The Complications of Choosing Setting

To explain my title further: I’m not going to talk about putting a setting into your work or discuss the best details I think you should use in order to do so. What I want to bring up today is the process of actually choosing the locales where your story takes place. I want to do this because I think the process involves more than picking your favourite city and throwing your characters in it; culture, history, customs, traditions ALL factor in because they affect what your story can do.

One of my favourite prof’s had us read a book called Place: A Short Introduction when we were studying Edmund Spencer’s works. I won’t get into the Edmund Spencer part, but the idea behind reading Place was to get our minds thinking about the intricacies of where events took place. Place/space is multilayered, and there’s so much you can do on a metaphorical and metaphysical level with location. But that’s getting way beyond my expertise.

Bear with me here, I have to delve a bit more into my history in order to convey what I want to convey.

As most readers know I’m Canadian, if you didn’t know that SURPRISE. Not. Anyway, Canadian writers have a bit of a problem when it comes to their writing that not a lot of writers from other countries have, and I am going to single out American writer’s especially here. This problem concerns setting our stories in Canada because this affects the commerciality of the story –in some circles. Stories set in the US don’t have this issue; globally, the US is seen as an ”everywhere” full of “every people.” Canada doesn’t have that status.

This is a real point of contention for me because I like my country and I want my stories to be accessible to a wide audience. I was actually so irritated by this idea that I incorporated it into my honours thesis and took a number of history courses about the US, Canada, and even an American/Canadian cultural comparative course. In case you’re wondering, I didn’t come up with any definitive answer and had to change my research direction because I wasn’t getting anywhere with the questions I was asking. Bugger.

Retrospectively, after reading more stories by Canadian authors set in the US and abroad and being able to look at my thesis with some distance, I’ve had a few revelations about this Canadian setting conundrum.

I’ll use Kelley Armstrong’s Omens as my prime example. Armstrong is an author based out of Ontario, famous for her Women of the Otherworld series. The first two books in that series are narrated by the character Elena, who is Canadian, but set mostly in New York. And, the series didn’t actually take off until book three came out, narrated by Paige, who was born and raised around Portland. Now, Elena is a werewolf and the books she narrates are intensely gory and violent. Paige is a white witch, but there’s a decent amount of violence in her life. You can look at it from two angles, really, but I’m supposed to be talking about Omens here.

Omens is set outside of Chicago. After reading the first chapter I will admit that I was pissed, I figure if you’re a Canadian you should choose your country over salability of your story, by golly! I took it a bit personally…for the life of me I have no idea why. Probably bad timing after not being able to come up with answers for my project. And other neurotic writer issues.

Now (that I have my sanity back), and I’ve dissected aspects of the story, I understand it. My best example with this book involves guns. There needs to be easy access to legal guns in Omens and there’s a high level of gun violence involved. I think it’s well understood that it is easy to get your hands on guns in the US, moreover, they are perceived much differently in the US than in Canada. It’s damn near impossible to get a legally owned gun here, and damn near as difficult to keep it. There are more regulations it seems than guns in our country. If Omens was set in Canada all of those parts would have to be amended in the story because they legitimately do not work in our country. I will concede that this would wreck a lot of really good parts of the story, and overly complicate others.

Lesson learned: writers can set their stories wherever they please because it’s their story and their choice –as long as setting makes sense.

So that’s what I’m talking about when I say choosing where your story takes place involves so much more than you sometimes think. Ciao!