Location, Location, Location!

Grounding your setting in a place that you know will help you visualize your work. In the magical adventure series, Bats in the Belfry, I used my hometown, a quaint village south of Buffalo on Lake Erie. To me Silver Creek was an enchanting place to grow up in the 1950's. I know the town so well, every building, every inch of the woods, every person who lived there then. I turned my hometown into Silver Cricket, a magical place with wizards, dragons and, yes, even a flying saucer. Using a locale in your life as the setting for your work is helpful because all the details are there. You don’t have to make up a locale be it village, city or house because you know the place. I’m not saying you shouldn't make up a locale. I’m saying it's helpful to use a place you know, and these details add atmosphere and authenticity. Of course this place you recall can be in another state, country or planet for that matter.

?????The setting of your novel is important, perhaps more important than you realize. Placing your hero in a snowbound cabin in Alaska is vastly different than on a tropical island in Hawaii. Not only for the obvious reason of cold versus heat. How your hero deals with the environment or reacts to it is essential to character development. In the cold of winter he or she may be forced to go out to hunt for food. On a tropical island a food shortage may not be a problem as he or she can pick a mango off a tree. Of course there are stranded-on-an-island scenarios where the lack of food is the issue, I get it. What I’m getting at is that every setting has a built-in ambiance that as a writer you can use to enhance your book. It also provides a challenge for your hero. Driving on snow covered roads is certainly more of a challenge than breezing down a road in Hawaii. You may want to throw in a tropical storm for a challenge if it serves your scenario in that case. Any setting has its own feel and specific environment, trees, birds, animals or the lack of such. This all has an effect on your hero. Someone who grew up in the country has a different experience than someone who grew up in a bustling city. The background of your character, that life experience, colors your character, gives him or her certain skills. A city boy probably doesn’t know how to milk a cow. Someone who grew up on a dairy farm would be familiar with this. Why is that important…it might be in a story where a woman is going to give birth in some kind of an emergency outside of a hospital. Our hero, because he grew up on a farm, is familiar with animals giving birth and even assisted in the birth of calves. This knowledge aids the hero who helps with the human birth. The setting of your novel can give you all sorts of juicy details to work with like the place's history, climate, terrain even past crimes. Do your research and unearth all those nuggets. Happy Writing!