If you are setting your novel in a real location then, if
your novel is set in current or historic times, most readers expect your
descriptions and details to be accurate. Even if you are setting your novel in
the future it is still important to consider details relating to anything that
remains the same such as the distance between streets or towns. That said you
can use a real location, or multiple locations, as the basis for a fictitious place
and also use details from those locations to aid development of your plot.
Your novel may be set in a city of contrasts. Some people
live in expensive apartment blocks with clean streets and easy access to shops
and facilities. Others live in crumbling high rise flats with littered streets,
playgrounds with broken equipment and high streets where the shops are mostly
boarded up. Such a city may or may not exist. If it does it may not be easy for
you to travel to – although online access to maps, street views and photos can
be useful. You may already have a good idea about what these locations look
like but detail from real life can bring your setting to life.
If you take a walk, with a camera and notebook, around your nearest
town or city you will most likely find examples of some of the places and
details you imagined for your book. They may not be exactly as you imagined but
they will have features you can describe. For example, you may find an office
block that has features that would be useful when describing your expensive apartment
block – a view across the river, underground parking with security. You then
might find a three-storey block of flats with balconies full of plants. A
restaurant could have a courtyard area. A city park might have a pathway suitable
for runners. All of these can be put together to create the apartment block and
its surrounding area. It is all these tiny details from multiple places that
enable you to build a picture and create a sense of place (wealthy, happy, convenient,
stressful, lonely etc). This detail may also provide potential ways to add to
your plot – the security guard could be a witness to a crime or the only person
a resident has a friendly conversation with, the river could become a hazard or
an escape route.
Similarly, you might want to create an area that appears
depressing. One boarded up shop in an otherwise modern and busy shopping centre
might have some of the detail – the colour of the boards used or the way it makes you feel. The
graffiti you noticed on a bridge could be transposed onto the shop front. That
one broken paving slab could become many broken or raised slabs along your fictitious
street.
Take notice of the detail and you can add a richness to your writing.
Exercise
1) Take a walk around your neighbourhood and make some notes
about little details, also take some photos. This could be a hedge that hides
the house beyond it, a pothole that cyclists have to avoid, an obstruction on
the pavement that causes walkers to step into the road, peeling paint on a door,
a garden full of topiary, a single shoe left on a wall, one building that is
dwarfed by its neighbours, an unusual door knocker, weeds growing in the middle
of a lane, a bench in a street.
2) Write an outline for a fictitious setting using elements from your notes
and photos. Make it different from the actual location. That one large house
might become a whole street of large houses, the small patch of untended garden
might become a deserted village.
3) Write some notes that could be used in a short story or
novel based on what you have seen. For example, that tiny building might be there
because the owner refused to sell to developers or the bench could be a meeting
place for romance or crime.
Happy writing
No comments:
Post a Comment