Another part of developing a novel structure is planning the locations. Just like with a movie, the “set” makes a difference. Where do your characters live? What kind of place is it (urban, suburb, rural?) If it’s a city, is it a rich one or a poor one? Most cities are a mixture, so what part of town do they live in and do they visit or know people in other parts of town? Where do they hang out? Do they have a favorite restaurant? Do they go to school? Do they go to church? To the mall? What do they see every day that might influence their thoughts, feelings, or actions?
To develop this part of my novel, I turned again to my long list of scenes (which I know is still partial, but which will form the backbone of my story). Next to each scene I wrote about the setting.
Here is a sample of my location notes from my first five scenes. The notes not only include the actual place (that is, “airport” or “church”, but they also include notes about why I want to set something in a particular place and give me some options for other places I could set the scene if I feel like that is necessary once I start writing.
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Scene # |
Short Desc | Location |
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1 |
Flight home | We may start in the airport (always a good place for observing people and for feeling alone in a crowd). We’ll follow her onto the plane. How long is her flight? How far from home is she? When she lands, do we care how she gets from the airport to her mom’s house? Will her mother pick her up? |
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2 |
Reunion with mother | Will this take place at the airport and in the car? (I’m thinking yes.) It could also take place at the mother’s house once the girl gets there, but I like the airport/car idea better. It lets them be in public (surrounded by strangers so they don’t feel on display) and then later in private so we can hear them talking alone and (potentially) honestly. |
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3 |
Funeral | This will be at a church/graveyard. They are Catholic. |
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4 |
Jogging/ Childhood Flashback | This will take place at night on the streets surrounding her mother’s house. This will serve to show just how close to home the depravity is and reinforce the jarring change between the town she remembers and what it has become. |
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5 |
Seeing the event | This will take place as she’s jogging past a house. Whose house? What part of town? Need to decide if it’s in a poor area or a rich area. The mayor’s daughter is in there, so is she slumming? Or did she invite the gang home while her parents are away? |
You’ll notice that I’ve included some additional information that wasn’t in earlier notes, like the fact that the family is Catholic. I decided this on the fly, but for several reasons:
- I grew up in a Catholic household, so I am most used to their rituals and can write about it much more easily than I could about any other religion.
- I don’t want to have to research an entirely different tradition just for one scene.
- It ties into something I discovered about the mother yesterday while writing about her emotions – she’s sort of a born again Catholic. When her husband dies she is suddenly overcome with a religious fervor that doesn’t seem to really help her and in fact harms her by pushing away her daughter who thinks it’s all a crock of BS.
Writing this has also revealed to me something else about the daughter. I have been struggling to decide what her college major was, what her interests are. The fact that she grew up as a tomboy, spending more time with her dad than with her mother, and the fact that there is some pre-existing tension between she and her mother tell me that she didn’t take on a study or career path the mother approves of. And the thought I had just now that her mother’s religiosity pushes her away reveals to me that she’s an atheist. I think she’s going to be a science major of some kind, either in the medical field, or perhaps in some boring, obscure science at which she thought she could get a job easily, but which evaporated with the recent destruction of the economy. All kinds of manufacturing plants need scientifically minded people, but when the jobs are shipped overseas, those jobs go away and there is often no other place to apply such specialized skills. I believe this is what is happening to my MC.
I love how something as unrelated as “location” has revealed to me not only my MC’s college major and religious beliefs, but the probable path of her early career. I find it fascinating how each layer builds upon the previous and sometimes enhances it or uncovers something I’ll need to know later on.
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