15 Tips For Writing Your Novel With An Exotic Setting

By Jenni Gate 

Note: friend and colleague Jenni Gate (who does both mystery and travel-writing) is pinch-hitting for me in my regular spot in the Sleuthsayers line-up today. Her subject: exotic locations in fiction writing–a timely subject during high vacation season! I'll be back in two weeks with my regular helping of half-baked ideas, sentence fragments, and poor spelling. In the mean-time, enjoy! –Brian

"To either side of the long-tail boat, dark and mysterious mangrove swamps shrouded

their secrets from view. The long-tail boat driver hefted an elongated pole with an antique, four-cylinder Fiat engine sputtering to life at the end over the back of the narrow vessel into restless water. Engines roared as diesel fumes and greasy, choking smoke billowed, launching our craft into the murky, gray-green Andaman Sea. It was a wet day to tour James Bond Island, known as God’s Nail to the Thai people. I should have listened to the ironic gut-ache I felt when I boarded the boat, its blue, green and yellow-patterned colors dimmed by dark, angry skies. Asian coastal monsoons whipped wind, rain, and frothy salt water into my face. I felt alive, yet exposed, the weather mirroring my turmoil. Like the other tourists on board, I snapped photos through a fogged lens of karst mountains rising from the sea, their limestone facades like candle-wax dripping over temples hidden deep within gloomy jungle caverns below. As we sped towards the island, I noticed the long-tail boat driver, thin, dark brows lowered over his anguished face. He searched the swamps to either side, their hidden waterways a perfect hiding place for modern-day pirates in the Strait of Malacca."

The place described in the piece quoted above: James Bond Island

Writing a story set in an exotic location is challenging. Too many details, and we risk losing our reader; too few, and we fail to anchor a reader into the world of our story. An opening paragraph needs to set the scene and give a sense of time and place, yet push the action forward. Our reader needs to know that the exotic setting is as integral to the story as the plot and characters. In stories where the setting is common or familiar, fewer details may be needed to set the scene. In fantasy novels and in mysteries set in uncommon locations, we need to hook our reader while threading details and references into setting descriptions to place the reader deep into the scene.

A childhood growing up overseas without TV and reading mysteries for entertainment led me to notice when a setting in a novel did or did not ring true, based on my own experience of a place. Get the details wrong, and a multi-cultural reader will notice.

Here are a few tips for setting your story in an exotic location:

1.     Know how to pronounce the name of the place, the names of people, and common objects in the setting. In news stories and books on tape, it grates to hear Kabul pronounced as Ka-Buwl, sahib pronounced as sa-heeb, Celtic pronounced as Seltic. If you write about a place, you should know how it is pronounced locally. It will come through in your writing.

2.     With exotic locations, including fantasy locations, maps can help orient a reader to the setting of the world of the story. Whether it is a map of a world or a map of a floor plan, consider including one or some either within or appended to your story.

3.     Research the people, culture, and subcultures of the location. Interactions between subcultures and counter-cultures with the main culture of a place are ripe with conflict for your story. Another source of potential conflict is when your protagonist is an outsider to the culture. If people in the setting are closed in outlook and limited in their experience of others, your character could have a challenge learning how to maneuver this new world. If people are open and friendly there are still clashes of culture, customs, and belief systems that can play turmoil with your character’s goals. Remember that what may be exotic to you as a writer is home to the people who live there. Knowing traditions and cultural norms, and understanding how those systems affect the daily lives of the people living there may help you find the elements necessary to craft a story with universal appeal.

4.     Know the history of a place and thread those historical details and references into setting descriptions to give the reader a deep sense of setting, layered with meaning. This works in fantasy settings as well. In Game of Thrones, for instance, frequent references to historical events and to legacies of the various family lines add meaning to the actions of the characters and provide a sense of their birthright.

5.     Setting impacts different people in different ways. Know your character before setting a scene in that character’s point of view. To write the paragraph at the beginning of this post, I created in my mind a character full of secrets who is ripe for an adventure. A romance novel with a wistful protagonist looking for love, would focus on the romantic elements of the setting instead. The details you choose to include should have something to do with the point of view character and the genre of the story. Setting also impacts characters in different ways when they are under pressure or out of their element. This can be a source of instant conflict.

6.     Any setting is exotic to someone who has never been there. Sometimes a fresh description of a well-known location can make a common setting exotic again.

7.     When researching your location, remember that photographs you may find on the internet or in a book can’t show the temperature or humidity or the insect life of a place. For example, on a recent trip to Thailand, my husband and I took hundreds of photographs. None showed the smothering effect of the heat and humidity, how simple actions became more difficult in that environment. All around us, ants of different sizes scurried everywhere. When we noticed a bright orange beetle at an elephant camp in the jungle, our guide vigorously stomped on it. He showed us a scar on his neck and said the beetle exudes an acid that eats through skin and gets infected in the muggy heat. Details like these can be used to add depth and texture to the theme and to the world of the story.

8.     Comparisons of an exotic setting with the more familiar settings of a character’s home can provide conflict as well as an emotional appeal to the reader. A character who is homesick and feeling isolated and distant from his or her family will experience a location differently from a character who has adapted to the place and feels at home among its people. Choose the details that mirror the emotions of the character or foreshadow the plot or theme. As with any story, don’t over-describe a palm tree if that tree will have nothing to do with the storyline. Unless your character is going to hide behind the tree, the reader does not need to know every detail about it. The details you choose to include, woven into the action of the story, help bring the scene alive. A list of setting details will lose your reader and distance them from the world of the story.

9.     Determine the purpose of a scene before adding exotic details. The details chosen to flesh out the setting should progress the goals of the scene, whether it is to advance the action of the story, highlight theme, or move a character from one location to another. A refugee forced to hide under a pile of snake skins to cross a border in the open back of a cargo truck will notice specific details such as the stench of the skins, the thick or smooth quality of the scales, and will know what type of poison her guards dipped their spears into. A tourist crossing the same border would notice other details such as how old the border guards are, the red tape required to cross, how close the guards scrutinize the vehicles and the individuals crossing at any given time. The details chosen for your scenes should mirror the characters’ emotions, expand the theme, and add tension to the story. Details set the mood, help the reader see the setting, and further the plot.

10.  To help anchor the reader in an exotic setting, sprinkle in similes and metaphors so that there are comparisons to what the reader may know of their own world.  

11.  Use all five senses, if possible, in each scene. The scent of Thai chilis cooking can make your character’s eyes water, choke their sinuses and fill the air with an unforgettable aroma. If your character’s respiratory system is in full reaction, coughing and sneezing from the pepper scent, they may not notice an attacker enter the room.

12.  Themes that can be paired with exotic locations include environmental themes such as deforestation, development, resources, exploitation. Conflict of indigenous populations with modern ones. Lifestyles vs. traditions. Fragile ecosystems, natural and un-natural boundaries and limits, blurred and disrupted borders. Ruins and crumbling structures contrasting with a jungle as a labyrinth. Mysterious creatures, monsters, spirits, enigmatic figures with supernatural powers. Found artifacts and gems, special objects. Dread, fear, darkness, horror, contrasted with awe, wonder, peace, and acceptance.

13.  Identification between a reader and the story is crucial. A familiar element to the story may help maintain a connection. If the setting is too different, or what happens in the plot is too shocking, readers may disconnect. Just as showing the photos of your last foreign trip to friends may cause their eyes to glaze over, readers may get bored if they don’t feel a connection or have a reason to care about the exotic setting and the lives of the characters in it. A shocking experience such as a coup, riot, or war, can be difficult for someone who has never left the U.S. to relate to. Our readers may understand the experience of a soldier in these situations to some extent, given that many Americans have either served in the military or know friends or family members who have served. Most Americans have no frame of reference for empathizing with a civilian caught in that sort of violence. There is a fine balance in the telling of these experiences. Careful selection of the details that will make a connection to keep our readers with us must be made early and kept in mind throughout the story.

14.  Be careful of making assumptions that may seem biased, racist, or offensive to a reader who is native to your chosen location. Be wary of using your setting as a backdrop for the bizarre or irrational as this has become a cliché in stories with exotic settings.

15.  Finally, a thought to keep in mind as you craft your story. “We all carry within us places of exile, our crimes, our ravages. Our task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to transform them in ourselves and others.” Albert Camus.

The mantra to write what you know about the emotions and motivations of human nature still apply, but it is possible to write about an unusual location just with careful research. A setting your protagonist is unfamiliar with immediately puts the character under some level of stress. An exotic setting can be treated like a character in your story, its characteristics naturally generating conflict, themes, and plot.

Jenni Gate is an accomplished wanderer and aspiring writer. Born in Libya and raised throughout Africa and Asia, Jenni’s upbringing as a global nomad provided a unique perspective on life. As a child, she lived in Libya, Nigeria, the Congo, Pakistan, the Philippines, and the Washington DC area. As an adult, she has lived in Alaska, England, and throughout the Pacific Northwest. Much of her work draws on her extensive experience in the legal field. Her published work includes several articles for a monthly business magazine in Alaska and a local interest magazine in Idaho. She has written several award-winning memoir pieces for writing contests. Jenni currently writes non-fiction, memoir, and fiction, drawing upon her global experiences.

To read more about Jenni's adventures around the world, visit her blog at Nomad Trails and Tales, like her page on Facebook, and follow her on Pinterest.

More About Setting

Still trying to come up with something new to say about writing that I haven't put up here on SleuthSayers.

When I read Jim Winter's post "A Sense of Setting" (April 9, 2021), I went back and saw I had posted about setting back in January 2018. Figured we have some new followers, so I want to say it again because setting is so important in fiction. Here's what I previously posted –

I was fortunate to learn early from a panel of editors:

Setting is the fictional element which most quickly distinguishes the professional writer from the beginner.

Setting is not just the name of a place or time period, it is the feeling of the place and time period. It includes all conditions – region, geography, neighborhood, buildings, interiors, climate, time of day, season of year.

Setting should appear near the beginning of a novel or story and remain throughout by answering the questions WHERE and WHEN. By using sensory details, the writer can flesh out a setting: the visual, smells, sounds, taste, feeling of atmosphere. All five sense sould be used in describing the little things – what a character sees, hears, feels, tastes and smells.

Every story takes place somewhere. Setting is more than a backdrop, it creates mood, tone and can help establish the theme of a work of fiction. Like charaters, it plays an important role in a story. Writers should not neglect setting.

When establishing a setting, get the details correct. You can't have azaleas blooming in Louisiana in December. In New Orleans, the weather is an important part of setting. We have only two seasons – STEAMY HOT (spring, summer and autumn). WET COLD (winter). There are only two mild days at the beginning of spring and two mild days at the end of autumn. Tennessee Williams said these were the only good days to be outside in New Orleans.

Go to the place you set your story (or a place like it if your setting is fictional place). Go and watch, listen, take notes. It's helped me before.

Azalea bush in Louisiana, March 2021

NOTE: Do not put too much setting description in your fiction. It should not read like a travelogue.

www.oneildenoux.com

Where is more than the name of a place.

I was fortunate to learn early from a panel of editors: "Setting is the fictional element that most quickly distinguishes the professional writer from the beginner." These were acquisition editors at a couple publishing houses and magazines. Stories without settings did not make it out of the slush pile.

Setting is not just the name of a place or a time-period; it is the feeling of the place and time period. It comprises all conditions - region, geography, neighborhood, buildings, interiors, climate, time of day, season of year.

Setting should appear near the beginning of a novel or story and remain throughout by answering the questions WHERE and WHEN. Using sensory details, the writer can flesh out a setting: the visual, smells, sounds, taste, feeling of the atmosphere. All five senses should be used by describing the little things - what your character sees, hears, feels, tastes and smells.

Every story takes place somewhere. Setting is more than a backdrop, it creates mood, tone and can help establish the theme of a work of fiction. Like characters, it plays an important role in a story. Writers should not neglect setting.

When establishing a setting, get the details correct. You can't have azaleas blooming in Louisiana in December. In New Orleans, the weather is an important part of setting. We have only two seasons - steamy hot in spring, summer and fall - wet cold in winter. There are occasional mild days at the start of spring and the beginning of autumn. Tennessee Williams said these were the only good days in New Orleans.

Go to the place you set your story (or a place like it if you create a fictional city or village or whatever). Go there and watch, listen, take notes. It has helped me often in important scenes.

One of the most gratifying compliments I receive come from New Orleanians telling me how real the city seems in my novels and stories. They see people and places they know. Even The Times-Picayune (a newspaper notoriously indifferent to local genre writers) described my writing as, "the real thing," when it comes to the city.

The weather can come as a surprise as in real life. As I wrote my crime novel BOURBON STREET, I learned about the 1947 Fort Lauderdale Hurricane (hurricanes were not named back then) and how after hitting Fort Lauderdale, crossed Florida into the Gulf of Mexico and slammed into New Orleans. It flooded the city similar to the way the city flooded during Hurricane Katrina, only the water didn't stay as long since there were no lakefront levees to help turn New Orleans into a bowl as it is today. The water quickly receded. I had my characters use the hurricane to assist in their escape.

I do agree with Elmore Leonard to leave out the parts people skip over. A writer, especially a mystery writer, may want to make sure the description of the setting does not overwhelm the scene.

Research. Research. Research when you set a piece in a place you've never been. If you work hard enough you can capture enough of the setting to work.

As I began to write my latest mystery, SAINT LOLITA, I originally set it on a real Caribbean island and quickly saw I'd never get the details correct so I made up an island - Saint Lolita, which lies west of Grenada in the Lesser Antilles. I researched islands of the Lesser Antilles to get details of flora and fauna and architecture, populations, cuisine, architecture and weather and I think I pulled it off.

Setting. Don't neglect it, especially in longer stories and novels.

http://www.oneildenoux.com/index.html

Settings

     Fiction, at its best, does more than just tell a story -- it tells a story in a setting.  Good fiction immerses the reader – we are propelled into the narrative and into its setting.  And the setting crafted by the author reflects the world around the author, or the author’s characters, at the time of the story.  The story told in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables is part and parcel with the French Revolution.  A Dickens novel is often almost as much about setting as it is about story.  Oliver Twist is dependent on the injustices that were a side effect, and a very real side effect, of the industrial revolution.  And as I noted some months back, Dickens’ A Christmas Carol in fact grew out of a non-fiction essay that Dickens wrote addressing the deplorable mid-nineteenth century working conditions in England and the need for child labor reform.

    No surprise, then, that setting is also a major component of great mysteries.  Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes cannot be separated from Victorian England.  I add the proviso of “Doyle’s Sherlock” since, to my mind, the BBC series Sherlock does a sensational job of re-imagining Holmes in modern day London.  But even there, it is modern day London, with its Blackberries and computers, that provides the setting backbone to the stories.

The Doorbell Rang (NOT the newest Clint Eastwood sequel

!)

    In Rex Stout’s 1965 Nero Wolfe novel The Doorbell Rang, which The Nation described as “the best civil liberties mystery of all time” the story is dependent on then-current FBI abuses under the direction of J. Edgar Hoover who, famously, Wolfe leaves standing on the stoop of his brownstone at the end of the book.  Similarly, Ellery Queen’s The Glass Village, and its theme that accusation must never be a substitute for evidence, is dependent on its setting -- the McCarthy era that pervaded the mid-1950s when the novel was written.

    To read these books is to experience what it was like to live in the eras depicted. It is no surprise that all of this remains true today.  Two recent (and sensational) new mysteries by a pair of gifted writers, Tana French and Gillian Flynn, who are separated by many thousands of miles, tell stories in different  settings, but settings that are still eerily analogous and in each case reflective of our time.  More on that below, but first, some background on each author.

Tana French

Gillian Flynn

    Gillian Flynn grew up in Kansas City Missouri, a state in which her three mystery novels are set.  Before she became a novelist Flynn was was a television critic for Entertainment Weekly. She was educated at the University of Kansas, and received a masters degree from Northwestern.  Her first novel, Sharp Objects, was a 2007 Edgar nominee for best first novel.

    Tana French in fact received the Edgar for best first novel when In the Woods, was published the following year  Although she was born in the United States, Tana French spent most of her early years abroad.  She received a degree in acting from the University of Dublin, and since 1990 has resided in Dublin, where each of her four mystery novels is set. 

    So, other than leaping into the world of mystery fiction within one year of each other there is very little that either of these women share.  Yet each has crafted their most recent novel in settings that, while thousands of miles apart, nevertheless resonate with common themes.

    A teaser on Gillian Flynn’s website describes her new book, Gone Girl, as follows:

On a warm summer morning in North Carthage, Missouri, it is Nick and Amy’s fifth wedding anniversary. Presents are being wrapped and reservations are being made when Nick Dunne’s clever and beautiful wife disappears from their rented McMansion on the Mississippi River.

And here is the description of Tana French’s new book, Broken Harbor, as set forth on her website:  

On one of the half-built, half-abandoned “luxury” developments that litter Ireland, Patrick Spain and his two young children are dead. His wife, Jenny, is in intensive care.

    The principal setting of each novel is therefore very different.  What, after all, does a small Missouri town  have in common with the outskirts of Dublin?  But there is an undercurrent in each setting that is the same and that is reflective of the times in which we live.  Each author has taken the pulse of the present and has built a setting for her novel that rings true and, as a result, ensures that each story rings true. 

    Broken Harbor is set in a community of new homes on the coast of Ireland that failed as a result of the economic downturn that has shaped many lives in recent years.  The home that the unfortunate family lives in is surrounded by abandoned or half finished homes, and the couple at the heart of the novel has had to grapple with the horrors of losing a job in an economy where jobs are increasingly hard to find.  From that setting, which is to say from their world, the story springs.

    And that community of “McMansions” that is the setting for Gone Girl?  Well, there are remarkable similarities between Gillian Flynn’s Missouri housing development and that depicted in Tana French’s novel.  The couple at the heart of Gillian Flynn’s novel also find themselves in a development that is a casualty of world-wide economic downturn.  Like the family in Broken Harbor, the couple in Gone Girl is surrounded by homes that are abandoned and in foreclosure, and other homes that stand as half completed derelicts.  As in Broken Harbor neighboring homes are abandoned as a result of foreclosure, or sit half completed.  And in each book there are wandering homeless people living or gathering in the empty homes.  And here, too, the central characters in the mystery have lost their own jobs as a result of economic downturn. 

    I have written before that I hate spoilers.  So you will get no more of the plots of these wonderful newly-published novels from me.  But they are both great reads, and like many mysteries and other well written books over the years, they gain strength from the fact that they are set in a world that we know.  The heart of each story beats to the world’s pulse.  The setting may be a bit bleak in each case, but, after all, that never stopped Dickens. 

Setting As Character

 Happy End-of-September Sleuthsayers! As you may recall, for my last turn in the rotation, I had the honor of writing the Sleuthsayers' Blog Tenth Anniversary post. While working on this post, I did a lot of looking backward at the writing contained on this site: the vast repository of the knowledge and skill tips of  the Sleuthsayers' Roll of Honor. Trolling back through this massive trove of material, I came across one of my earlier posts, dealing specifically with a frequently underused tool in the writer's kit: setting. This particular post is from 2013, and I think it's aged well if I do say some myself, so I'm reposting it here, in hopes it proves helpful to authors out there wrestling with setting. In two weeks, I'll be back in two weeks to expand further on this topic. - Brian

*    *    *  

Setting. Everyone knows about it. Few people actively think about it.

And that's a shame, because for writers, your setting is like a pair of shoes: if it's good, it's a sound foundation for your journey. If it's not, it'll give you and your readers pains that no orthotics will remedy.

Nowhere is this more true than with crime fiction. In fact strong descriptions of settings is such a deeply embedded trope of the genre that it's frequently overdone, used in parodies both intentional and unintentional as often as fedoras and trench coats.

Used correctly a proper setting can transcend even this role–can become a character in its own right, and can help drive your story, making your fiction evocative, engaging, and (most importantly for your readers) compelling.

Think for a moment about your favorite crime fiction writers. No matter who they are, odds are good that one of the reasons, perhaps one you've not considered before, is their compelling settings.

Just a few contemporary ones that come to mind for me: the Los Angeles of Michael Connelly and Robert Crais. The Chicago of  Sara Paretsky, Sean Chercover and Marcus Sakey. Boston seen through the eyes of Robert B. Parker. Ken Bruen's Ireland. Al Guthrie's Scotland. Carl Hiassen's Miami. Bill Cameron's Portland.

And of course there are the long gone settings highlighted in the gems of the old masters. These and others read like lexical snapshots from the past.Who can forget passages like:

The city wasn't pretty. Most of its builders had gone in for gaudiness. Maybe they had been successful at first. Since then the smelters whose brick stacks stuck up tall against a gloomy mountain to the south had yellow-smoked everything into uniform dinginess. The result was an ugly city of forty thousand people, set in an ugly notch between two ugly mountains that had been all dirtied up by mining. Spread over this was a grimy sky that looked as if it had come out of the smelters' stacks.

—Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest

Then there was Hammett's most ardent admirer (and in many ways, his successor) Raymond Chandler, a writer of considerable scope and power, was never better than when describing the sun-blasted neighborhoods of 1940s Southern California, the desperation of the region's denizens, and and black tarmac byways both connecting and dividing them in Farewell, My Lovely:

1644 West 54th Place was a dried-out brown house with a dried-out brown lawn in front of it. There was a large bare patch around a tough-looking palm tree. On the porch stood one lonely wooden rocker, and the afternoon breeze made the unpruned shoots of last year's poinsettias tap-tap against the cracked stucco wall. A line of stiff yellowish half-washed clothes jittered on a rusty wire in the side yard.

And no one did it better than Ross Macdonald:

The city of Santa Teresa is built on a slope which begins at the edge of the sea and rises more and moresteeply toward the coastal mountains in a series of ascending ridges. Padre Ridge is the first and lowest of these, and the only one inside the city limits.

It was fairly expensive territory, an established neighborhood of well-maintained older houses, many of them with brilliant hanging gardens. The grounds of 1427 were the only ones in the block that looked unkempt. The privet hedge needed clipping. Crabgrass was running rampant in the steep lawn.

Even the house, pink stucco under red tile, had a disused air about it. The drapes were drawn across the front windows. The only sign of life was a house wren which contested my approach to the veranda.

— Ross Macdonald, Black Money

In each of the passages excerpted above the author has used a description of the setting as a tip-off to the reader as to what manner of characters would inhabit such places. Even hints at what lies ahead for both protagonist and reader.

With Hammett it's the stink of the corruption that always follows on the heels of a rich mineral strike. With Chandler, it's a life worn-out by too much living. And with Macdonald, it's a world and its inhabitants as out of sorts as those hedges that need clipping.

Brilliant thumbnail sketches each. If you haven't read them, you owe it to yourself to do so. And each of them was giving the reader a glimpse of a world they had experienced first-hand, if not a contemporary view, then at least one they could dredge up and flesh out from memory.

With the stuff I write it's not that simple.

In his kind note introducing me to the readers of this blog, our man Lopresti mentioned that when it comes to fiction, my particular bailiwick is historical mystery. In my time mining this particular vein of fiction I've experienced first-hand the challenge of delivering to readers strong settings for stories set in a past well before my time.

How to accomplish this?

It's tricky. Here's what I do.

I try to combine exhaustive research with my own experiences and leaven it all with a hefty dose of the writer's greatest tool: imagination.

"Counting Coup," the first historical mystery story I ever wrote, is about a group of people trapped in a remote southwest Montana railway station by hostile Cheyenne warriors during the Cheyenne Uprising of 1873. I used the three-part formula laid out above.

While pursuing my Master's in history, I'd done a ton of research on the western railroads, their expansion, and its impact on Native American tribes in the region, including the Cheyenne.

I've visited southwestern Montana many times, and the country is largely unchanged, so I had a good visual image to work from.

Imagination!

An example of the end result:

Wash and Chance made it over the rise and and into the valley of the Gallatin just ahead of that storm. It had taken three days of hard riding to get to the railhead, and the horses were all but played out.

The entire last day finished setting their nerves on edge. What with the smoke signals and the tracks of all the unshod ponies they'd seen, there was enough sign to make a body think he was riding right through the heart of the Cheyenne Nation.

Stretching away to north and south below them lay the broad flood plain of the Gallatin. The river itself meandered along the valley floor, with the more slender, silver ribbon of rail line mirroring it, running off forever in either direction. The reds of the tamarack and the golds of the aspen and the greens of the fir created a burst of color on the hills that flanked the river on either side, their hues all the more vivid when set against the white of the previous evening's uncharacteristically early snowfall. 

"Suicide Blonde," another of my historical mystery stories, is set in 1962 Las Vegas. Again, the formula.

I did plenty of research on Vegas up to and including this time when Sinatra and his buddies strutted around like they owned the place.

I lived and worked in Vegas for a couple of years and have been back a few times since. I am here to tell you, Vegas is one of those places that, as much as it changes, doesn't really change.

Imagination!

Which gets you:

Because the Hoover boys had started tapping phones left and right since the big fuss at Apalachin a few years back, Howard and I had a system we used when we needed to see each other outside of the normal routine. If one of us suggested we meet at the Four Queens, we met at Caesar's. If the California, then we'd go to the Aladdin, and so on. We also agreed to double our elapsed time till we met, so when I said twenty minutes, that meant I'd be there in ten. We figured he had a permanent tail anyway, but it was fun messing with the feds, regardless.

The Strip flashed and winked and beckoned to me off in the distance down Desert Inn as I drove to Caesar's. It never ceases to amaze me what a difference the combination of black desert night, millions of lights, and all that wattage from Hoover Dam made, because Las Vegas looked so small and ugly and shabby in the day time. She used the night and all those bright lights like an over-age working girl uses a dimply lit cocktail lounge and a heavy coat of makeup to ply her trade.

Howard liked Caesar's. We didn't do any of the regular business there, and Howard liked that, too. Most of all, Howard liked the way the place was always hopping in the months since Sinatra took that angry walk across the street from the Sands and offered to move his act to Caesar's. Howard didn't really care to run elbows with the Chairman and his pack, he just liked talking in places where the type of noise generated by their mere presence could cover our conversations.

You may have noticed that in both examples used above I've interspersed description of the setting with action, historical references and plot points. That's partly stylistic and partly a necessity. I rarely find straight description engaging when I'm reading fiction (in the hands of a master such as Hemingway, Chandler or Macdonald that's another story, but they tend to be the exception), so I try to seamlessly integrate it into the narrative. Also, since I'm attempting to evoke a setting that is lost to the modern reader in anything but received images, I try to get into a few well-placed historical references that help establish the setting as, say, not just Las Vegas, but early 1960s Las Vegas. Doing so in this manner can save a writer of historical mysteries a whole lot of trying to tease out these sorts of details in dialogue (and boy, can that sort of exposition come across as clunky if not handled exactly right!).

So there you have it: an extended rumination on the importance of one of the most overlooked and powerful tools in your writer's toolbox: setting. The stronger you build it, the more your readers will thank you for it, regardless of genre, regardless of time period.

Because setting is both ubiquitous and timeless. Easy to overdo and certainly easy to get wrong. But when you get it right, your story is all the stronger for it.

And that's it for me. Tune in next time for more on making setting work for you.

See You in Two Weeks!

Setting as Character...Really? Bad Girl Makes a Case (and gives an example)

What do we mean by "Setting as Character?"  Students always ask me that, and here's what I tell them:

Setting is important in helping to establish the mood of your story.  It should be treated with as much attention as you would give any other character.

In the 14 week Crafting a Novel course I teach at Sheridan College, we spend most of one class talking about setting.

One of the first things you must decide when writing your novel, is the reality of your setting.  Is it a real place that exists today, or that did exist in another time?  A place you can research?  Or is your setting completely from your imagination?

The trouble wtih many beginning writers is they set their novels in 'Anytown USA.'  Thus, no character, no unique feel to the place...the 'why it is different from everywhere else?' is missing.


For this reason, I usually opt for a real setting, even in fantasy novels.  No, you may not be able to go back to 4th century West Country in England (when WILL they come up with a time machine that works, already?  I'm waiting...)  But you can visit the area now, take in the beauty of the countryside, and particularly, visit the local museums to get more details on how people lived and how the land looked at the time.

That's what I did.  Here's how the location for my time-travel trilogy came about.

 All of our families have pasts.  Have you looked into yours to see if there might be inspiration there?  That's how I found my setting for Rowena Through the Wall.  In a corner of England called Shropshire, more known for sheep than people, there once stood a Norman castle of fantastic 'character.'

The original castle, erected after Harold fell to William in 1066, went to ruin in the early 1500s.  The new abode, Hawkstone Park, was built in 1556; it was forfeited in 1906 to pay off the gambling debts of my rakish relative.

My late cousin showed me around the countryside.  Tony Clegg-Hill was the previous Viscount of Shropshire and Shrewsbury.  I adored him.  He had that particular dry British wit that reminded me of David Niven.  It was his great-grandfather who lost the castle.

Tony would regale me with anecdotes about the family villains: the original Viscount Huel, who was basically a henchman for William the Conqueror.  More recent rogues like Sir Rowland Hill gambled away anything that could be taken as a stake.  It's a damning history, but a vibrant one.  But not all the family were black sheep.  One Lord Hill distinguished himself as the second in command to the Duke of Wellington at the battle of Waterloo.  When Wellington was made Prime Minister in 1924, Hill succeeded him as commander in chief of the British army.

So when it came to writing Rowena Through the Wall, I leaned back into the family history.  The original Normal castle with it's rounded turrets, crenellations and merlons had been waiting for a writer to bring it back to life.  Rowena walks through the wall to her ancestor's land, and she falls in love with it too.

"Outlander meets Sex and the City"
"Game of Thrones Lite"
Rowena Through the Wall was featured on USA Today, and was an Amazon Top 50 Bestseller (all books.)

Setting as Character

In my previous Sleuthsayers post I promised that with this post I would leave off talking about politics and get back to talking about the craft of fiction writing. I'm returning to this topic by dusting off one of my first posts on this blog, wherein I explore the use of setting as another character in your story. This originally ran in 2013. I think it holds up, and hope you get something out of it.

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Setting. Everyone knows about it. Few people actively think about it.

And that's a shame, because for writers, your setting is like a pair of shoes: if it's good, it's a sound foundation for your journey. If it's not, it'll give you and your readers pains that no orthotics will remedy.

Nowhere is this more true than with crime fiction. In fact strong descriptions of settings is such a deeply embedded trope of the genre that it's frequently overdone, used in parodies both intentional and unintentional as often as fedoras and trenchcoats.

Employed correctly a proper setting can transcend even this role–can become a character in its own right, and can help drive your story, making your fiction evocative, engaging, and (most importantly for your readers) compelling.

Think for a moment about your favorite crime fiction writers. No matter who they are, odds are good that one of the reasons, perhaps one you've not considered before, is their compelling settings.

Just a few contemporary ones that come to mind for me: the Los Angeles of Michael Connelly and Robert Crais. The Chicago of  Sara Paretsky, Sean Chercover and Marcus Sakey. Boston seen through the eyes of Robert B. Parker. Ken Bruen's Ireland. Al Guthrie's Scotland. Carl Hiassen's Miami. Bill Cameron's Portland.

And of course there are the long gone settings highlighted in the gems of the old masters. These and others read like lexical snapshots from the past.Who can forget passages like:

The city wasn't pretty. Most of its builders had gone in for gaudiness. Maybe they had been successful at first. Since then the smelters whose brick stacks stuck up tall against a gloomy mountain to the south had yellow-smoked everything into uniform dinginess. The result was an ugly city of forty thousand people, set in an ugly notch between two ugly mountains that had been all dirtied up by mining. Spread over this was a grimy sky that looked as if it had come out of the smelters' stacks.

                                                       —Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest

Or this one from Raymond Chandler's Farewell, My Lovely: 

1644 West 54th Place was a dried-out brown house with a dried-out brown lawn in front of it. There was a large bare patch around a tough-looking palm tree. On the porch stood one lonely wooden rocker, and the afternoon breeze made the unpruned shoots of last year's poinsettias tap-tap against the cracked stucco wall. A line of stiff yellowish half-washed clothes jittered on a rusty wire in the side yard.

And no one did it better than Ross Macdonald:

The city of Santa Teresa is built on a slope which begins at the edge of the sea and rises more and more steeply toward the coastal mountains in a series of ascending ridges. Padre Ridge is the first and lowest of these, and the only one inside the city limits.

It was fairly expensive territory, an established neighborhood of well-maintained older houses, many of them with brilliant hanging gardens. The grounds of 1427 were the only ones in the block that looked unkempt. The privet hedge needed clipping. Crabgrass was running rampant in the steep lawn.

Even the house, pink stucco under red tile, had a disused air about it. The drapes were drawn across the front windows. The only sign of life was a house wren which contested my approach to the veranda.

                                                 — Ross Macdonald, Black Money

In each of the passages excerpted above the author has used a description of the setting as a tip-off to the reader as to what manner of characters would inhabit such places. Even hints at what lies ahead for both protagonist and reader.

With Hammett it's the stink of the corruption that always follows on the heels of a rich mineral strike. With Chandler, it's a life worn-out by too much living. And with Macdonald, it's a world and its inhabitants as out of sorts as those hedges that need clipping.

Brilliant thumbnail sketches each. If you haven't read them, you owe it to yourself to do so. And each of them was giving the reader a glimpse of a world they had experienced first-hand, if not a contemporary view, then at least one they could dredge up and flesh out from memory.

With the stuff I write it's not that simple.

In his kind note introducing me to the readers of this blog, our man Lopresti mentioned that when it comes to fiction, my particular bailiwick is historical mystery. In my time mining this particular vein of fiction I've experienced first-hand the challenge of delivering to readers strong settings for stories set in a past well before my time.

How to accomplish this?

It's tricky. Here's what I do.

I try to combine exhaustive research with my own experiences and leaven it all with a hefty dose of the writer's greatest tool: imagination.

"Counting Coup," the first historical mystery story I ever wrote, is about a group of people trapped in a remote southwest Montana railway station by hostile Cheyenne warriors during the Cheyenne Uprising of 1873. I used the three-part formula laid out above.

1. While pursuing my Master's in history, I'd done a ton of research on the western railroads, their expansion, and its impact on Native American tribes in the region, including the Cheyenne.
2. I've visited southwestern Montana many times, and the country is largely unchanged, so I had a good visual image to work from.
3. Imagination!

An example of the end result:

Wash and Chance made it over the rise and and into the valley of the Gallatin just ahead of that storm. It had taken three days of hard riding to get to the railhead, and the horses were all but played out.

The entire last day finished setting their nerves on edge. What with the smoke signals and the tracks of all the unshod ponies they'd seen, there was enough sign to make a body think he was riding right through the heart of the Cheyenne Nation.

Stretching away to north and south below them lay the broad flood plain of the Gallatin. The river itself meandered along the valley floor, with the more slender, silver ribbon of rail line mirroring it, running off forever in either direction. The reds of the tamarack and the golds of the aspen and the greens of the fir created a burst of color on the hills that flanked the river on either side, their hues all the more vivid when set against the white of the previous evening's uncharacteristically early snowfall. 

"Suicide Blonde," another of my historical mystery stories, is set in 1962 Las Vegas. Again, the formula.

1. I did plenty of research on Vegas up to and including this time when Sinatra and his buddies strutted around like they owned the place.
2. I lived and worked in Vegas for a couple of years and have been back a few times since. I am here to tell you, Vegas is one of those places that, as much as it changes, doesn't really change.
3. Imagination!

Which gets you:

Because the Hoover boys had started tapping phones left and right since the big fuss at Apalachin a few years back, Howard and I had a system we used when we needed to see each other outside of the normal routine. If one of us suggested we meet at the Four Queens, we met at Caesar's. If the California, then we'd go to the Aladdin, and so on. We also agreed to double our elapsed time till we met, so when I said twenty minutes, that meant I'd be there in ten. We figured he had a permanent tail anyway, but it was fun messing with the feds, regardless.

The Strip flashed and winked and beckoned to me off in the distance down Desert Inn as I drove to Caesar's. It never ceases to amaze me what a difference the combination of black desert night, millions of lights, and all that wattage from Hoover Dam made, because Las Vegas looked so small and ugly and shabby in the day time. She used the night and all those bright lights like an over-age working girl uses a dimly lit cocktail lounge and a heavy coat of makeup to ply her trade.

Howard liked Caesar's. We didn't do any of the regular business there, and Howard liked that, too. Most of all, Howard liked the way the place was always hopping in the months since Sinatra took that angry walk across the street from the Sands and offered to move his act to Caesar's. Howard didn't really care to run elbows with the Chairman and his pack, he just liked talking in places where the type of noise generated by their mere presence could cover our conversations.

You may have noticed that in both examples used above I've interspersed description of the setting with action, historical references and plot points. That's partly stylistic and partly a necessity. I rarely find straight description engaging when I'm reading fiction (in the hands of a master such as Hemingway, Chandler or Macdonald that's another story, but they tend to be the exception), so I try to seamlessly integrate it into the narrative. Also, since I'm attempting to evoke a setting that is lost to the modern reader in anything but received images, I try to get into a few well-placed historical references that help establish the setting as, say, not just Las Vegas, but early 1960s Las Vegas. Doing so in this manner can save a writer of historical mysteries a whole lot of trying to tease out these sorts of details in dialogue (and boy, can that sort of exposition come across as clunky if not handled exactly right!).

So there you have it: an extended rumination on the importance of one of the most overlooked and powerful tools in your writer's toolbox: setting. The stronger you build it, the more your readers will thank you for it, regardless of genre, regardless of time period.

Because setting is both ubiquitous and timeless. Easy to overdo and certainly easy to get wrong. But when you get it right, your story is all the stronger for it!

A Rainy Day at the Beach

Several weeks ago I attended a one-day writers' conference in Long Beach, Mississippi, called The Magic of Books. I conducted an afternoon workshop on writing and selling short stories--which are of course not books, but they asked me to do it anyway--and it was a fun session, at least for me. But the highlight of my day there (besides lunch) was the chance to hear a presentation by my friend and longtime mentor Carolyn Haines.

For those of you who don't know her, Carolyn is the author of more than seventy novels, including the "Bones" mysteries featuring Sarah Booth Delaney and set in the fictional Mississippi Delta town of Zinnia. (The latest in the series is Bone to be Wild--one of my favorite titles.) Carolyn is also a crazy and delightful lady who has been a tremendous help to my so-called writing career and who always makes me laugh. She has written under at least three pseudonyms and in a number of genres.

Vive la difference

Among the many words of wisdom she gave us that day, on the topic of "Writing in Multiple Genres," were the following:

- In mystery fiction, justice prevails

- In romance fiction, love prevails

- In historical fiction, the details must be accurate right down to the clothing and the dialect.

- In horror, fantasy, and historical fiction, setting is of primary importance.

- The key to POV is consistency.

- Thrillers must include some kind of ticking clock.

- In traditional mystery fiction, the protagonist knows more than the reader; in suspense/thriller fiction, the reader knows more than the protagonist.

- In thrillers, the antagonist must be the equal of the protagonist.

- Literary fiction requires deep character development and usually addresses social issues.

- SF is mainly plot-oriented and appeals mostly to male readers.

- In fantasy fiction, world-building is all-important.

- High fantasy involves elves, fairies, etc.

- Low fantasy involves vampires, werewolves, etc.

Not that it matters, but during much of Carolyn's presentation about mystery/noir fiction it was gloomy and raining outside, and it even thundered once or twice when she mentioned horror stories. The woman is so talented she can control the weather.

Elements, my dear Watson

Another of the things she talked about in her session was the "elements" of fiction. All of us think of different things when we hear that term. Personally, I think of plot, character, dialogue, POV, and possibly setting. Carolyn's take on it wasn't too far from mine: she said the elements consist of (1) plot, (2) character, (3) setting, and (4) theme. I think her point was that these are the ingredients of a story or novel--and she's right. But I think of the elements of fiction in a different way. I see them as the things you have to be good at in order to write it well.

Example: One of the elements Carolyn names is theme, and while I agree that theme is certainly a part of a story, I don't think theme is something I have to worry much about, as a writer. I once heard someone say that you should never try to come up with a theme beforehand, because there's no need to; you should just write your story, and if the story's a good one, it'll have a theme. Another way of phrasing that, I suppose, is if it doesn't have a theme, then it's not much of a story and it won't sell anyway.

I believe Carolyn's mention of theme, here, is tied to a couple of her pieces of advice that I listed earlier: in mysteries the theme (the overall point) is "justice prevails," and in romances it's "love prevails." I think she was saying the author must know these things and keep them in mind during the writing process--otherwise, the story or novel will fail. Or at least it will fail as a mystery or a romance.

Another place where our "elements" list varies is that I think things like dialogue and viewpoint are so vitally important they should probably be included. And yes, I know, dialogue isn't something that has to be a part of every story--I sold one to the Strand a couple years ago that had no dialogue at all--but when it IS a part of the story, it has to be nearly perfect in order to work. Bad dialogue is like a torpedo hit to the engine room; your project can't survive it. And POV, while it's not something to obsess over, is still one of those things that can badly hurt your story if it's misused.

The other difference in our definitions is setting. Carolyn includes it in her list; sometimes I do and sometimes I don't. I agree with her that it's a necessary ingredient in a piece of fiction--it obviously has to be there, or the characters would have no place to live and talk and make the story happen. But I find myself worrying less and less about setting, the more I write. I sort of feel that if the setting is truly important to your story--if, let's say, your characters are on a desert island, or in a hut on Mt. Everest, or at the bottom of a mine shaft, or in a nuclear testing facility, or in a lifeboat--then you'd certainly be wise to spend some time and a lot of words describing that setting and making it crystal clear to the reader. But if your story is such that it could possibly be told just as well using a different setting, if for example most of your story involves a conversation between two people sitting in a city park, or a restaurant, or an apartment or an office building or a suburban backyard, etc., maybe it's not that necessary to spell out a lot of detail about their surroundings. Especially if it's short fiction. That's my opinion only, by the way, and I welcome any thoughts you might have on this.

NOTE: I assure you that Carolyn knows more about all this than I do--after all, she's the mentor and I'm the mentee, she's Obi-Wan and I'm Luke. (Well, maybe I'm C3PO.) Let me ask you: If you had to make a list, what would you consider to be the "elements" of a novel or a story? I've heard that some writers include such things as symbolism and conflict--and, to me, conflict is a part of plot. Different folks, different strokes.

Noms de plume

Yet another good point she made during her session was Use a pseudonym if you feel your fans/audience might not like a new or different genre. This was, I assume, one of the reasons that Nora Roberts is also J. D. Robb, John Camp is John Sandford, J.K. Rowling is Robert Galbraith, and Evan Hunter was Ed McBain (actually, neither Hunter nor McBain was his real name). As for Carolyn, she has written as Carolyn Haines, R. B. Chesterton, Lizzie Hart, and Caroline Burnes, and believe me, all those incarnations do a darn good job of writing.

Have any of you taken this approach, and decided to use one or more pen names? If so, did you do it because of a genre switch? Or did you choose to keep your own name (as Larry McMurtry and James Patterson have done) regardless of genre? Have any of you chosen a pseudonym for other reasons? This is a subject I find fascinating, probably because--even though I consider myself fairly imaginative--I doubt I would ever be able to come up with a suitable alias no matter how hard I tried. As the intoxicated writer once answered when asked for his pen name, I just say, "Bic."

And that's my pitch, for today. May all your trips to the seashore be sunny, not rainy; may all of us make progress toward mastering the elements of fiction no matter how they're defined; and if you've not read Carolyn Haines, under her own name or any other, I hope you will. There is much to be learned from her novels and short stories. Here's her web site. Prepare to be entertained!




BY THE WAY: Two weeks ago at this blog, when I wrote about my story that appears in the current print issue (July/August) of The Saturday Evening Post, I said I would include a link to it when it appeared online. That story, "Saving Grace," was finally posted on August 7. Also, I was asked awhile back to write a piece for EQMM's blog, Something Is Going to Happen, and that post, called "From Page to Screen," went live last week as well. If you have time to read either (or both), I hope you enjoy it (or them). See you on the 29th!