Setting -

17Oct 2012 by diannagunn

Building your World by Addie J. King

Today's author is a Nanowrimo veteran who saw my call for guest posts and answered almost immediately. I'm very proud to present her post, Building Your World as part of my Nanowrimo Blogaganza. I hope you'll enjoy it as much as I did! * * * * So you've decided (or are thinking about) National Novel Writing Month this year? AWESOME! But what will you write about? More important, where will your story take place? Will you sail the Spanish Main? Will you inhabit the foggy gaslit streets of Victorian London? What about a spaceship, talking to aliens from another planet? Wanna write about werewolves and cavemen? Or will you write about something happening in today's world? There are a ton of ideas, and only you can decide where you…

Exploring Character and Setting at the Same Time

Writing

Sometimes, either before you begin a novel or between edits of a novel, you realize you need to learn more about your characters or your world before you can dive into the main story. Although it might be tempting to rush into the story, it pays to do this work so that creating the next draft is less painful. In order to maximize efficiency, I've found a way to explore character and setting at the same time. This doesn't include research. While learning about your setting always informs what your characters are like and how they react to things based on where they're from, research rarely leads directly to new realizations about characters. What does lead to new realizations about characters is free writing. But how do you use free…

Setting and its Purposes in Early Planning

Novels, Writing

You are probably aware of the three main elements of storytelling: plot, setting, and characterization. While these elements are usually talked about separately in writing blogs, in truly great fiction they are very hard to separate from one another, and each one directly influences the next. This is because characters must fit within their world; the plot must fit within the setting and the characters must be willing to participate. In most fantasy novels the setting is changed too, if not the climate or world itself than at least human society. Today I'm going to talk about setting and how you can either use it to create a story or how you can discover it by looking at the basic elements of your idea. I am lucky because my stories…