underneath the prose even when they can't name it.

A sagging middle is very often a hero who wants nothing specific. A mystery that feels like a cheat is very often a clue that lived in your notes and never made it into chapter three.

The symptom is always a feeling that something's off. The cause is a blank where a choice should be.

So what's the solution?

Ask the questions an editor would ask.

I've found that the fastest way to find an undecided decision is to ask yourself the questions a sharp editor would ask across the table. Then answer each one in a single sentence.

One sentence.

If it takes a paragraph, or a "well, it's complicated," you haven't decided yet.

Here are a few that break stories open in almost any genre:

• Why can't your hero simply walk away?
  What do they lose, specifically, if they quit?
• What does your hero believe about themselves that isn't true? And where does the story force them to face it?
• What does your antagonist want, in their own words? 
  Would they call what they're doing good?
• At the big turns, who decides what happens? Your hero, or the plot?

Each genre has its own set, too.

• A mystery writer should ask whether the true culprit appears in the first third of the book.
• A romance writer should ask what wound keeps these two apart, and why it can't be solved with one honest conversation over coffee.
• A fantasy writer should ask what magic costs, and whether the climax uses the rules the reader spent the whole book learning.

Now watch what happens when you try to answer.

Some questions you'll answer in a heartbeat.

Good.

That part of your story is solid, and you can stop worrying about it.

Some questions will make you squirm.

You'll start typing, stop, delete it, and slowly realize you don't actually know the answer. You meant to know. You assumed you knew. But you never decided.

That squirm is the hole.

I think it's the most useful feeling in revision, and most of us have trained ourselves to skip right past it!

The test most writers never run

I want to show you where it gets interesting.

Let's say you answered every question. Clear, confident, one sentence each. You know your villain's motive. You know why your hero can't walk away.

Awesome!

Now, where does a reader see it? 

Name the chapter. Name the scene.

I rebuilt the way I revise around this one simple test.

It's brutal in the best way, because there's a second kind of hole, sneakier than the first, and it hides inside the answers you're proudest of.

You decided, yes.

BUT…you never wrote it down where the reader could find it.

Tsk. Tsk. Tsk.

It lives in your head, in your outline, in a note on your phone from two in the morning. You know it so well that you read it into the pages every time you revise.

THINK about that.

Your brain fills the gap so smoothly you never notice the gap was there.

But the reader doesn't have your notes.

They only have the page.

If you can't point to the page, it's still in your head.

So run your answers through it:

• You can't answer the question at all. That's an undecided hole. Go make the decision first, before you touch a single sentence.
• You can answer it, but you can't point to the chapter and scene. That's a decided hole. The choice exists, but the reader never sees it, and this one gets fixed in the draft, often with a single line in the right place.

The second kind is the one that drives writers crazy, because it's invisible to you and completely obvious to everyone else.

Ohhhhh, I personally HATE this one.

It's exactly why the beta reader shrugs.

They felt the gap you can't see.

When your answers argue with each other

There's a third place stories break, and it only shows up when you lay your answers side by side.

Two answers that each sound fine on their own can't both be true.

Say you decided your villain wants to buy the old harbor lighthouse for his shipping company before winter.

Clear motive.

You also decided your hero, a lamplighter's apprentice, wants to clear her name before the town trial.

Also clear.

Now put those two sentences next to each other.

Does he stand in her way? Does she stand in his? If both of them can get exactly what they want without ever crossing paths, you have two people living in the same town and no villain at all.

There's no fight.

The reader feels that as a story with no teeth.

…even if every individual scene is beautifully written.

The fix is usually a single decision

Find the one thing only one of them can have.

Maybe the lighthouse holds the ledger that proves she's innocent. Now his deal destroys her case, and with every page he gets closer to signing, she gets closer to the rope.

I see contradictions like that everywhere:

• An impossible-looking crime with a hand-waved solution. The more impossible the setup, the cleaner the answer has to be.
• A hero who's supposed to change, but whose first scene and last scene describe the same person.
• A magic system the reader learned carefully... that bends the moment the plot needs it to.

None of these show up when you read one chapter at a time. They show up when you put your own answers in a row and make them meet.

How to run this on your draft tonight

You don't need anything fancy for this. A notebook works, and so does a blank document.

Step one: write the questions.

Use the ones above, plus a few for your genre. Fifteen to twenty is plenty for a novel, and fewer for a short story.

Step two: answer each one in a single sentence.

No cheating with "kind of" or "I'll figure it out." If you can't answer, write UNDECIDED in capital letters and move on, and don't stop to fix anything yet.

Step three: prove it.

Next to every answer you're confident about, write the chapter and scene where a reader sees it. If you can't name one, write NOT ON THE PAGE.

Step four: read your answers side by side.

Look for any two that can't both be true, and start with your hero's want against your antagonist's want.

When you're done, you'll have something most revision passes never give you, which is a list of specific, nameable gaps sorted into decisions you need to make and decisions you need to write.

Start with the UNDECIDED ones, because every other fix depends on them. Then work the list from the top.

The part that makes you a stronger writer

I love this part most.

When someone else (or someTHING else) fixes your story, that one book gets a little better while you stay exactly the writer you were. On the next book, you're right back where you started, staring at the same soft middle and wondering why it keeps happening to you.

Book after book.

…after book.

When you find the hole yourself, by asking the question and feeling the squirm, you learn where you personally tend to skip decisions. Maybe you always leave your villain's plan vague, or maybe your clues keep living in your notes instead of on the page.

(I really love this part)

Once you know your pattern, you start catching it while you draft. I've watched it happen in my own books. The holes get smaller with every manuscript, because you're filling them before the reader ever gets there.

So go find your holes.

Then go fill them.

I believe in you.

Which kind of hole do you run into the most: the decision you never made...or the one you never wrote down? Have you ever "known" something about your story that never made it onto the page (and how'd you find out)? Finally, what's one question about your current story that made you squirm just now?

About Jaime

Jaime Buckley is an author, cartoonist, and creator of the Wanted Hero fantasy universe. A father of thirteen, he knows a good story has to compete with real life, hold its own, and leave people wanting more. He helps writers build worlds worth exploring and stories worth sharing, guided by one conviction: “You are MORE than you THINK you are.”

Find practical encouragement for your writing at JaimeBuckley.com, or step into his world and start reading free at Life of Fiction.

Jaime's new tool: FictionProof asks the questions a sharp editor would ask, finds what you haven't decided yet, and hands you the questions that settle it. It runs on your own computer, and your book never leaves it. No AI is used in the analysis.

 Describing your POV character from the inside out

Have you ever struggled with how to describe a character in POV without resorting to a mirror scene? Or worse, describe a character by having them look in a mirror? It's a good rule. I'm glad somebody started saying it because we've all read those scenes where a character wanders into a bathroom, stares at their reflection, and conveniently reports their eye color, hair color, height, weight, and every distinguishing feature they possess. Readers see the machinery immediately and it can really bother them .

How do we describe a character in POV without a mirror?

Years ago, I wrote a prologue about a young girl whose life was coming apart. She was frightened, desperate, and trying to make sense of circumstances that had narrowed her world down to a handful of terrible choices. At that moment she wasn't thinking about the color of her eyes. She wasn't cataloging her features. She wasn't wondering whether anyone would think she was beautiful. She was trying to survive. So I wrote her fear. I wrote her grief. I wrote the pressure she was under and the choices she faced. In my mind, those things mattered far more than whether her hair was brown or blonde.

Then readers started asking what she looked like.At first, I found that mildly irritating. Not because the question was unfair. Quite the opposite. It was completely fair. The reader wanted something I wasn't giving them. The character couldn't thinking about her physical aspects, but the READER still wanted to see her.

I've thought about that a lot over the years because it points to a real problem in point-of-view writing. We want readers immersed in the character's experience, but readers also need enough physical detail to build a picture. How do we give them that picture without forcing our character to think thoughts that don't feel natural?

I suspect the answer has something to do with how we experience ourselves in real life.

I know what color my eyes are, but I almost never think about them. In fact, someone told me I had beautiful blue eyes the other day and I had to stop a minute. Yes, my eyes are blue but it’s not something I pay any attention to. Most days I don't think about my appearance in any organized way at all. What I notice are things that affect my life. My back that gets stiff if I sit too long. A blouse that doesn't fit the way it used to. A photograph that catches me from an angle I wasn't expecting. The fact that my hair has developed opinions of its own. Those are the things that rise to the surface of my consciousness.

Why? Because we experience ourselves indirectly. A woman may become aware of being tall because she's always the tallest one in the room. A man may think about his scar because people keep asking about it. Someone with exceptionally curly hair may spend half their life fighting it and wondering what other people might think. In other words, people usually become aware of physical characteristics when those characteristics collide with something else.

That's where things started clicking for me.

Maybe the goal isn't to describe what a character looks like. Maybe the goal is to describe what it's like to live inside that particular body. That sounds like the same thing, but I don't think it is at all.

Suppose I want readers to know my character is tall. I could simply have her tell the reader that fact. There's nothing inherently wrong with that. The reader receives the information and moves on. But what if she automatically reaches for things nobody else can reach? What if family photographs become an exercise in figuring out where to put her? What if she's spent her entire life hearing variations of, “Wow, you're tall?” But height isn't only information. It's experience.

The same thing happens with appearance generally. The description is still there. It's simply tangled up with emotion, memory, relationships, and everyday life.

A friend of mine once pointed out that we never actually see ourselves directly. We see reflections. Photographs. Shadows. Other people's reactions. We spend our lives assembling a picture from fragments and assumptions. It's a strange thought when you stop to consider it. The person we know best is also somebody we've never truly observed from the outside.

And maybe that's what I was missing in the prologue of the frightened girl. Not eye color. Not hair color. Clues. Physical experiences. Small moments that would have allowed readers to assemble the picture for themselves while they were sharing her fear and despair. And, the more I watch people, the more convinced I become that character description lives in those moments. Not in mirrors. In friction. In comparisons. In old insecurities. In favorite features. In aging joints and stubborn hair and clothes that fit beautifully or don't fit at all.

When readers ask what a character looks like, they probably aren't asking for a police sketch.

They're asking for enough pieces to imagine a human being. And the longer I write, the more I think those pieces are found not in what a character sees when they look at themselves, but in the thousand small ways they move through the world without looking at themselves at all.

For a free video on this subject and a look at the prologue I’ve mentioned, click here.

How do you describe a character in POV without using a mirror?

About Sally

Sarah (Sally) Hamer is a lover of books, a teacher of writers, and a believer in a good story. Most of all, she is eternally fascinated by people and how they 'tick'. She’s passionate about helping people tell their own stories, whether through fiction or through memoir. Writing in many genres - mystery, science fiction, fantasy, romance, medieval history, non-fiction – she has won awards at both local and national levels, including two RWA Golden Heart finals.

A teacher of memoir, beginning and advanced creative fiction writing, and screenwriting at Louisiana State University in Shreveport for over twenty years, she also teaches online at both margielawson.com and nostresswriting.com and blogs for writersinthestormblog.com/ and thewriteconversation.blogspot.com. Sally is a free-lance editor and book coach at Mind Potential, with many of her students and clients becoming successful, award-winning authors. Find her at sally@mindpotential.org

Featured picture created by CoPilot.