McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft
The Question of Setting
meg_evonne:
--- Quote from: daylightdreamer on May 20, 2009, 01:57:32 AM ---The new head of the department who taught most of my classes thinks that even wanting to write commercial fiction makes you a sell out and a bad writer and told me as much. You can imagine how please I was with that. >:(
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GRRRRR. Still--you can learn something from anyone. Wring him/her dry of what you can and then discard. your purpose is to improve your craft. Remember, you may one day have to work with an editor that you can't stand. It's good practice. Also, you'd be amazed what even this idiot's recommendation might mean on your resume/bio--so bump that C to an A next time, get the creeps notice and play them for everything you can get out of them.
I'm not normally so mercenary, but time is prescious---don't lose it because you don't like the instructor. And frankly, this jerk deserves the mercenany treatment...
Starbeam:
Another way to go is what I did for one of my classes. I wrote a story that had a fantasy element; the main char kept seeing a dragon and talking to it, but I never made it clear if the dragon was actually real or if it was all in her head. Also the style of magical realism. It sorta makes you get creative with how you can change things around with perspective to come across one way or another, depending on who's reading. And if it's anything urban fantasy, small changes to make things more normal can be later changed back.
the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:
My vote would be "write where you know"; there are plenty of people out there for whom the bits of getting Chicago wrong that Jim not being a Chicago native has put in the books are things to grumble about, and on the contrary, it's really cool when someone writes about a setting you know well yourself and gets it right. (My own favourite example of this is Ian McDonald's King of Morning Queen of Day, the last section of which does early-90s Dublin at the time I was an undergrad there and has one big action scene that would have been visible from my front door, and it;s absolutely perfect.)
If you must set something somewhere you don't know, either be vague or get a local test-reader to check the geography.
LizW65:
--- Quote from: neurovore on May 20, 2009, 08:09:22 PM ---My vote would be "write where you know"; there are plenty of people out there for whom the bits of getting Chicago wrong that Jim not being a Chicago native has put in the books are things to grumble about,
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I've encountered people on another discussion group who just can't get past Dresden mentioning that he lives in "midtown" Chicago in the first book, and have denied themselves an entire excellent series because of that one detail. Makes me want to roll my eyes and say, "Get over yourselves already, people."
And there's always Google Earth, or that old standby, the Road Trip, which you could at least try to write off as a business expense at the end of the year.
daylightdreamer:
Okay...there are a lot of comments to address, but I'm going to try to address as many as I can.
--- Quote from: LizW65 on May 20, 2009, 04:09:06 PM ---How much do you wanna bet this guy tried, and failed, to write commercial fiction? That comment has "sour grapes" all over it. ;)
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He's a poet, first of all, so it's really hard to get a lot of stuff out of him about prose type stuff. We had a novelist as the head of the department when I first went there (part of the reason I went there), but she transferred out before I even got to have a class with her and they brought in this guy. He's just a lit snob, partly, and he's also just...odd. He says that when he reads, he can't visualize what he's reading. It's just words on the page, so he's all about making it look good on the page and making the words sound good next to each other.
--- Quote from: LizW65 on May 20, 2009, 04:09:06 PM ---From your description, I think your story sounds sufficiently different from Jim's to make it OK. PN Elrod has a vampire detective series set in Chicago, but the Depression-era setting makes it quite different from most urban fantasy currently on the market. My advice is, don't get too hung up on stuff like this before you actually start writing; it'll only hold you back. You can always go back and change it later if you think it necessary.
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Yeah, that's kind of what I'm thinking. I'm just going to make sure I tread the line carefully. And really, I'm not going to be able to get a lot of good feedback on it until it's written, so yeah. If I have to change it later, so be it.
--- Quote from: Starbeam on May 20, 2009, 04:24:08 PM ---Or is one of the types who believe the only "real" stuff out there is anything considered literature. I had a couple professors like this in college.
...
Something I discovered, that would've been helpful before college instead of learning afterward, is that it would've been a good idea to look up the CW professors to see what they've done and how open they'd be to genre. Oh well. I wrote something like 12 chapters in the one class, even though the prof graded only the first 25 pages, and gave me a C.
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Yeah, I've really just kind of gotten screwed. One, I was the first child to go to college and I didn't shop around as much as I should have. I settled on this school because I liked the school and the program seemed really legit, but then the professors have since all juggled around and the one good one I had is never around to talk to anymore. I'm trying to set up an email dialogue with him, but it's proving difficult. Oh, if I could turn back time. Sadly, by the time I realized this was probably a poor choice for what I want to do, I had my degree basically done and I don't have the money to spend if I were to transfer. I'll be graduating in one more semester, so yeah. Hindsight is 20-20.
--- Quote from: meg_evonne on May 20, 2009, 07:36:14 PM ---
GRRRRR. Still--you can learn something from anyone. Wring him/her dry of what you can and then discard. your purpose is to improve your craft. Remember, you may one day have to work with an editor that you can't stand. It's good practice. Also, you'd be amazed what even this idiot's recommendation might mean on your resume/bio--so bump that C to an A next time, get the creeps notice and play them for everything you can get out of them.
I'm not normally so mercenary, but time is prescious---don't lose it because you don't like the instructor. And frankly, this jerk deserves the mercenany treatment...
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Yeah, I've done my major project there and I learned a lot from him and the other faculty. I just don't know how much of it is applicable for what I want to do. He does have a lot of interesting advice, it's just not usually topical. I've been trying to treat it like an exercise. Do what he says and while I'm doing it, try to find ways to apply it to what I really want to do. I'm going to try to get some more out of everyone before I graduate, but I'm starting to look elsewhere to improve my craft.
--- Quote from: neurovore on May 20, 2009, 08:09:22 PM ---My vote would be "write where you know"; there are plenty of people out there for whom the bits of getting Chicago wrong that Jim not being a Chicago native has put in the books are things to grumble about, and on the contrary, it's really cool when someone writes about a setting you know well yourself and gets it right.
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I think I'm going to leave it for now and if nothing else, change it later. I'm not a Chicago native, but I go to college within 40 minutes of there, so I've been down there a lot. I'm actually setting the majority of the story in the suburbs north of Chicago, which is where I live when I'm at school, with a detour up into Milwaukee, and then parts of it in Chicago, too. If I write a sequel (and I'd like to, but I don't want to get ahead of myself) it would probably be mostly in Chicago, but that's then, this is now. I want to be able to get the details right, which is why I want to use the area.
Oh, and about the road trip thing, since I won't be near the school this summer do to poor job market, I won't be able to road trip down there as easily, but I'm planning on trying to get down there at least once so I can check up on any issues that come up in the novel. If nothing else, most of my friends live in that area, so I can always call them and be like "Hey, can you drive over here and tell me what you see?"
Thanks for all the advice everyone. :) It's really helpful. Sorry for the long post...>>;
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