Marcia Thornton Jones's Blog, page 167

When is Setting Important? by Laurie Calkhoven

Claudia’s post earlier this month led me to think about when describing setting is important and when it isn’t. My WIP is set in a generic suburban neighborhood with a creek for frog hunting, a cranky neighbor, an overgrown yard, and a school bus stop. I rely on readers to add color from their own neighborhoods, their own cranky neighbors. Didn’t we all have a Mrs. Crabapple down the street growing up?

The way we describe setting can tell us a lot about character and emotions, and those are the details I pull in when necessary.


In my historical fiction describing setting was more important. My readers haven’t lived in colonial Boston, Gettysburg during the battle, or World War II Paris. They can’t add color from their own experiences. Traveling to the places I wrote about helped me find the details that can brought the setting to life, but even more vital were the details I learned by reading primary sources. In that way I knew that the place to go for penny candy in 1863 Gettysburg was Petey Williams’ store, and that when Owen Robinson cranked out ice cream at his confectionary, it cost ten cents.




As much fun as some of those details are, it's important to include setting details that bring our characters to life. So when Michael walks through a Paris train station, what he notices are not the French people bustling to train platforms and about to embark on adventures, but the Nazi soldiers and the threat they represent.






For more about setting, I can highly recommend Janni Lee Simner’s FINDING YOUR SENSE OF PLACE:  http://simner.com/writinglife/

Changing our Setting (July Theme) by Kristin Levine

I recently changed my own "setting" when I sold my house last week.  I got divorced a few years ago and the house equity needed to be divided, and even more importantly, I needed a fresh start.  Dreading packing everything up by myself, I invited a bunch of friends over for a "packing party."  I gathered boxes, bought tape, and made lists, figuring we probably wouldn't get that much done, but maybe we'd get a few things packed.Then my friends showed up.  One took over the grill and made fajitas for everyone.  Another took all the leftover food from my cabinets and arranged it into an attractive snack plate.  Another brought crab dip.  Even my realtor showed up with a cake.Everyone else grabbed tape and Sharpies and got to work.  In one evening, my friends packed about 70% of the house.  I was shocked that something I'd been dreading ended up being so much fun.  And I felt so touched and supported that my friends were so willing to help me transition to a new phase in my life.  Instead of feeling sad about my "change in setting," I started to feel excited.Then came my first evening in the new place.  My kids were with their dad in California, visiting relatives, and again I was feeling a little scared, apprehensive and alone.  Until a friend showed up with champagne.  And cake, which we ate with forks, directly from the box.  (Clearly, I have the best friends ever!)  Before we had finished eating, a new neighbor came by with cookies. And I suddenly remembered why I love writing for middle-grade.  When you're twelve years old, the whole world stretches in front of you.  New settings.  New beginnings.  New friends.  New possibilities.  Maybe it's not just for twelve-year-olds.  Maybe a change in setting can open up new worlds and possibilities for a forty-one year-old too...

Heretical Claim re Setting (July theme) by Claudia Mills

Here's my heretical claim and perhaps humiliating confession re setting: Setting doesn't always have to be important to a book, and it's almost never important to mine.

Whew! There, I've said it!

These days I write mainly school stories for third and fourth grade readers: Kelsey Green, Reading Queen; Annika Riz, Math Whiz; Izzy Barr, Running Star in the Franklin School Friends series; and my forthcoming Nora Notebooks series launching this September with The Trouble with Ants.


The setting of my books is just. . . school, and a school setting that I hope will be universally recognizable to anyone who has ever been a student, teacher, or classroom visitor. Because a book has to take place somewhere, my books "take place" in Colorado; I live here, so I can toss in a few mentions of mountains with confidence. But there is nothing specific to Colorado about Franklin Elementary School and Plainfield Elementary School. If I took out the occasional reference to mountains and substituted the occasional reference to palm trees or cornfields, nothing of significance would change about my stories at all.

Writer friends who have heard me say this rush to reassure me that my books DO create wonderful settings, they do, they do! They tell me they can so see Mrs. Molina's third grade classroom, where she presides strictly and sternly until exuberant, always enthusiastic principal Mr. Boone comes bounding in to rouse the kids for the school-wide reading contest, or PTA carnival with its dunking tank, or spelling bee.

That is kind of them. Writers are so often kind to other writers.

But I think what they really mean is that my books have memorable characters, who invite the reader into a memorable world. Does that memorable world count as a setting?

I'm not sure it does. But maybe I'm wrong.

In Simon Ellis, Spelling Bee Champ, we do get to see the Word Wall in Mrs. Molina's room, where Simon competes with Kelsey to write the most and hardest words ever. We see the kids huddling for spelling practice, trying to be the first team to claim the coveted bean bag chairs. We see the teams crowding into the gym for the main event, carrying the large pads on which teams will write each correctly spelled word to display. And we see the winning team feasting on Mr. Boone's famous honey pie at the pie buffet.

So I have physical details. I'm not saying I don't have physical details, that my characters somehow float above the material world as disembodied spirits. Franklin School is a place. But it's a place that comes alive for readers, if it does, chiefly because of the characters who inhabit it and what they say and do in that space.

Perhaps I'm interpreting setting too narrowly as geographical/regional? Perhaps setting can just be a distinctively delightful classroom in Every School, USA? I still think I'm right that setting is the least important feature of my books. But setting is so widely held to be the most important element of a book that I wouldn't mind being convinced that I'm mistaken.

Finding Story (Setting - July Theme - Sarah Dooley)

"Which comes to you first when you're writing a novel, the characters or the plot?" It seemed a simple question, posed by a fellow writer in a critique group. I mulled it over, trying to discern what it was about a book that came into my head first. Was it the characters -- my beloved, unique Livvie from LIVVIE OWEN LIVED HERE; courageous Ember from BODY OF WATER; serious Sasha from FREE VERSE? Or was it the plot -- Livvie's quest to recapture her home; Ember's journey through life at the campground; Sasha's poetry as a way to deal with her missing cousin?

When I really stopped to think, though, none of those elements came into my head first.

With LIVVIE OWEN LIVED HERE, it was reflections in dusty windows of a town withering to nothing. It was fireball candy from the local gas station. It was leaning For Rent signs on unkempt lawns.

With BODY OF WATER, it was the smell of lake mud and campfires, the early-morning sound of somebody's tent door zipping open, the scatter of shadows across the grass as the wind blew in the storm clouds.

For FREE VERSE, it was birds past a window, light and shadow, gritty pathways giving way to sun-filled treetops, rivers that cut through thickets and roads that don't seem to go anywhere.

It was setting. It's always setting.

When I sit down to write something new, there's this ritual I have. In my head, I walk into a place, maybe one I've seen before. I look around, breathe in the scent, feel the temperature and texture of that place against my skin. I take a moment to remember all the times before that I've felt this essence. Having moved fifty times in thirty years, I don't call a single place home, but each of these collections of essence -- sight, sound, feel, taste, point in time -- carries with it a smudge of my upbringing and a piece of the writer I am.

Setting comes first. Once that comes, everything else finds its way onto the page.

If You Love Your Book, Then Don't Let It Go - Linda Fausnet

A few years ago, I wrote a blog post entitled Self-Publishing Means Never Having to Say Goodbye, in which I lamented how hard it was for me to let go of a novel that I knew would never be published, either traditionally or self-published. I loved the story, but it was for middle-graders who are notoriously absent on Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest. I knew it would be nearly impossible to market to that age group online, so I sadly shelved the book forever.
Until two weeks ago when I published it.
Then I wrote a blog article entitled Why It's Okay to Publish a Book That Probably Won't Sell. It's much easier for me to market my chick lit and romance books, and I'm fairly sure my middle-grade book likely won't sell a ton of books.
So what? I'm the boss, now. I own my publishing company, Wannabe Pride Publishing, and I went right ahead and greenlit this project. No, it's not going to zoom up the Amazon charts, but the book is dedicated to my son and it made my daughter and critique partner cry – in a good way. In a touching, happy ending kind of way.
The book, entitled The Joyville Sweat Sox, is about baseball. I'm passionate about the sport, and I think that really shines through in the story. It's about a young woman who is forced to coach a baseball team full of clueless kids as punishment for breaking her town's No Anger law. It's won't be easy to teach them the rules of the game without losing her temper…The coach, Konnie Mack (get it, baseball fans?) has had anger management issues ever since she lost her father a few years back. The villain in the story, Bobby Hearsay, stole Joyville's baseball team in the middle of the night and moved them to another town. It was the same year Konnie's dad died. She feels she was robbed of that last special summer of going to games with her father.
Konnie hates the idea of coaching kids who don't even know how to play the game. Gradually, she softens, realizing, "They aren't the one who took baseball away from me and my dad. They're the ones bringing it back." She instills in them the love of the game that she shared with her father. At the end, the judge who sentenced her for getting mad in the first place actually comes to her defense for getting angry. This time, she got mad and risked severe punishment by standing up for her little players. The judge tells her that he's proud of her, and that he saw a lot of her father in her that day.
Yeah. That part still makes me cry.
I tend to be overly sentimental when it comes to baseball. I can't watch Field of Dreams without completely falling apart… And that's why I wrote Joyville. I packed the tale with (hopefully) funny baseball references and lots and lots of heart and feel-good stuff.
It's really quite simple.
I like the book. I want to share the book with other people. I wanted a book that my kids could read and enjoy, and maybe some other kids would, too.
This will likely be my only foray into middle-grade territory. I'm currently working on a paranormal romance trilogy about ghosts from Gettysburg, and it's definitely NOT for kids. The first book I published was not for kids, and my next book is chick lit, which is okay for children, but won't interest them.
It's kind of cool to know that, for the rest of my life, I'll have a book out there for kids. You never know when someone will pick it up, read my words and smile, laugh, and maybe cry a little.
And that's the beauty of self-publishing. My book may only reach a handful of people, but I don’t have to say goodbye. 
-          Linda Fausnet
My book, THE JOYVILLE SWEAT SOX, is available here - http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00YXUD7FI
If you're a writer, I invite you to check out my writer support blog at www.wannabepride.comand you can join my Writer's mailing list here - http://wannabepride.com/blog/?page_id=3466.
Linda Fausnetlindafausnet@gmail.com~Linda's also hosting a giveaway: US / Canadian residents can use the form below to enter to win a signed physical copy of THE JOYVILLE SWEAT SOX! a Rafflecopter giveaway

The Setting is Personal by Danette Vigilante

It might come as no surprise that my two books, The Trouble with Half a Moon and Saving Baby Doe, take place in a public housing project since I grew up in one. It feels a tiny bit like cheating, but I had my reasons.
Sometimes growing up in public housing marks you as somehow being “less than” by society. Outside of my neighborhood, this plagued me, but at home, amongst my friends and neighbors, none of that existed. I was surrounded by a village made up of good, hard working people who cared not only for their own families, but for their neighbors as well.
Does this mean I lived in a perfect world? Not at all and when I began writing, I knew I needed to show what living in public housing is really like. The truth? It’s absolutely no different than living in any other neighborhood— including the “bad” and the good.

Setting (July theme) by Bob Krech

When I came back to the US from teaching overseas, I took a teaching job in a school district that sent all new teachers for seminars in teaching reading, writing, and math. In the seminar on teaching writing we were given an assignment to write about a memory of a childhood place and to try to utilize our five senses. We began with a web on the five senses, jotting notes along each strand.

I chose to write about the summer I was ten. I spent two weeks that summer staying with my grandparents and uncles in an apartment a half block from the Hudson River in what was then a very gritty, urban Jersey City. This is what 10 year-old suburban me's senses encountered.

See: block after block of apartment houses and stores, dirty streets, cars, trucks, the Hudson River, boats, little old grandmothers shopping and cleaning
Hear: ice cream trucks' music and bells, factory lunch whistle, police sirens, delivery trucks rumbling
Touch: dried, splintery wood from the docks on the Hudson River, rough stone and brick stoops, smooth Spaldeens for stickball, Jerry Geckle banging my head on pavement
Smell: Sabrett hot dogs from push cart on corner, Colgate's factory soap and perfume smell
Taste: Sabrett hot dogs with mustard, onion, relish, and sauerkraut! Cold, tangy, lemon ice from the push cart. (Jerry banged my head on the pavement because I threw a lemon ice at him. This was after he hit me with one first. I have witnesses!)

These notes were the very simple basis of my first paid, published story. Just jotting those notes, which were the framework of the setting, also turned out to be the catalyst for the story. Setting can be that strong of a force in writing and often a great place to actually start your story.

Interview with THE BOOK OF DARES FOR LOST FRIENDS Author Jane Kelley

Posted by Tamera Wissinger
It’s release day for Smack Dab in the Middle blogger Jane Kelley’s THE BOOK OF DARES FOR LOST FRIENDS, a story that has been welcomed with excellent reviews. Congratulations, Jane! We're lucky to have Jane with us today to answer a few questions about her newest release. 
photo by Keith Weber Jane's Goodreads Bio:
Jane Kelley lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband and her daughter. She was the 2013 Thurber House Children's Writer in Residence. Jane says, “I grew up in Wisconsin, near a forest that was my refuge and a source of inspiration. I still love to be in nature, whether I’m exploring Vermont or an untamed corner of our city park. No wonder I wrote my first book about a girl who finds herself by getting lost in the woods.”
Description of THE BOOK OF DARES FOR LOST FRIENDS from Feilwel & Friends:
Val and Lanora have been friends forever. Val expects their relationship to stay the same. But after they start middle school, Lanora decides to reinvent herself. Her parents have split up, and she wants to rise above that. Unfortunately Lanora's choices lead her into trouble. Val hates watching her friend lose her way. She wants to rescue Lanora, but how? Val doesn't know what to do until a stray cat leads her to a strange boy who lives in an even stranger bookshop. Together they embark on a quest. Will they be able to save a lost friend? Will they get lost themselves? Or will they find a way to help each other become who they want to be . . . .
Jane Kelley has created a nuanced, universal story about friendship and that delicate time of adolescence when there is much to lose and much more to find.
Kirkus Reviews Starred Review Excerpt:
...In this meticulously designed tale, Kelley takes an ordinary, realistic situation—upon entering middleschool, a girl decides to start fresh and jettisons her longtime best friend, who is unwilling to let matters rest—and imbues it with layers of poignancy and enchantment...
Interview with Jane Kelley, author of THE BOOK OF DARES FOR LOST FRIENDS:
Can you talk about how the idea for THE BOOK OF DARES FOR LOST FRIENDS came to you? Did you know right away that this was the book that you wanted to write, or did you discover it as you wrote? How did your stories evolve?
This book changed quite drastically. In fact, the only elements that remain from early drafts are the fire escape (as I wrote in my blog post) and a mysterious black cat. I had to keep Mau––or my own cat would have been mad at me. But all the other characters went through many changes until, after several drafts, one scene clicked into place. Halfway through the book, Val dares to force her way into a fancy office building to confront her lost friend’s father. That realistic quest had fairy tale elements; those glittering glass office towers reminded me of castles. After I got that scene right, I knew I could make the rest work.  
Was THE BOOK OF DARES FOR LOST FRIENDS always for middle grade readers or not? Why did you choose middle grade?  
It was always for middle grade. One of the reasons I love writing for this age group is that they are transitioning from innocence to awareness. My main characters remember when they did believe in fairy tales, but they are trying to be more adult. They must find new sources for comfort and courage.
What is the best part of writing stories for middle grade readers? Are there any drawbacks?
I like that I can still dip back into magic––even if the one talking about spells is a younger sibling. I don’t think there is a drawback. I think these readers can handle complexities of character and thought. And I’m happy that I, as author, can solve at least some of their problems at the novel’s end.
Is there one question you wish you could answer about writing, your book, or the author's life, but have never been asked? Here's your chance to Q &A yourself.  
Actually I do have something I want to say. When I was young, my favorite book was called UNDERSTOOD BETSEY. Clearly I thought that no one understood me! But one of the most amazing things I find about being a writer is that I can encourage understanding. I can actually put a reader in a character’s shoes. I can whisper the character’s thoughts in the reader’s ear. I can (hopefully) describe emotions well enough so that the reader feels the fears and the joys of another person. That is a very good thing.
~~~~~~
Thank you, Jane! Congratulations, again, on today’s release of THE BOOK OF DARES FOR LOST FRIENDS, available today from Feilwel & Friends. Best wishes to you and your new book. If you’d like to know more about Jane and her books, visit her Website or her Goodreadsauthor page. 

Setting in Historical Fiction by Darlene Beck Jacobson

While setting is important in everything we write, it takes on special significance when writing historical fiction. If we want children to really feel part of a long ago time and place, it is necessary to ground them into the setting by using sensory details. Think of it as time travel in reverse...going BACK in time to make an unfamiliar place seem familiar.  Setting essentially becomes a character in the story.
      In my MG historical WHEELS OF CHANGE, I had to show the workings of a carriage barn and forge.  This place was the heroine Emily's favorite hang out, so I wanted modern kids to feel what she feels when she's there.  Here is the setting taken from chapter one with Emily narrating:



      I dance across the sawdust-covered floor past Sam, Papa’s woodworker.  His saw hums like a busy beehive, slicing planks of wood.   I pick up handfuls of the slivers, inhaling their fresh-cut fragrance.  The slivers stick to my sweaty palms; I wipe my hands on my dress to loosen them.  The slivers stick there as well, like they’ve found a home. Mama would frown at my soot-and-sawdust gown. I duck behind a post, breathing in the sweet wood and varnish smells.            I glide back to the forge and lean on a wooden carriage wheel propped up next to Henry’s work area. Even in this soot-covered space, things are neat and tidy, nothing out of place.   Pulsing waves of heat makes it feel like summer year round.  The fire needs to burn red hot to be the right temperature for bending iron.  I stare into the fire’s belly, watching it move and change colors as if it were a living thing.  Some folks might think the forge is dark and dreary with only one small window.   But the fire is like a beacon that lights up the whole barn and makes it shimmer.  Papa’s barn without the forge would be like Mama’s house without the kitchen.  The heart would be gone.         The rhythmic tapping of Henry’s hammer is a symphony.  If I had but one wish, here it is – to be a blacksmith.
By using all the senses, we get to feel, see, smell, hear and almost taste the essence of a carriage barn and forge. We are there with Emily as her familiar world becomes ours.
 

Ah Setting, You're Killing Me!

from Jody Feldman
Or, maybe next time, from home; from here.

As type this, I am struggling with setting.
My WIP is set in several different cities, some of which I’ve never visited.

So I’ve been relying on YouTube and, in one case, an envoy who happens to be visiting one particular site. It’s not the same, though, as being there myself.

When I’m “there” I can fully understand which sites, which pieces of sites, would captivate my characters.

“Ask me,” you might say. “Maybe I live in one of those cities.”
Here’s the corner I’ve painted myself into:  If I tell you the cities, I give you some spoilers.

And so I’ll keep trolling online and faking my way through. And when this book is ready to roll, I may reach out to some of you to let me know if I’ve captured the true flavors of my setting.

For my next book, though, I think, once again, I’ll make up somewhere new.