Carlene Havel's Blog: Carlene - Posts Tagged "setting"

Before I begin the first sentence of the first chapter of a work of fiction, I write a personality profile and physical description of each major character. Is a house, office building, or other structure significant to the action? I draw a floor plan and briefly describe the decor. My timeline begins with the plot situation and works backwards. For instance, if the action begins in 1800 and the hero is 30 years old, then obviously he was born in 1770. If the heroine is five years younger, I have a reference point that establishes her birth date as 1775. If she went to school between the ages of five and sixteen, her education began in 1780 and ended in 1791. This takes a lot of self-discipline, because all the time I’m doing this preparation work I’m just bursting to get started telling the story. However, the up-front work pays off. If I want to drop an event into a character’s past, the time line allows me to set the date easily because the math has already been done. As for the inspiration, I have a notebook stuffed with ideas for stories. A hundred years wouldn’t be enough time to get them all done!