Writing Fiction: A Hands-On Guide for Teens

Where and When: Your Setting The one thing that you need to remember about your setting, whether it’s on the moon, in your cousin’s school, or in a land and time far, far away—it needs to be tangible. Your setting needs to have all the dimensions of sight, taste, hearing, touch, and smell, and it needs to affect your characters and the plot. If your plot is set in a high school, then the daily life of your characters is filled with the regular ringing of class changes and loudspeakers, by the smells of wet winter clothes, gym change rooms, and cafeteria mystery meat. Texture comes from sticky cafeteria tables and broken chairs that pinch the backs of your legs when you least expect it. You don’t have to describe every aspect of high school life, because your readers will have some idea of what it’s about from their own experience or from seeing it in movies and TV. Some small, vivid reminders of the parts of high school that aren’t just seen will give your readers that moment when they can fall more deeply into the life of your characters and the world they inhabit. It’s even more important to provide concrete details when your setting is more exotic and not one that your readers will likely have inhabited themselves. Science fiction and fantasy need a careful touch. You don’t want to drown your readers in details—but think about the ones that are essential. Highlight the essentials that affect your character. You might have a situation where your character curses the extra bright light provided by two moons while he’s trying to break into the enemy’s camp, and the extraordinarily high and low tides caused by the moons add complications when his escape is delayed. One way to make your story’s setting come to life is to draw a map of the locations of your story. Even if your setting is a thinly disguised rendition of your own neighbourhood, drawing a map is a good way to open doors to some things you might not have thought of. What is beyond the two blocks that surround your MC’s house? Who lives there? Is it someone who has just moved in and could come in and shake up the story and your characters a bit? Keep drawing your map in ever-widening circles, until you are on Main Street or at the mall, and be open to what might decide to arrive on the page. Maybe there’s a blank space you can’t figure out how to fill, and then you realize it’s a cemetery with a freshly dug grave and one small bouquet of flowers. Maybe it’s an abandoned lot that has remained empty for 30 years since the house on it burned down; no one even walks across it for a short cut. Maybe, it’s a portal to another universe. Drawing the map isn’t an exercise in being a good artist but, rather, an exercise in building a world that you can confidently walk your character around—without finding out on page 38 that you have him turning left into a mini-mall where on page 3 you’d created a park. The exercise serves a couple of purposes: letting your imagination work in a different way than with words, and mapping out a setting that will stay consistent through a longer work. I also suggest drawing maps as a way to find a plot in the first place. Draw a detailed map of an imaginary town—or neighbourhood or island or country or planet—and then imagine what could happen there. Who might live there and need to move from one place to another? Do the names you chose for streets, or mountains, or swamps suggest a mystery, a comedy, a fantasy, or a romance? Is the place you've created one where people fall in love, use magic, or fight evil androids? Drawing provides an extra bonus, in that it connects to the right side of your brain and helps quiet the critical, linear left side, allowing your creativity to shine. Give it a try, especially if the voices in your head are particularly loud and rude about your writing talent today. Even taking some time to colour a picture in your kid sister’s colouring book can make all the difference. Draw a map, rely on your senses, select your detail carefully, and your setting will become that important other character in your story.