How Setting Influences Story

Most good stories are very heavily influenced by their settings. Consider this simple story setup. A young couple has just gotten married. At the reception, the bridesmaid reveals that she and the best man had drunken fling the night before the wedding. As they head off on their honeymoon together, the bride and the groom must work through this crisis or their marriage will end before it has truly even begun.

This is a story that could happen virtually anywhere, and at almost any time in history. It could be a comedy, melodrama or tragedy. All of the elements are there for any sort of story you can imagine. The overt crisis (though not the underlying conflict) is clear and the stakes are equally clear. Consider though, the effect that setting would have on this story.

Setting #1: 2008. The wedding took place at a posh hotel in Chicago, The bride and groom now face a long plane rise to Hawaii, where they have secured a small villa right on the beach. While they are in Hawaii they are scheduled to attend a luau, an island tour and snorkeling in a private lagoon.

Setting #2: 1988. The couple were married at a Las Vegas chapel by an Elvis impersonator. The reception was held at the Circus Circus hotel buffet, which is the hotel they will be staying at, surrounded by their family and friends, for the next several days. They have tickets to see Rich Little and have booked a helicopter tour of the Las Vegas Strip.

Setting #3: 1954. Rural Virginia. The couple were married in a large church wedding with the reception at the Elk’s Lodge. For their honeymoon they are driving down to a small motel in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Their car is a ten-year old Cadillac.

Obviously these are rudimentary setting details, but I think you can get an idea that the three different settings lend themselves to dramatically different effects. A posh villa in Hawaii will influence the characters much differently than a garish casino or a small-town motel. The morals and general atmosphere of the 1950s, the 1980s and the 2000s are very different. The economics of the three settings are also dramatically different. The feeling of being surrounded by family or being isolated during a crisis has influences the characters.

The setting can either have a weak or a strong influence on the plot and the themes of a story, depending on how the writer uses it. Here are a few ideas for choosing your settings:

• Choose settings that matter to the characters
• Choose settings that can influence the action
• Choose settings that you know enough about to describe comfortably
• Choose settings that will be of interest to the readers
• Take the time to describe the settings in enough detail for the readers to have a clear idea of where the characters are

Deciding on a Narrative Voice

There are many ways to tell a story and you will need to choose which one will work best for your novel. Here is a quick rundown of the basic narrative points-of-view.

Third Person

A third person narrative tells the story from a perspective outside of any one particular character. It discusses the events from a slightly removed position. “Billy went to the store to get beer.” Some of the decisions involved with third person include whether or not the narrator has access to the character’s thoughts or merely their actions, and whether or not the narrator has a point of view about the actions happening in the story. Finally, there is the decision of whether or not to follow more than one character. A narrative can be in the third person, but still only focus on the actions of a single character.

First Person

First person is told from the perspective of a character within the story, usually the lead character but sometimes a peripheral character that happens to know most of the events either through observation, participation or through someone else telling them what happened. “I went to the store to get beer.” It is also possible to have multiple first-person narratives, with the perspective shifting by chapter or by scene from one storyteller to another.

Reliable or Unreliable Narrators

In first person narratives, the character sees everything from their own point of view. This means that they cannot know what happens unless they observe it or are told it, and the way they observe the story may be pretty close to the facts or skewed by their own perceptions. A story narrated by a pathological liar or a child, for example, may not accurately reflect the reality of what is going around them. Third person narrators are usually not unreliable, but it is possible to do this as well.

What Ar Your Needs?

Choosing which type of narrator to have can be difficult. You want the narrator that is going to best reflect the needs and goals of your story. A story with twenty different characters, for example, may need a third person narrator simply because a single character within the story may not be able to observe or even be told all of the things that occur. A first person narrator, however, generally adds a level of immediacy to the story, and the fact that they are seeing what happens from the character’s perspective may increase the reader’s feeling of connection to the story.

Once you choose a voice though, especially if you are trying to work quickly for a deadline like Nanowrimo, you need to stick with your first choice. Changing the narrative voice requires a great deal of editing and can take quite a lot of time.

Writing an Action Outline

Outlines Make it Easier to Track Complex Events

An action outline is a point by point outline of the events that you intend to have happen in your story. The action outline serves as a roadmap for your plot. It demonstrates to you how your plot will be driven forward. It helps you to think about how an action taken in chapter two might result in an event in chapter ten, due to the sequence of events it causes.

The beauty of an action outline is that it allows you to look at the complexities of the different things happening in your novel. How the choice not to return a phone call early on may result in a lawsuit or a suicide attempt as the story continues. These action-based relationships are what are generally lost when you write without an outline.

Cause and Effect Drive a Plot Forward

When writing an action outline, think in terms of cause and effect. While, in everyday life, not every mistake or missed opportunity matters in a given day, in a novel these things must matter. If the choice to go to a party rather than visit a sick friend has no consequence further down the line, then it probably doesn’t belong in the novel. Life may sometimes feel random, but in the end, a story needs to feel like an evolution. An illogical event might happen early on, but as the story progresses it must have a logical impact on all the people concerned.

Some consequences may be less startling than others. A character may not suffer external consequences to an action, but may pay an emotional price that results in them making a different decision later on. The decision not to visit a sick friend on Tuesday weighs on the character until Thursday, then the character finally does go, just in time to run into someone the character didn’t want to see or find out that they missed out on something they would have wanted to be present for.

If you map out those possibilities from the beginning, you will not only understand what drives your plot forward, but it gives a shape to what you write so that everything feels logical within the framework of your story, no matter how different your world might be from reality.

Sample Action Outline

This outline shows two different chapters in a novel, demonstrating that actions from an earlier part of the novel often result in consequences later on. This is a very bare-bones outline to demonstrate the process. You might want to be far more detailed about the actions that occur.

Chapter 3

1. Lisa comes home to find Sam’s father Roy parked in front of their house.
2. Roy demands to see Sam. He is clearly drunk and angry.
3. Roy grabs Lisa, holding her helpless. He threatens her life.
4. Jeremy  arrives from next door and bashes Roy on the head with a baseball bat. Knocking him out.
5. Jeremy tells Lisa he will take care of things
6. Jeremy shoves an unconscious Roy into the passenger seat of his own car.
7. Jeremy takes Roy’s keys, gets in on the drivers side and drives off.

Chapter 8

1. Lisa tells Sam that his father has been in the Hospital for several days.
2. Sam confronts Lisa about her keeping the information from him.
3. Sam and Lisa break up.
4. Sam goes to Union Hospital to see his father.

What are Your Novel’s Goals?

Prepare for Success

One of the preparations that makes writing a novel easier, especially a novel that you have to complete in a month for Nanowrimo, is determining the goals for your novel. What do you want to have happen by the end of your story? As you assemble your characters and look at your plot, it helps to think about where you want it all to end up. What is the final moment of your story going to be? What are your characters going to learn or fail to learn? Will the novel end on a success or a failure? Is the story tragic, melodramatic, romantic or comic? What do you want your readers to come away from the story thinking?

Decide Where You Are Going

Take the time to review your goals as you start your process. How you expect your story to end? What do you expect to be the resolution for each major character? What are your emotional or thematic goals? Write all of these things down. This is the beginning of your story outline. Your goals may be different than the ones I have proposed. Your goals could be focused on character, theme, audience, style or a visualized resolution. The important step is to formalize those goals so that you know what you are working toward.

Beware of Dogs

Not every story gets written with an end goal in mind. It isn’t a requirement for a novel, but using this method keeps your intentions clear. If you know your destination, it is much easier to plan your way there. A novel that is written without any goals in mind at the beginning can succeed, but there are many pitfalls. It can be very easy to find yourself in a “shaggy dog” story in which the plot seems to lurch from one random event to the other.

Don’t Look Back

In many cases, if you don’t have goals in mind, they will become apparent about halfway through your novel and you will realize that you need to go back to the beginning and start to rewrite because the plot does not match your new direction. Characters that may have been important in the beginning could suddenly have no role in the conclusion because they weren’t created with that conclusion in mind.

Having end goals in mind, even if you don’t have a fully fleshed out outline/plot, will help keep you focused on what you want your characters to do and how they need to be shaped by the story. What you want to avoid, especially when on a deadline, is going back to rework what you have already written. You want to be able to see your draft all the way through to the end.

Next Page »