Creating a Character of your Setting

by Rachel MacMillan....

Ruthy note! I've been facebook friends with this amazingly frank and funny woman for a long time, since her early days in Seekerville and her current stint as amazingly hard-working career woman who happens to write a lot of books on the side. My kind of gal! I was so pleased she made time to join us for our 10th Birthday Celebration here in Seekerville, and I welcome Rachel's snark and wisdom. I get a kick out of both!

 221 B Baker Street, Privet Drive, Green Gables, Satis House, Middle Earth:  the names alone conjure strong images and thoughts and smells and feelings.    Even without traveling there, we have a keen and concrete sense of their existence.  

As a reader, I fall for setting as much as I do character. A well-developed and historically or contemporarily accurate setting can transport this armchair traveler to the ancient ruins of Rome or the battlefields of the Great War or a lazy porch swing on an American farm as days fall shorter and snow sparkles the sky. A well-developed setting, I believe, can act as one of the most important characters in your novels.   A world built well is a reader’s dream --- but it takes some planning and imagination on the part of its creator.

Often, world building is a term reserved for writers who create fantastical realms like Tolkien or Science Fiction that takes us beyond the stars like in Star Trek.  I believe that every time we take pen to paper we create a world: the narrative voice that maps through the characters and events we transcribe on page, the nuances, the vernacular, what we choose to describe and the lines we leave uncoloured for the readers’ imagination to fill in.

So how do we do that?

MAP IT OUT You want your readers to be able to follow in the footsteps of their favourite characters in a literary pilgrimage. On my most recent trip to London, I found my way to the wall of the Marshalsea Prison ---made famous by Charles Dickens’ Little Dorrit and a place I had always wanted to visit because of my love for the author and the book.  Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame was another recent cross off my literary bucket list when I visited Paris this Summer.

The gas lit cobblestones of Stevenson’s Edinburgh evoke the same chill that I felt reading Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

The leaves crunching under my feet in autumnal Concord made me feel that Jo, Amy, Meg and Beth were just around the corner.

On my first trip to Vienna, I had a better than working knowledge of the city—even beyond a map---because Bodie and Brock Thoene had painted its splendor so well in Vienna Prelude. In each case mentioned above, I was immediately able to recall moments from the novel and feel an immediate kinship with my surroundings because they came to life in the books I read.

IF YOU CAN, GO…

Earlier this year, I heard Stephen Schwartz speak. Schwartz is a popular Broadway composer and lyricist famed Wicked and Godspell, among other musicals. He has worked with Alan Menken on several Disney films including The Hunchback of Notre Dame.  He stepped out from the bell tower and high into the rafters where the gargoyles Quasimodo befriends stood sentry.  The Paris he looked out at, of course, had been stamped by modernity---but he said he could strip it all away and just imagine the city unfolding before him in its rudimentary Medieval state.  Where would the baker’s stall be?   Where would the bells’ sound reach?   Often things as slight as the direction the sun would slant through a window or whether buildings would block the belch and horn of an incoming ship can add that extra sense of place.

I can’t teleport to 1930s Boston, the setting of my next series, but I can return again and again and walk the streets and strip the present from my mind.  A trip to the Massachusetts Historical Society allowed me to study maps and to see how street names and roads have changed with construction and expansion.   Of course, a major city has evolved in the decades that have elapsed and a careful author will walk and experience and, like Schwartz, use their imaginative power to expose the city before skyscrapers and raging automobiles and teenagers weaving in and out taking selfies with buildings.

If you don’t have the opportunity to travel, read all of the books ---fiction and non—you can find.  Borrow travel booklets from the library, read Expedia and Trip Advisor questions and reviews—especially those that deal with distance or transportation if they are integral to your story.  Use Google Earth.  It is amazing that you can zoom in and have a live look at the place you are writing on your screen.  Is there a church in the perimeter?  Is there a tucked away coffee shop? These details can bring your book to life.

Pick a few key buildings or places that would be around in your book’s time period, if writing  historically, or that you are familiar with even as a contemporary author. 

In the Herringford and Watts series, I imagined Toronto in the Edwardian period and while the city has undergone major changes, historical preservation afforded me a great advantage.  To get my bearings of the city and to create my world of downtown Toronto in the 1910s, I used several of the same places and streets to build around in a familiar grid.  The Elgin and Winter Garden Theatres appear in almost all six stories featuring my lady detectives.   Big Ben and City Hall provides a sentinel for a Canada shifting to war, Union Station sees trains chug out and in bringing people to and from the metropolis of my mind.    Picking a few key points allows for easy mapping and research of a perimeter. Start small and work your way out until the entire curtain is pulled back on the past.    I frequented the archives for photographs as well as maps from the age.    Using my home as a character made me fall in love with it over and over again and my favourite response from readers is always “Now I want to visit Toronto.”

 HOW TO PICK A SETTING

It is easier to embroider a place you know well. Pick a place you have an affinity with, an emotional attachment to or fond memories of.  Or, if you are a historical novelist, a place with an interesting tenet of history you are fascinated by. It is far easier to create a setting full of character if you can close your eyes and inhabit it in your mind.  Remember that settings don’t need to be customarily flashy---they just need to have heart or facet to them.  The TV show Midsomer Murders takes place in a typical English village –though season after season atrocious murders cut through the routine ins and outs of rural life.  Hallmark Christmas films take small ordinary towns and spark them to life with twinkle and romance. 

MAKE SURE ACCURACY STILL ALLOWS FOR IMAGINATION:

    In my new series, my detective, Hamish DeLuca, finds immediate access to the Old North Church on Salem Street in Boston.   While I have spent my time there with an historian to get a clear sense of it in the 1930s (there were several differences a result now of historic upkeep), Hamish is able to get access to places that a public resident wouldn’t be able to explore.  I can keep the integrity of that historical setting while taking fictional allowances.  As a reader, I am far more interested in a writer capturing the essence of a time period than taking myself out of the story to nitpick every last supposed inaccuracy.

Questions for you:

What is the last book you read that evoked a strong sense of setting as character?  What are some of the ways you use to develop setting in your own work?

Rachel McMillan lives in Toronto where she works in Educational Publishing. She reads voraciously, loves to travel near and far and is a Broadway fanatic.  She is the author of the Herringford and Watts series for Harvest House and the upcoming Van Buren and DeLuca series for Harper Collins/Thomas Nelson... and she's offering a signed copy of The White Feather Murders to one lucky commenter!

Toronto, 1914. Merinda Herringford and Jem Watts never could have imagined their crime-solving skills would set them up

as emblems of female empowerment in a city preparing to enter World War I at the behest of Great Britain. Yet, despite their popularity, the lady detectives can't avoid the unrest infiltrating every level of society.