creating novel settings Archives

Building a World

Any writing endeavor leaves an author building a world. This is true for nonfiction as well as fiction. It is true for any genre.

Nonfiction Too?

Nonfiction is set in a real place. It is someplace you can see pictures of or visit. Except that isn’t the place you are writing about.

The author is writing about a place the author sees. It may be based on reality, but the author sees it according to the author’s point of view.

When I wrote “Exploring the Ozark Hills”, I chose the topics. I went out and took the pictures framing them to illustrate what I wanted to write about. It was the real world, but it was also the world I wanted to see.

Real World Fiction

Novels set in the real world, past or present, are like the ones for nonfiction. They may be based on real places, but they are written about as the author sees them.

Plot events influence what is most important in a setting description. Flower kinds and colors don’t matter much during a chase scene. During a romantic scene, these may help enhance the feeling the writer is trying for.

Fantasy and Science Fiction

No matter how hard a writer tries to create an imaginary world, it will relate to what is familiar. We may write about being telepathic, but it is not based on experience. Instead we write about what we think it would be like.

Building a world with strange plants and animals is the same. We have a mental picture of what an animal is, what a plant is. The imaginary ones will conform to these ideas to some extent as we can’t relate to something totally out of our experience.

Melding Truth and Imagination

As I struggle with “The Carduan Chronicles: Ship Nineteen”, I must meld the reality of nature with my point of view of these places with the point of view of these small people. The plants and animals are those I am familiar with. I must see them differently to make my writing feel real.

Building a world for any writing project is challenging. It takes time and thought. In the end, this world begins to feel real and that lets it feel real for a reader.

When I wrote “Broken Promises”, I intended to move Hazel Whitmore from the city to the country. It took an entire book to accomplish this. So I ended up writing “Old Promises”.

cover of "Old Promises" Hazel Whitmore #2 by Karen GoatKeeper — It took all of “Broken Promises” to get Hazel Whitmore out of the city. Now she is in the country, rural Missouri, trying to adapt to no internet, no cell phone, new relatives, new school and being miles from town.

The Setting

Although I’ve seen every contiguous state and lived in several of them, I’ve lived in the rural Missouri Ozarks for thirty years. Following the dictum ‘write what you know’, I moved Hazel to the Missouri Ozarks. This covers a lot of territory.

Crooked Creek is a fictitious town modeled on two or three towns I’ve lived near. The residents are drawn from people I’ve known in these towns, although only one is true to the person.

The land Hazel moves to is modeled after a place we looked at when we moved here. It wasn’t suitable for our life style, but works well for Hazel’s.

My imagination dreamed up the house. I’ve been in buildings filled with dust and dirt along with cobwebs. These were a bit exaggerated for the novel.

The setting was essential for writing “Old Promises”, even needing a bit of a map.

City to Country

There are so many adjustments for someone moving from the city, if they want to be part of the country life for real. Some of them are a big shock.

For me, seeing the horizon was amazing as smog hid it near Los Angeles. And my father’s place was flooded in three days after I got there, something I’d only seen on TV.

Hazel’s world is a bit different. Her new house is hidden behind a hill so there is no cell service. Internet service is slow once her mother can afford to have it put in. Town is miles away.

Hazel’s school is a small kindergarten to eighth grade. The students have known each other all their lives. She is not only new, but a stranger, a foreigner and resented by relatives she has never met or known of before.

Sink or Swim

Although the plot revolves around an old family feud, the real story is Hazel trying to understand and adjust to a way of life undreamed of by those living in cities. In some ways, that way of life will never be understood by the city transplant. That is something I understand even after thirty years living in the Ozarks and helped me in writing “Old Promises”.