Nothing Happens Nowhere

Eudora Welty said, “Nothing happens nowhere,” and she’s right: setting is huge in storytelling. The place, time, and people observing the action aren’t just wallpaper, they have a big impact on what happens in the scene. Add building your own fantasy world to that, and things get complicated.

One of the things I’ve been doing for the last several years for the important buildings in my stories is floorpans. I want to know how the characters move through their spaces, and I can’t do that until I see how the spaces are laid out. In this collaboration, one of the most important settings is the church where my protagonist is secretly living. It’s not just her home, it’s also the site of some fairly large action sequences, so everybody had to know how the church was laid out. But for the first time, instead of a floor plan, I did an elevation, a plan from the side, because most of the action in this building is vertical, not horizontal. It’s another one of those discovery exercises we’ve been talking about. As I draw the plan, I can see how the different levels work, what Cat has to do to get up and down them, and how the general typography works. Toni’s character doesn’t have many scenes in the church, but she has enough that she needs to know what’s in my head, and because I have to put it on paper, I know it much better now myself.