Setting: Time

For me, working out what the setting of a story will be comes down to one question: will the story be set now, that is, in the present day?

In many ways this is the easiest solution, because if it’s so, then compared to the alternatives, your work is basically done.

To illustrate what I mean, let’s consider the alternative.

Say your story isn’t set in the present.  What does that leave?  The past and the future, of course.  

First, a side note.  When I say that I “decide” whether my story will be set in the past, present, or the future, this is actually getting the real process exactly backwards.  I never, for example, or almost never, say to myself, “well, it’s time to have a story, when will it be set?  Well I set the last one in the past, so I think this one will be in the future!” and then do the rest of the work from there.

Instead, because I can’t will an idea into existence, I most often find myself overtaken by my next idea when I wasn’t expecting it, and usually while I’m working on something else.  So, I’ll be walking along, and the idea for a story will occur, and it will say of itself when it’s supposed to be set.

In fact, a good way to summarize this long discourse on how to start a story is to say that Plot (trouble), Setting, and Character are the three main shapes a NEW IDEA can present itself in when it turns up on your doorstep in the middle of the night, figuratively speaking.

The three are tangled up with each other in ways that seem to be irreversably complex and co-dependent (remember, starting a story is a three body problem), and the best you can do is to try to be organized, to let it do its thing without thinking to much, and to recognize and write down which parts are logically important and emotionally significant, trying to make something engaging, satisfying, and memorable.

If you can do the above two paragraphs, you have no need to read this blog any further except for the funny pictures, that’s basically everything I know so far about writing fiction.  The rest is all just justification and detail.

So let’s say you’re thinking about a certain period of time.

If it’s in the past, you’ll probably get intrigued by some historical detail or person (“figure,” I guess, though I kind of think that term is a little hammy; would you like to be called a “historical figure” one day? yeesh).  Say you learn that toilets used to be shaped a different way, or that when birthing their calvary foals the ancient Macedonian calvary used to blow carefully into their nostrils to get them breathing in order to share a closer bond.  Whatever the detail, suddenly some part of it hits you over the head, and you want to hear more about it.  There are only two ways I know of to hear more about an idea that occurs like that, and both are profitable in their own way.

The first way to hear more about it is to do more research, and the second way is to make up a person who lives in that world, and have them give their reasons and reactions to that detail.  And if you want to tell your story well, doing the research will almost always be necessary, and will never do you harm if you’re patient enough.

If your creative impulse is as impatient and inconstant as mine, you probably want to write down at least some part of your idea within the first few hours (or days, at most) before you get bored with it and forget it altogether.  Since good research takes time, sometimes a lot of time, I will often try and get my ideas down before they slip away, and worry about technical or historical accuracy later.  If I find out later that what I wrote doesn’t fit with the facts, I try to find a way to make it make sense with real life, as history records it, without changing the feel.  If 

How to do research well will have to wait for another post.  For now, suffice to say that stories set in the past will require research, because a lot of the flavor of the story and a lot of what will make the character’s experiences believable and relevant will be in the details of the world you’re trying to portray.

And then again, if the world of the story isn’t as important as the characters and the plot, consider setting it in the present, if you can.  Most of the things that are important to people today (staying alive and personal relationships) were important to people a thousand years ago, and usually what gives a story its salt will resonate whether it happened last year or in the fourth century.  But if it happened last year, you have the freedom to tell the story on its own terms without having to make sure the audience remembers that there are Roman pillars shining in torch light in the background somewhere.  Make sure that the story means enough to you to justify the amount of work that will be needed to make it real and believable.  Otherwise, the setting can turn to be more of a distraction than anything else.

What about stories in the future?

First off “from the future” sounds a lot better, don’t you think?  It sounds like they’re here for a reason; they just came through the door and we’ve got to know what they have to say -- or else!

Stories set in the future take the issues involved in stories set in the past and raise them to the second power, at least.  The issues involved, if you want to do the job well, become so complicated that the matter deserves an article of its own.