location
Showing posts with label location. Show all posts
Showing posts with label location. Show all posts

Location, Location, Location!

5:00 PM Add Comment
Do you love New York?

             Or would you hate it, even on a spring day in Central Park?
 
What about your characters? 

We know how important is to describe where your story is taking place: if it could happen anywhere, you miss a huge opportunity to create a meaningful story world for your reader. But have you ever considered the importance of setting to each of your characters? How does each one feel about it? And how does that affect what they do in your story?

Setting can  enrich a character's behavior by causing them to react in ways that move the action forward. In other words, setting can create conflict.  There are two kinds of conflict: Internal and External. 

Internal conflict is what happens inside a character - and it can change the dynamics of any setting.


If your hero loves the beach, she'll be relaxed there. It will be the ideal setting to slow down the pace and let a romance build. Then again, if she hates the beach - whether she refuses to be seen in a swimsuit, or if her brother drowned in the ocean - that first date could be a nightmare before the picnic basket is unpacked. 



Popular "fish out of water" stories use the setting to create inner conflict through contrast. Put a city gal in a country setting for the first time, and the humor will write itself. Send her home to the small town she escaped, and drama will infuse every scene.

External conflict is something that happens right there on the outside when your characters have other business to attend to. The romantic couple at the beach could get rained out, or distracted by a lifeguard rescue, or lose the car keys in the sand.  The gal in the country could experience her first tornado, or a flirty sheriff, or a lack of cell phone signal. Pile some external conflict on a scene already rife with internal conflict and you get a double whammy - a scene so exciting there is no way the reader can resist.

The point is, when we talk about setting, anything can happen - and should.  Where we are and how we feel about it makes a big difference in our lives. Where your characters are and how they feel about it can make a big difference in your story.
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Leslie Lehr is a prizewinning author, essayist, and screenwriter. One of her favorite settings is at book festivals where she gets to discuss her new novel, What A Mother Knows.

You can follow Leslie at www.facebook.com/authorleslielehr
Tw @leslielehr1
or email her at lesliejlehr@gmail.com



A Love Letter to Cleveland

2:00 AM Add Comment

by Sylvie Fox

No matter how I do this, it isn’t going to come out right. You’re going to think I hate Cleveland. But that’s not exactly true. I think of it, mostly, with fondness.

That said, let’s get the jokes out of the way first. Here are two, mostly safe for work, videos that you have to watch. I promise it’ll take two minutes of your time.





So that’s Cleveland in a very tiny nutshell.

Next year I’ll publish the first two books in the Casey Cort series, Qualified Immunity, and Under Color of Law which take place in the early part of this century.

When I started to write my first book (why my first book is coming out last is another entire blog post), I had only left Cleveland and it was fresh in my mind. The post industrial city had a lot of qualities that make it an excellent character. As you may have noticed from the videos above, the city suffers from economic depression, gray, gray weather, and a lacking sense of humor.

But my books take place in the past, so I’m writing about a city that doesn’t exist anymore. For better or worse, it has moved on. And what was true in 2003 isn’t true today. I’m doing my best to stick with my vision of the city as it was then. But we all view places through different lenses and I worry that the corruption and damaged legal system my heroine faces will come across like I’m setting the Cuyahoga river on fire a second time. But that’s not the case. It’s sort of like writing about the 1970s in New York City. It was a lot awful, but it was a little great, too.

Did I like going to economic summits on the city's problem of hemorrhaging college graduates? No. Did I like watching news reports of elected officials going to jail? Not really.

But I did I love going to the art museum and seeing Lucy at the Museum of Natural History? Absolutely. The best art exhibit and best play I’ve ever seen happened right there at the Cleveland Playhouse.

In fact, Casey Cort is one of my favorite heroines, a little heavy, a little plucky, a lot of fun—to write. She’s facing her thirties and it’s an uphill battle. Cleveland is the perfect setting for a book with a heroine seeking redemption. Little victories are more rewarding when you have to lean against a stiff Lake Erie wind to get them.

Sylvie Fox is the author of The Good Enough Husband, another book about a heroine in dire need of redemption. But at least this one's mostly set in sunny Southern California.
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