Welcome to the February issue of Ask a New Author! This month, we will answer questions about how to choose the setting for your story and -- once that is all squared away -- how to finish your story. Read our submitted questions below!
My question is something that has troubled me when I think of writing a book. How do you choose the town where the story takes place? I don't want to use my hometown and offend anyone, even though the story would be fiction. But I'm not familar with other places. - Kelly McKisson
Miriam says: I’ve thought about this a lot. There are aspects of storytelling that come naturally to each writer. For me, I can fall into developing a character or a narrative voice or dialogue without even really thinking about it. Setting has always been trickier. It often is the part of the story that comes last; sometimes I make it through an entire first draft without deciding exactly where a story takes place, outside of a city or a suburb or a Northwest town.
Often, my choice of setting has to do with writing what I know. Unsurprisingly, much of my work takes place in Michigan or Oregon because I’ve spent most of my life in Michigan or Oregon. There are more ambitious writers out there who let their imagination take flight when it comes to setting--writing about Prague or Phnom Phen or Pennsylvania without ever having been there, based only on research. But I’m not one of those writers. For whatever reason, I’m much more apt to write about a situation I’ve never been in (having a brother go missing for my last book, being a middle-aged museum-guard aquarist man in my novel-in-progress) than write about a place I’ve never been.
As for not wanting to offend readers, I wonder what you mean by that exactly. Are you afraid you would offend them by not representing your town positively? Or by not representing it accurately? Or both? I’ve found one way around both of those issues is to make up a setting. In The Local News, the setting is a stultifying Detroit suburb called Fairfield. I made up the name Fairfield. However, I happened to grow up in a stultifying Detroit suburb that bears quite a strong resemblance to Fairfield. Inventing a new name, though, gave me dramatic license to play with the details and the depiction of the place.
Susanna adds: Such a good question, Kelly.
My novel STILTSVILLE is set in a very specific era in a very specific place -- Miami (and specifically an area called Stiltsville) from 1969 through 1993. I lived in Miami (and Stiltsville) during these years, so I felt reasonably confident that I could represent the time and place pretty accurately. But my novel isn’t an historical novel, per se, so I did take some license, and I think I can justify doing so.
Whether or not you should write about your town depends, in my opinion, on whether you can capture the tone and tenor of the town -- not every single little detail must be accurate, but some details should be.
I wrote a series of three blog posts on this very subject, titled Where Does Fact Meet Fiction? In the first post, The Mad Alcoholic Writer myth and the Thinly Veiled Autobiography myth, I talk about myths about writers and about novels -- debut novels in particular -- being autobiographical. In the second -- and this one is directly relevant to your question -- is called Using true-life settings in made-up books. With examples and a quiz! In it I break down exactly what I think qualifies as a sin of inaccuracy when using a real place, and what doesn’t. You don’t have to agree, but you might get started thinking about exactly the kinds of things you want to include. The third part of my series is called What should a fiction writer sacrifice for factual accuracy? It grapples with when a writer might decide to intentionally include inaccuracies in a novel.
I’ll add that my old teacher Chris Offutt used to say, “Write like your parents are dead.” To me, this means not that I’m insensitive to my family or my community, but that if I let them take up room in my head while I’m working -- especially when I’m drafting -- then I’ll never get anything done.
Before my novel was published, I took out two bits that I’d borrowed from real life, from real people close to my family. I’m glad I used them when I was drafting, and I’m glad I got rid of them -- substituted them for invented stories -- before the novel was published. So in the end, I did take my teacher’s advice -- I wrote without worrying about my family or community. But I edited with others in mind. This is the advice I give to you: write about your town and forget about your community. If needed, you can substitute out some of the grittier, more painful bits of reality to spare your relationships. But in writing about your town, you might find that you can include much, much more than you must exclude.
I always start a story but never finish it because I think it is horrible what should I do. - Kaitlyn Hines
Randy says: Keep going through, even when you have those feelings! All of us reach that point in our way when we say “Argh! This is awful.”
There have been many times when I’ve wanted to step away—times when it seems I am simply blathering. Then, two months later, I’ll look at that same work and think, hmm…pretty good stuff that I’ve done here.
It’s almost impossible to hold two thoughts in one’s head at the same time—how can one think, I hate him and I love him at the exact moment? One thought replaces the other. I suggest you learn to do this with your writing. At the moment you think the negative thoughts (What drivel I’m writing,) shake your head and replace it with a positive thought: (This may be great, I can’t tell at the moment.)
It’s also important to remember that first drafts are often awful, that’s why they are only the first draft! I think of my first draft as ‘laying down the tracks.’ My second draft is to get the plot straightened out, the third for character fixing, the fourth for tone—etc.
For me, the first draft is the hardest, because it’s squeezing out new material. Once I type ‘the end’ the first time, I know the next go round will be easier.
Believe in yourself. The first draft is a journey of simply taking all the steps until you reach ‘the end.’ Then the fun begins.
Big changes in store for Ask a New Author starting next month! Stay tuned. In the meantime, send those publishing and writing questions to askanewauthor@bookdivas.com.
