Down and Dirty Step #9: Using a Calendar to Keep Track of your Setting

Okay, if you’re like me, the word setting conjures a place—a sunny beach or a windy mountaintop or a blue blue lake or a primeval forest. Your job as the writer is to struggle with the task of finding the perfect details to create that perfect setting and then weave them into your story to create that setting, from your character’s point of view, of course, so the reader doesn’t die from boredom.

So, I needed a subtle shift in my thinking. Setting is place, but it is also time. As you tell your story, your characters move through time, day to day. One way to easily keep track of those days – and this was a great trip I received from a published author years ago – is to use a calendar for each scene of your story. You don’t want the days of your story to feel the same. After all, Mondays in real life feel different than Sundays.  They should feel different in your character’s life also.

The trick is to think about your protagonist. Does he/she go to school or work? What do they do Mondays through Fridays? How does their life change when the weekend hits? If your story takes place over four months, you don’t have to reflect every day, but you have to know which day it is and drop hints to the reader so they have the feeling that time is passing.

The easiest way to keep track of the different days is to record each scene on a calendar. You can either do this when you are writing your first draft or you can begin this in the revision stage.  In either case, when you constantly refer back to the calendar, you force yourself to be aware of the day and you can reflect that information in your story. 

Next month: Down and Dirty, Step #9 Incorporate Visceral Responses when your Point of View Character Reacts

Down and Dirty: How To Make Your Setting Rock

As a writer, we must face the fact that readers skip descriptions of setting more often than any other part of the book.  Most particularly, they hate reading long passages of boring descriptions of setting.  And yet, we need to describe the setting to ground the reader in the here and now of the story or else we’ll have our characters floating in outer space.

So how can we effectively describe setting that reader will want to read?

In my opinion it has to do with point of view.

Point of view means who tells your story. Most stories have two, sometimes three, points of view, which means the reader is limited to what the character can see and hear. An omniscient point of view is an all seeing, all knowing narrator.

We know from experience that readers respond better to third person narrators than omniscient narrators.  Readers like when a story is filtered through the lens of a particular point of view character. 

Even when setting is being described. 

So be a saavy writer.  When you describe setting, do it with purpose. Use it as a set-up for something else:

Use it to reveal character.

Use it to set mood.

Use it to create conflict.

In Lisa Scottoline’s Dead Ringer, the narrator, Bennie Rossato a third person, limited narrator is an attorney who is tough, cynical, humorous, clever, and a bit brave.  Notice how Ms. Scottoline filters the setting through the eye of the narrator, Bennie. It is all done through word choice:

She wiped sweat from her forehead while she waited, and looked around.  The dappled grass on the riverbank was dotted now with people who’d ditched work early to take advantage of the unseasonable warm stretch of weather. Cyclists in baby hats with turned up brims biked on the asphalt paths  . . . Lovers smooched on bedspreads, and students tossed cloth Frisbees to mutts in bandannas.

When you describe setting, make sure that what you tell your reader is key to the story.  Make sure that the descriptions would only come from the point of view character. 

Down and Dirty, Step #8, Avoid Describing Your Setting from an Omniscient Point of View.

Next Month:  Down and Dirty, Step #9 Using a Calendar to Keep Track of Your Setting.

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