ATWELL ANDREWS: THREE TIPS FOR SETTING CREATION
Part of our Interview with an Author series with Atwell Andrews.
Believable settings are as important as believable characters. My foundation for creating an imaginative, credible setting is to think about what is going on in the story: What can the setting say about what the story represents? As the setting reappears throughout the novel, what mood and expectations will it evoke? This is so much easier than painting a striking scene, then trying to backtrack and fill it with meaning.
Here are three tips when you are thinking about your setting:
Use Setting to Serve the Story: Settings should NEVER be random and disconnected from the plot; they should ALWAYS add to the story, build momentum, move the story forward. Take Batman, for example. Batman is a complex, fragmented character with a dark, moody side. He is preoccupied with pushing back against evil, preventing it from taking over, but the evil is never fully extinguished, always threatening. Now think about Gotham City, Batman’s home and primary setting. It’s tall, gigantic, almost gothic, with a dark, sinister feel. Whenever Gotham is mentioned or seen, even if the angles and neighborhoods change, we experience a heaviness and expect conflict.
Use Real Places as Inspo: I find it useful to picture a real place that fits what I need and describe it, changing and adding elements as I need to. Back to the Gotham City example, Gotham is inspired by New York City in the mid-20th century, a time when the city was fraught with corruption, gang rivalry and crime. Batman writer and editor Dennis O’Neal has said that Gotham City is akin to “Manhattan below 14th Street at eleven minutes past midnight on the coldest night in November.”*
What about creating a light, beautiful setting? Same idea. I think about C.S. Lewis’ “foothills of heaven” in The Great Divorce. Clearly modeled after the English and Irish countryside, the setting would evoke warmth, freshness and peace for his mostly British audience. Then Lewis infuses meaning into that real setting: heaven is even more solid than the countryside, so solid that the ghostly characters visiting from the dreary grey city (hell) cut their feet on the blades of grass, and the brightness of the sun feels like bricks on their shoulders. And heaven is immense, so big that the bus the visitors come in fits through a small crack in the soil. Even the waterfall seems infused with Christian symbolism.
Start with the End in Mind: I try to start creating a setting with the end in mind. What will the characters go through, become throughout the novel? What is their moral journey? How will they grow internally? What can the setting symbolize? Think about the Elf-path through Mirkwood in J.R.R. Tolkein’s The Hobbit. It is little known, little used, narrow, often as dark as a tunnel and surrounded by thick trees and spiders. Cobwebs are all around the path, but they don’t impede it. In other words, the path, like the main characters’ journey, is difficult and SCARY. But when Bilbo and his companions take the narrow path, they make progress. But it’s hard to stay on the narrow path, and they finally succumb to the temptation to find an easier way. They leave the path and are lost in the darkness, never to find their way back to the path.
