The Setting

Where your story takes place. It could be an island, an alternate world, another planet – the possibilities are endless.

Before starting your novel, you will need to think long and hard about where you will set your story, as this will influence how your characters will act and who they will interact with. Will your world have specific features? Perhaps it has an undiscovered species or creatures roaming about the lands. Or maybe it’s a baron wasteland with nothing in sight. Whatever the case, you will need to familiarise yourself with your character’s surroundings – for if you don’t understand your location and how your characters interact with it, your reader certainly won’t!

You will need to think about the size relationships of your world and its inhabitants.

If it is a large world, perhaps the possibility of the different characters or beings running into each other is small. For example, in Rowling’s Harry Potter the wizards are hidden away from the normal ‘muggle’ humans with magic, even though they all share the same London. If your world is a small island, does that mean you can travel from one end to the other in a matter of days and how ill this impact on the story?

If you decide to make your world rural or medieval, you will need to decide on the different types of landscape or geographical features. Do some research into ancient history to see how people lived in particular times, therefore giving you an opportunity to improvise or design fantastic landscape features e.g. The Neverending Story.

Where are the rivers or mountains? Do you have volcanoes? Where do the people that inhabit your world live? You may also want to start thinking up names for different villages and towns or other prominent areas. Some helpful hints when naming an area is to use names of the existing scenery. For example: the name Meadowbank is the joining of the two words meadow and bank when in all reality they could mean the meadow on the bank of a river. However, it is also fun to just make up the names as you go on, not too many or you will tax the memory of your readers.

As mentioned above, you may also want to think about the different types of creatures that live in your world. A good guide to existing creatures you may want to use can be found here

WORKSHOP: Draw a map of your world. Include all the different features and start labelling the map. Look at Tolkien’s Hobbit or Lord of the Rings. It doesn’t have to be a good copy; it’s to help you reference where your character is and where they are going.