Hello all! Welcome to Write On — our Thursday night series on writing — mostly fiction, but we’ve had a few memoirists and journos poke their noses in. All are welcome. Pull up a chair, grab an appropriate beverage, warm up your keyboard, and tell us how your writing is going.
I’ve been a bit bogged down on the novel I’ve been working on and let it sit mostly idle from February through April, and pretty much no writing of any kind was occurring. Disappointing state of affairs for sure. I’ve decided I need to write some of the ‘bad guy’s’ backstory, so he’s appropriately pinned down in the story. I’ve the terrible sense that this one guy has way too much influence for not really showing up in the first two-thirds of the story. So either I need to rework how he can do that, or rethink the way I’m telling the story. Hah.
To distract myself (because of course, me and my ADHD don’t want to face that task), my brain and COVID-addled nose have handed me this half-cracked story idea: a werewolf who’s lost her sense of smell. Add to that, her pack has fallen apart, and as a result, she decided to go lone wolf. And move across the country. I sort of meant it to be light-hearted-ish, but it’s not going that way so far. I mean, I began my ‘write every day in May’ challenge with a zombie short story.
I managed to write 31 times in the month of May (some days got more sessions, and some days got none), and my writing partner and I agreed at the start that five minutes and three sentences count as a session. It was a low enough bar to make it easy to start, and it certainly helped me move up in words produced. Bits at a time led to bigger bits to now we’re both using a 25-minute timer and getting 300-500 words out in those timeframes. Progress!
We’re doing it again for June.
On to the diary topic: Location
I set my werewolf story in Erie, Pennsylvania for a few reasons: one, it’s close enough that I could go visit if I want to actually go and soak up the town’s atmosphere; two, it’s not a college town, per se, though it has a few colleges in and around it; three, I’ve lived near one of the Great Lakes before, and I think I’ve got a handle on most of the environment factors that ought to come up.
I’ve been checking the city out on Google Maps and taking advantage of the pics that people link up to those places. I don’t have a clear map in my head of my main character’s hangouts and general movements in Erie, and I’m still figuring out the plot. I’ve done a little bit of research about the city itself — yes, apparently smuggling occurs across Lake Erie. A city of 100,000 has greater than one cop per thousand residents which seems — high? — to me. And the police department also has concerns about gang activity (huh). Immigrants are around 8 percent of the population with a good chunk of them from Nepal and Bhutan. Really flat for them there, but I’d guess the lake effect snow in the winter isn’t a deal breaker.
Whether or not I leave the story in Erie, or fictionalize the location later, I’ve managed to give myself some plot leads just by doing a bit of nosing around on the internet. It’s kind of nice not making things up out of whole cloth like I am for the fantasy novel.
What’s your approach to establishing location and setting? Of course, those methods are going to flex based on the genre you’re writing. Regular fiction writers, how/when in the writing process do you anchor your story to real world locations? Sci-fi and fantasy writers, have you dropped real world locations (with the names filed off) into your writing?
Challenge for tonight
Throw your Callow Youth and Stout companion into a location where:
- They’ve never been before and/or is theoretically impossible (by their world’s rules) for them to have gotten to.
- One has wanted to go and never has been before and the other has been there and never wanted to be there again.
- Location swap: i.e., Cecilia Spunk is now chasing the Chainsmoke Killer through Jocasta Entwhistle’s world, while Jocasta is searching for an escaped/abducted dragonet through whatever noir-detective city Cecilia usually resides in. (or any other swapped set of stock characters, of course!)
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