Partially, this meant that whereas I (largely) used the city’s actual historical past and geography, each particular person and enterprise within the e-book is invented. However it additionally meant that I needed to strategy the city as I’d the e-book’s characters, giving it the sort of story arc and shades of persona that readers count on from the human characters.
Too usually, settings find yourself being simply that: a type of stage set on which the characters perform the motion of the novel. I needed the Mill Valley of my novel to be rather more than that.
Listed below are a number of ideas I discovered helpful as I labored to make that aim a actuality.
1. Do your analysis
To write down properly about your characters, it’s important to know them intimately, and the identical goes for a spot.
After I went again to Mill Valley to see household, I made some extent of visiting locations I knew would present up within the e-book—my outdated Little League baseball subject, the city’s central plaza universally often called “the Bricks,” the crumbling World Battle II-era coastal artillery bunkers the place we used to celebration after I was a child.
At every website, I took notes on what I noticed and heard and smelled, in addition to about who was there and what they have been doing. Greater than as soon as, my observations discovered their method instantly into the e-book.
I additionally did a good bit of analysis into the historical past of Mill Valley and the encompassing Marin County. The web is nice for this. I discovered outdated maps that confirmed the realm within the early years of Spanish settlement earlier than California grew to become a state and skim novice histories of the realm working from the arrival of the Coast Miwok individuals, by means of the years of the Spanish settlement, and proper as much as the waves of individuals introduced by the Golden Gate Bridge and World Battle II.
This helped me create a “backstory” for the city, which, in flip, made it simpler for me to construct a compelling dramatic arc for it.
2. Give your setting a dramatic story arc
In a novel, a “flat” character at all times stays the identical, whereas a “rounded” character adjustments over the course of the story in a compelling method. The identical holds true, I’ve come to consider, for settings.
All of us write loads of “flat” settings—a bar the place two characters meet, a courtroom the place a trial takes place, and so on.—however I needed the city on the coronary heart of Blithedale Canyon to have a narrative arc identical to ones I gave to the e-book’s most important characters. And, simply as with a human character, that meant one thing very important wanted to be at stake for the city and the motion of the novel wanted to place these stakes in danger.
For the Mill Valley of Blithedale Canyon what’s at stake is the query of what sort of city it’s going to be. Within the novel, the technology of small-business house owners who made the city is dying off, changed by fabulously rich entrepreneurs and tech gurus. The household of Trent Wolfer, the novel’s narrator, owned a shoe retailer the place his granddad repaired sneakers within the again. Close by malls killed off that enterprise, and now, as Trent says at one level, “All of the outdated shops are gone. There’s nothing left on the town however chain shops and artwork galleries.” Trent takes a job at a regionally owned grocery retailer the place the son of the proprietor is making an attempt to harness the facility of the net to out-compete a high-end nationwide chain and maintain the enterprise in his household. This battle for the city’s id turns into an necessary secondary plot for the e-book.
3. The setting’s story arc has to hook up with the central plot of the novel
It’s all properly and good to supply your readers a storyline on your setting, but when it doesn’t join in a significant option to the e-book’s plot, readers will marvel why it’s there.
In Blithedale Canyon, the central plot is a love story. Trent is a drug addict and alcoholic who strikes again to his hometown to dwell along with his mom and her tech-millionaire second husband after narrowly avoiding an extended jail sentence for defrauding the proprietor of a liquor retailer in Santa Barbara.
On the floor, Trent would appear the final particular person on Earth to care about Mill Valley’s small-town really feel. However his grandparents’ shoe retailer was a haven from the chaos of his childhood, and he needs greater than something for the world to return to the one he knew then. So, virtually regardless of himself, he throws himself into the mission of saving the grocery retailer, pondering that if he could make that work, he could make all the opposite dysfunctional components of his life work as properly.
On this method, his story arc and the story arc of the e-book’s setting are joined as one.
4. Grant your setting the delicate shadings of character you’d grant a central human determine
Readers are drawn to complexity of character, particularly when that complexity results in surprises and insights.
In my case, it will have been straightforward to take potshots at Mill Valley, with its stratospheric wealth and its tradition of sun-glazed self-regard. And I did take my photographs. Early on, Trent rails at how the city has “turn into an upscale theme park of itself, the bus depot revamped into a stylish bookstore, the outdated head store into an artwork gallery, the pharmacy right into a doggie daycare, every thing in all places cleaned up and prettified for the vacationers on their option to Muir Woods and the ocean seashores.”
However I additionally needed to point out the facet of the city these vacationers would possibly miss. As a result of he’s native, Trent goes locations few guests will ever see and the individuals he meets there belong to a tight-knit group largely invisible to individuals passing by means of.
I needed to be true to either side of the city’s character, the wealthy, self-satisfied, Teslas-and-aromatherapy facet, and the one inhabited by odd working individuals barely hanging on in a spot that has turn into more and more inhospitable to them.
5. Your different characters should relate to your setting as they’d a human character
It’s not sufficient that you just view your setting as a totally realized character; your different characters should see it the identical method, or else the reader by no means will.
Every of the primary characters in Blithedale Canyon have a particularized relationship with the city they dwell in. For Trent’s rich stepdad, a hippie turned tech entrepreneur, it’s the canvas on which he’s painted the masterpiece of his personal life. For Suze Randall, the girl Trent loves, who has moved again house together with her two children, the city is a deadly ladder out of the outlet she’s dug herself with a disastrous marriage. And for Trent, it’s his final, finest likelihood to make a house for himself after he’s failed in all places else.
The purpose is the setting of your novel ought to by no means be static, by no means merely be the place the place the occasions of the plots occur.
Identical to an actual place, it ought to present a unique face to each one who lives there. And identical to an actual place, it needs to be in fixed flux, ever susceptible to shedding its method or rising to fulfill its potential.
