Young Writers Society

So, my original plan was to have my characters travel to the fantasy world from the real world. But then i realised, if they start in the fantasy world, that gives me a lot more creative license, and also works out better for the plot...does anyone have any ideas on this? Thank

Works better for the plot > everything else.

Plans change, and if you come up with a better idea, then go for it. Writing involves a lot of flexibility and realizing that sometimes your plans aren't the best thing— there's a better one just around the corner.

Go with what you like to do, what you want to do, and what you're the most excited about. Your story will turn out better for it.

Since you didn't really tell us any back story, I can't quite give an opinion on what works better for your story, but it's always nice to ask yourself 'why' you're doing things. You might not have an answer, and that's totally fine, but when you get to dilemmas such as this one simply asking that question might shed a lot of light on what direction your story is headed.

If I were you I'd ask myself "why is it important for them to start in the real world?" "Why is it important to start in the fantasy world?", after you answer those questions, ask yourself more questions! "What's the benefits of starting in the real world/fantasy world" "what differences will it make in my plot" etc etc. It's really helpful and it'll probably answer your question for you.

Good luck!

Where will your characters feel better about themselves, meaning more "comfortable" in that situation, and in that location/place of your novel? In order to actually ask yourself that question,you need to know enough about who the character is to determine this. If you are in the early stages of just developing these characters, then I suggest that you wait off until you really dig a little bit deeper and get to actually know them as a person better, and where they are more likely to adapt.

I wish you good luck in your writing en-devours, and in the end, the setting is just one little dot in the big landscape of the plot.

Actually, setting can have a huge impact on the plot. It can determine what's feasible—what would work at all—as well as what's likely to happen, and can drive the plot itself by being the source of conflict in the characters.

To put it lightly, setting is really, really important. You need to know what world you're working with, what land you're working with, what geographical territory and culture you're working with, because that's how you develop your characters—through their interactions with others, their interaction with their culture, and their interaction with the place where they live.

In this case, it's important to know if you're starting in the fantasy world or not because that can have a giant impact on the plot in and of itself. If you start in the real world instead, you have to do explaining and set-up to show how the characters get to the fantasy world, how they deal with being in the fantasy world, and how they can even understand the language being spoken in the fantasy world. If you start in that world instead, you don't have those boundaries, but you have to explore how growing up there would have affected your characters.

Geographical territory is one of many things that influence how a culture will develop—in fact, it's one of the most important things, because it determines if your culture is more likely to be nomadic or sedentary, and it helps determine the basic method of how a society would settle down in that area.

Culture, as a whole, is huge. It would take me a year to go into why you need to know your characters' cultures, but just look at what I've already said—culture literally shapes who people are, from the moment they're born, after all.

So no, setting is not "one little dot"; it's an extremely important piece of information that must be taken into consideration for the novel to work with any degree of plausibility and reality.

My general formula for story-crafting is: setting+ character= plot. Because characters provide the driver of the story, and setting provides the obstacles. You should have a well enough developed setting you can pull conflict from it, because your characters do not exist in a vacuum and there are people, commitments, and things around them.

A poorly developed setting leads to characters who are floating in time and space with nothing to ground them. There's nothing like reading a story and the characters are so distinctly from that place you can't help but imagine it. Not just the way it's pictured, but the way it influences a person.

If you've ever talked to somebody who grew up in the rural area of a city vs somebody who grew up downtown, you'll get some idea of how stark the difference can be. For larger cities, you can go by neighbourhood and get the same effect (Brooklyn vs Queens). That's just a difference within a single city— imagine whole different worlds.

Develop setting in tandem with your characters. You'll end up with a much stronger plot as a result.