CREATIVE WRITING
Setting the scene
Conveying location and place are vital to the atmosphere of your fiction. Novelist Amanda Jennings offers advice on how to bring the places in your stories to life
EXERCISE
Think about an everyday irritation. A flat tyre, for example. Now write a short piece on how your character deals with this irritation, but make their environment easy. Now change the setting. Put them somewhere isolated. At night. In a raging storm. Same situation, different setting. How has the emotion changed? What about the tension?
Setting is so much more than just the backdrop to a story. It plays a vital role in engaging the reader. An effective setting breathes life into our words.
The first book I wrote, which ended up being the third I published following a significant rewrite, tells the story of Bella who, kidnapped as a child, traces her roots and discovers her real family, a mother and sister, broken by her disappearance two decades earlier. When developing the story, with the principal characters and vague plot in place, I thought hard about setting. I wanted Bella’s world upended.
I pictured her raised by her kidnappers in a large house in an Oxfordshire village, with a walled garden, an immaculate striped lawn, and sweet-smelling roses. I wanted to thrust her into a very different world to the neat and controlled one she’d been forcibly brought up in. Wild and raw, somewhere she felt unleashed, somewhere to which she felt an immediate and almost spiritual connection.