Mindful Content: Creating Memorable Settings for a Novel

By Marcus Coates, @homeinriyadh, 30th September 2021

Blog No. 22

Image from Unsplash: Daniel Jensen

A place worth remembering

Okay, so you've got a killer idea for a story that you know will take every reader's attention. And you've created a central protagonist with depth, character and magnetism that the reader can relate to, along with a host of supporting characters and antagonists that are unique and engaging. So what next? It's time to think about where the story will take place.

Where does my story take place?

Of course, where the action takes place varies greatly depending on your story genre. One thing is for sure, though, a great novel is often as memorable for its settings as it is for its central idea or characters.

Horror stories use confined spaces and minimal locations to play on a readers' psychological fear of being trapped or hunted with few possible escape outlets. Thrillers and espionage novels employ the opposite convention: the protagonist visits multiple locations or countries searching for information or evading the hidden enemy.

A breadcrumb trail of clues will lead the central detective to investigate along the social class spectrum within a city or community in crime fiction. As the reader, we enter environments we would typically not have access to.

In romance novels, expansive locations with breathtaking scenery or hidden spots filled with charm and beauty mirror the main characters' emotions as their love develops. Whilst fantasy novels build whole new worlds where the impossible is possible, such as talking animals and playing cards, as in C.S Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia (1950 – 1956) or Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland (1865).

And numerous novels are odes to their author's cities; the characters and their environment are inseparable. The Alexandria Quartet (Lawrence Durrell, 1962) depicts Alexandria, Palace Walk (Naguib Mahfouz, 1956) is all about Cairo, Ulysses (James Joyce, 1922) is set solely in Dublin, Bonfire of the Vanities (Thomas Wolfe, 1987) explores New York City, and The Master and Margarita (Mikhail Bulgakov, 1966) scenarios take place across Moscow. All place the reader firmly in the streets of these great cities. But regardless of where your novel takes place, nailing your primary setting matters.

Generating Unique Settings

Great stories thrive on contrast and by taking the reader to places either familiar but from a unique perspective or taking the reader to unknown locations or other worlds. A large part of the reading experience is the promise of being transported without leaving the comfort of our homes just by turning pages in a novel.

Here are some writing prompts to help you on your way. Ask yourself these questions to see what locations and settings spring to mind — or ask them to a friend, family relation or well-travelled colleague.

1. The most claustrophobic place?

Imagine your protagonist being attacked and left in a concrete cellar, a boarded attic room, a locked cupboard or bound in a car boot. Or maybe stuck in a cave, a tunnel, crawl space or lift as a fire rages nearby. Enclosed spaces were used to chilling and unnerving effect in The Collector (John Fowles, 1963) about the abduction of an art student and her captivity in a remote house in Essex.

2. The most expansive region?

Expansive areas, like the open sea, deserts, rainforests, and mountain ranges are hostile places to the unprepared or places of refuge and life to the initiated. One of the first page-turners that I finished in one sitting was First Blood (David Morrel, 1972), about a troubled Vietnam vet — known as Rambo — returning home and waging a brutal war against the Kentucky police force. Using his special forces knowledge, he disappears into the Kentucky mountains and forests and evades his pursuers, lost in the familiar but suddenly alien terrain. And what about being set adrift on a small craft in the Atlantic Ocean, miles from shore, with a giant and angry white shark hunting you down — as in Jaws (Peter Benchly, 1974)?

Unsplash: Jeremy Bezanger

3. The scariest place?

Temples, burial chambers, graveyards, dense forests, old buildings, and abandoned schools are often associated with death or abandonment, causing unrest in the reader. Dracula was published in 1897, but Bram Stoker's description of Dracula's castle in Transylvania can still send tingles down the modern reader's spine — that is, if the description of the surrounding Transylvanian forest and villages have not already caused the reader to put down the novel!

4. The ugliest place?

Ghettos, crack houses, neglected housing estates, and where poverty festers are ugly places. They are places where dreams die, and neglect is evident on every grimy surface. Charles Dickens contrasted the riches of Upper-Class London establishments with those of the Working Class slums in such stories as Bleak House (1852 – 1853) and Great Expectations (1861) to pick just two of his many. The ugliness of intelligence officer Scobie's shack, and the surrounding streets in Freetown, Sierre Leonne, are constant themes in Graham Greene's The Heart of the Matter (1948) that remind us of the ugliness of the colonial experience.

5. The most unsettling place?

Some places are inherently unsettling because of their function: a prison or correction facility — in One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest (Ken Kesey, 1962), for example, Randle Patrick McMurphy tries to exercise free will but is subject to rehabilitation through electric shock therapy for doing so.

Other places have an adverse history – a forest that was once the site of an ancient massacre, a compound once a concentration camp, a house where a murder took place, a factory that historically served as an asylum — it's as if the past still inhabits these spaces with psychic energy. Or a place is unsettling because the rules are not clearly defined: as in the case with Franz Kafka's The Trial (1925), where Joseph K is arrested and convicted by an inaccessible authority for an unspecified crime.

6. The most hostile environment?

Depending on who's eyes the setting is viewed, a location can be marvellous to one and hostile to another. For example, the carefree London inhabited by Evelyn Waugh's London socialites in A Handful of Dust (1934) is a very different experience from the immigrant experience when arriving from Trinidad in Samuel Selvon's Lonely Londoners (1948).

7. The most futuristic place?

Some buildings inspire a sense of the future, even if paradoxically, they are not new at all: The Tate Modern in London often makes me feel this way ( it opened its doors in 2000). The cavernous interior, the minimalist furnishings, and the installation pieces flickering away in random rooms give a sense of being out of time or on a spaceship travelling through time.

We may not be able to visit the future (yet), but certain locations can help us imagine the future. In Raymond Bradbury's sci-fi The Martian Chronicles (1950), the story is set on Mars after America leaves a devasted earth behind. Still, the inhabited spaces on Mars feel strangely suburban even if the indigenous population of Martians are visibly different.

Unsplash: OpticalNomad

8. The most ancient sites visited?

Of the original seven wonders of the world, only the pyramids of Giza still stand. The updated seven wonders of the world: the Taj Mahal, the Colosseum, Machu Picchu, Petra, Christ the Redeemer, the Great Wall of China and Chichen Itza are there to remind us of the ancient world, its culture and customs and our journey as a civilisation into the future. They are also great settings for novels.

Two of my favourite novels are rich in ancient customs. In I Claudius (Robert Graves, 1934), reluctant Emperor Claudius narrates the depravity of ancient Rome through the successive reigns of Augustus and Tiberius and the deified reign of Caligula. In Things Fall Apart (Chinua Achebe, 1958), the protagonist, Okonkwo, is caught between Nigerian customs and the arrival of European colonisers.

9. The most crowded place I've ever visited?

City streets, football matches, riots, concerts, battlefields, raves, and market squares can all provide a sensory overload in which to place characters or for them to evade a captor or be lost within. Two of my favourite depictions of crowded spaces are by Durrell and Mahfouz.

In Lawrence Durrell's The Alexandria Quartet (1962), he lovingly describes Alexandria from every angle and class perspective; whilst the souqs and bustling Cairo lanes of Naguib Mahfouz's Palace Walk (1956) provide insight into Eastern culture for a Western mind. Mahfouz has often been described as the Egyptian equivalent of Charles Dickens.

10. The most isolated place visited?

According to a passage mentioned in a recent study on isolation during prolonged spaceflight (also looking into home confinement during Covid-19):

"The beginning of the study of isolation and confinement can be marked by Polar expeditions, providing anecdotal evidence of the psychological and physiological challenges associated with prolonged isolation and confinement, such as sleep disorders, mood disturbances, depression, anxiety, paranoia, and suicide (Chouker, A., Stahn, A.C. npj Microgravity 6, 32 (2020))."

A great example of prolonged exposure to isolation occurs in the classic horror tale, The Shining (Stephen King, 1977) when Jack Torrance's isolation sends him delusional during his off-season care of the Overlook Hotel with terrible consequences for his family.

To help you find unique and exciting settings, ask yourself the following questions and note your immediate response using the template below. Or use the template as a set of interview questions to a friend.

Once completed, think about each response and ruminate on why you chose that particular room, building, place, city or setting. You never know; it might just provide you with that killer setting you've been searching for!

Previous writing templates & ideas

If you are interested in the steps used to generate initial story ideas and create character profiles — and you haven't already done so — check out my previous blogs. Blog 19, 'Generating Story Ideas' and Blog 20, 'Creating Novel Characters with Individuality and Depth – Profiling'.

Also, if you want to receive the latest blogs on writing, templates, and quick recipes, keep in touch by adding your email to my mailing list. Keep in touch here. Happy writing!