Choosing the Setting of a Novel

Welcome, Nicki, as she stops by on her blog tour for Three Daves. Until September 30, Three Daves and other school-related titles are only 99 cents in Kindle, Nook, eBook, and ePub as part of the Omnific Publishing Back-to-School sale.  If you’re a book reviewer, A Tale of Many Reviews has opened up sign-ups for a Three Daves paper book tour.

I personally took advantage of this great deal. I have my copy of Three Daves waiting on my Kindle for me to read.  I love the new cover!!

Today Nicki and I discuss how writers choose their settings.

First, Nicki:

I doubt many people think of Central Illinois as a very exciting place.  And the truth is…er, it’s not.  But somehow that didn’t stop both me and the exciting Karen G from choosing the cornfield clustered metropolis as a setting for our stories.  So for my guest post today, we’re going to explain ourselves and tell you just why, out of all the places in the world, Central Illinois was the preferred backdrop for telling our tales. 

My first decision regarding the setting for Three Daves was that it had to be a college campus.  There’s really no other time in life quite like those undergrad days—it’s the perfect combination of  being free from the watchful eye of parents and yet still not having to face up to all the responsibilities of adulthood. 

When describing places, I’m often inspired by where I’ve been—the old “write what you know.”  But also, my alma mater, Eastern Illinois University in Charleston, IL, was the perfect campus off of which to model my fictional Central Illinois University precisely because it was so isolated from any major distractions, keeping the focus on the students and their mutating relationships. 

The mid-size of the EIU campus was also ideal as it allowed for much criss-crossing of paths.  You never know exactly when each Dave’s story has ended—any one of them could pop back in when you least expect it.  But I admit to getting a little stir crazy in that sea of corn, and so I sent my main character on a few side trips.  It wouldn’t be college in the 80s without a spring break in Daytona Beach, after all. ;)   

Okay, Karen—your turn.  Why’d ya do it?

My two novels Uncut Diamonds and House of Diamonds are loosely based on my own life, and they are set in Jacksonville, Illinois, where my husband and I basically started out our married life. I considered fictionalizing the name of the town and then decided not to. Especially in Uncut Diamonds, the town and the houses where the McGills live are almost like characters themselves, so I decided to keep it authentic.

I was born and raised in Central Illinois and although I now live in Utah, the cornfields, huge trees and river country of Downstate Illinois (what everyone calls it to distinguish it from Chicago) are what feels like home to me. I went to college there and so did my sisters. In fact, one of my sisters graduated  from Eastern Illinois University, the setting of Three Daves. When I found out the setting of Nicki's book, I knew I just had to read it!

Setting is really important to me in choosing what books I read. I'll buy a book simply based on the setting! I love to read about places both familiar and foreign to me.

How about the rest of you readers and writers? Writers, how do you choose your settings? And Readers, what kinds of settings do you enjoy in books?

L is for Local Color Writing

LOCAL COLOR WRITING is a term applied to writing that exploits the speech, dress, mannerisms, habits of thought, and topography peculiar to a certain region, primarily for the portrayal of the life of a geographical setting. About 1880 this interest became dominant in American literature. Bret Harte, Mark Twain and Joaquin Miller wrote of the West; Joel Chandler Harris of the South; Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman of New England.

LOCAL COLOR WRITING was marked by dialect, eccentric characters and sentimentalized pathos or whimsical humor. It lacked the basic seriousness of true realism and was content to be entertainingly informative about the surface of specific regions. It emphasized verisimilitude of detail without being much concerned about truth to the larger aspects of life. The bulk of the work done in the movement was in the sketch and the short story, although Mark Twain captured the genre perfectly in his novels The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn especially.

It is helpful to modern writers to understand earlier movements and genres, so that some of the particular flavor of these can enter the work and add to its originality. Now we call LOCAL COLOR WRITING more accurately regional novels. WiDo Publishing has recently released two regional novels that use the local color concepts to add to the interest and originality of the stories: Mississippi Cotton by Paul H. Yarbrough and Arizona Guy by Raymond Spitzer. It is the LOCAL COLOR WRITING that adds to the charm of these two regional mysteries.

(This post has been inspired by and in some instances, directly quoted from A Handbook to Literature, 8th Edition, by William Harmon and C. Hugh Holman)