McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft

Settings

(1/3) > >>

BigMoosey:
I'm just wondering exactly how in depth everyone else goes in on the setting to their stories. The setting I am currently working on, an Urban Fantasy sort of thing, is about the most detailed setting I've ever really come up with, and at the moment, I'm not quite sure about any of the over-arching plot points or even characters, beyond a vague idea of the main character.

Also, at what point do you consider an idea an homage to an influence of yours, versus outright ripping the thing off?

the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:
As an SF writer tending in the space opera direction my shorthand is "make the physics work. Once the physics work, make the biology work accordingly. Once the biology works, make the culture work based on that."

To my way of thinking, there is a certain degree of handwaving you will have to do to make genre work. (In space opera you need to handwave an FTL drive. in UF you have to handwave how magic works, or, if you have a secret world of werewolves and vampires alongside our own, you have to handwave how they fit with the mundane world and how they work internally.)  I think the more solid you make the stuff that you are taking from reality, the better that will hold up the stuff that you are making up; so if you're writing about renaissance history, talk to some Renaissance historians and get them to beta.  If you're writing something set in Montreal in 1980, talk to people who lived in Montreal in 1980, and so on.  (Space opera is much easier than urban fantasy or historical fiction this way.  Nobody's going to nitpick you for getting the cultural details of the beings living around Epsilon Aurigae wrong so long as you make them hang together in an internally plausible way.)

The corollary of this is; never write in any detail about guns, horses, or sailing ships.  The world is full of people who will always know more than you about those topics, and many of them are on the internet and will say so at length.

Wordmaker:
The setting of my Locked Within series is actually quite detailed, but mostly in my own head. My rule of thumb is that if a piece of setting information isn't somehow relevant to a given scene, I don't mention it. You'd be surprised how much detail you can slip into off-hand comments, important dialogue, etc.

There's a lot of information about my setting that will never appear in one of the books, because it's not important to the story and would only slow the pace if I took time out to go into it.

arianne:
I think it's important to have a very clear idea of your story's setting (as in, how everyone got to where they were, how supernatural creatures were born, how everything works in terms of biology, physics etc), but not to info dump everything on the reader. I really hate those books that spend pages and pages describing the history and science of their world until the reader wants to scream "NO ONE CARES!!" (a variety of this is the thinly disguised Q&A info dump wherein a newcomer spends pages and pages asking pointless questions about the history and science of said world...)

The Deposed King:
Neuro's right about getting your background resources right from the start.

and Arianne has a definite point.

But Wordmaker has it down!

Know it all, have it all internally consistent and only put in what actually fits into your story and dump the rest.  I quibble slightly in that I think over a 7-12 book story you could probably fit all or nearly all of that info in at some point or another.  But for a single or trilogy he's spot on.  (I'll let you know at the end of my big series if I was right or not  8) )




The Deposed King

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page