Setting: A Living Element with Fran McNabb

Thank you, Cara, for inviting me to the Seekerville Blog. Over the years, I’ve met many of your fellow Seekers at conferences and think you are part of a wonderful group of ladies.
I’ve chosen to say a few words about “Setting.” I know the subject has been written about on this blog, but it’s a favorite subject of mine so I hope I can approach it in a different way. Plus, it’s a great way for me to work in the subject of my newest Avalon release ON THE CREST OF A WAVE, February 2010.

First, setting is not a stagnant element that we label at the beginning of our manuscript, then forget about. Setting should an active, formative part of your story and your characters. Your characters are who they are because you’ve chosen a particular place and time in history for them. They become the product of this time and place.

Let’s look at a character we all know: Scarlett O’Hara from Gone with the Wind. With Scarlett O’Hara’s fist raised to the sky, she cries, “As God is my witness, I’ll never be hungry again.” Do you picture her saying that in a back alley of an inner city? Of course not. Scarlett would not have said or even thought to say those words had she not been raised as a child of the Old South prior to the Civil War. Tara and the life she lived on that plantation formed who she was and how she viewed the world. She could not have been Scarlett at any other time in history.
When we get into the POV of our characters, especially those set in other periods of history, we have to understand the period in which they lived. Even though I didn’t write anything as grand as “Gone with the Wind,” ON THE CREST OF A WAVE is also set in the south during the Civil War. Unlike Scarlett, my heroine didn’t live on a plantation. In fact, her life was that of the daughter of a fisherman along the Gulf Coast. I can relate to that. I, too, am the daughter of a fisherman so I understood many of the feelings she had about her life.
She finds herself helping a Union officer who was in charge of a prison camp on an island just off the coast of Mississippi. The tiny strip of sand housed thousands of soldiers, both Union and Confederate.

Because my mother’s family has run the ferry boats to and from the island, it was, and still is, an important part of my life. During one summer my family lived on the island to help run the concessions. For six days a week I roamed the island, swam in the water, and slept in the simple building that my grandfather built. On Saturday evening I would take the ferry back to the mainland to attend church on Sunday morning. What a glorious way for any child to spend the summer.

Needless to say, the island made an impression on me and I find I’ve used the images often in my stories. One night during that unforgettable summer, we had to spend the night in Fort Massachusetts because of a high tide from a storm. I remember the night as if it were yesterday, and when I used the fort in this new novel, I was able to pull from those impressions.
Granted, most authors don’t have the opportunity to personally experience all the places that they write about, but getting to know those places and studying the lifestyles during those periods are very important to form the types of characters we create.

Today, when my husband and I take our boat for a day or a weekend of fishing and swimming, we can see the fort from where we anchor. It’s hard to walk the island today over a hundred years later and not think about what happened on that barren stretch of sand. For me, it’s easy to look beyond the fishermen and the sun bathers and see my hero and heroine. I was able to immerse myself in that time period when I wrote the story, and I think we need to do that with every story we write.

Think about the settings you create. Can you place yourself where your characters play and walk and talk? Do you know the feeling of being in the mountains, the plains, a coastline, or in a big city? If you don’t, how can you convey the reality of a setting to your readers? As writers, we can use the internet, books, personal experiences, or other’s experiences to make that happen.

Have fun writing your next setting and let yourself be taken away.

You can visit Fran at her website http://www.franmcnabb.com/