Young Writers Society

Okay I have trouble with this, I can only write in fantasy and enjoy writing and if you enjoy it what's the point right? Well I have trouble actually making the surroundings and characters mix at the right levels. My brother who never writes is better at this than me and it has me intimidated and on the verge of walking away from my hobby. SOMEONE PLEASE HELP! Any tips on how to get the suroundings into the story without watering it down and it being obvious and without taking away from the characters? I just need help. And lots of it. Well thank anyone who does.

Mwaha.

You have asked a hard question, my friend. A hard question indeed. But I will try and help, because writing is awesome fun and I can't allow a fellow writer to walk away from a good time just because they don't think they're good at it.

1) Ignore your brother. I used ot be better than my sister at art, and now she is absolutely amazing. I moved away from art because of that, because it is hard to watch someone close to you do the same thing you do, just better. But I feel bad about it every time, because I know she's only better because she works harder at it. =P

2) it would help if you gave us an example of your writing, so we can see where you are having trouble.

Okays, to the actual advice:

Setting is a pain in the butt, seriously. Yet, it is very important in most stories and can't be ignored. The first thing you need to do is make sure you know what your setting looks like. Once you have a clear picture in your mind (or a slightly crappy but understandable picture on paper =P) then you can get started.

First person, it's easy: You see what your character sees. So as your character goes through life, you would describe what they see/notice. Say they have just entered a park:

"I entered the park and went over to the swings." <No setting. who else can they see at the park? Do they like the park layout? If your character isn't noticing much, then you won't waste too much time on the setting because it obviously isn't important to them (since it's a first person POV).

"I entered the park, noticing how fresh and green the grass looked. I absently wondered if they watered it often as I made my way over to the swings." <A little setting made it's way in there.

But this is, of course, just 'immediate' setting. If you are talking setting as in country, time period, and political situation, I find the easiest way to incorporate it (still talking first person POV) is to either explain it as the character encounters it (aka: they hear a news report and reflect upon it, they have a conversation with someone about it, etc). The other way I find works at times is to NOT explain it, intentionally, anyways. if your character (narrator) doesn't usually think about the 'setting' of their lives, then you probably wouldn't hear much about it unless they are writing a journal intended for a bunch of clueless readers.

...

^_^ I hope some of this is helpful to you. I don't want to continue with third person because I'm not 100% sure which 'setting' you are talking about (immediate or big general setting of the world). So if you think I can be helpful to you then PM me and I can come back. Okay?

^_^ Keek!

Hm. I've had the same trouble with siblings being better at someting: my bro is awesome at writing music, and I love singing a random composition of my own, but I just can't write it. My brother is the same the other way: he comes up with great plots but can't stand the actual writing because he think's I'm awesome.

As for setting, I find using separate paragraphs (in 3rd person) to build your initial set helps. Like instead of jumping into your action ("Lynn had been having the worst day of her life so far") you do something like this (called a camera opening in Elizabeth George's Write Away):

A stormy sky loomed over a tiny little cottage in the deep green woods of Dark Forest. Two people were huddled close to each other in the hut's single room, looking gloomily out at the darkening trees around them and wondering if their dilapidated structure would manage to weather this coming squall.

Etc., etc., etc. Wherever your characters go, you'll have a description of whatever place your characters are walking through if you do something like this at the beginning of each chap. Or, if you don't want to be repetitious, start with dialogue and then describe the scene (be it a discussion with various characters inside a large building or a small room, or a fight scene out in the middle of nowhere).

Unfortunately, I don't think I can give you anything more than what Valor has already said about general setting--just try to incorporate news events in modern-day stories or legends that may have evolved from a specific time period in a fantasy setting. For example, in my fantasy-type fanfiction, in the second "novel's" sequel 100 years have passed. I've mentioned the past events and the legends that evolved from them, especially as they have a bearing on the plot of the aforementioned sequel. This gives the reader a sort of compass by which they point themselves to the time the new story takes place, especially if they've already read the first story.

Hope this helps! Whatever you do, don't give up. I'm sure we at YWS can help more if you gie us what you've already got.

~Gladius

I'll admit that this is something that has troubled me as well, and I've only written one, maybe two, fantasy stories. I agree with Sleeping Valor when she says that it would help if we have a copy of your work. However, I can give some general advice that has worked well for me in the past. The surroundings first have to be somewhat believeable. I know, it's fantasy, but on some inner level of the readers' minds they have to believe that this is real. A believeable surrounding is very helpful towards that effect.

Also, part of the problem may reside within your characters themselves. Part of what shapes people is the environment they live in. Are you creating characters and enviroments seperately? If that's the case, then therein lies the problem. One character might be out of place in one particular environment. It's like in kindergarten. Square pieces don't go in circle holes, and vice versa. You may find you have more success when you create a surrounding first and then create characters to fit within that surrounding. Or the other way around, characters, then a surrounding to fit them.

These are only my opinions of how you could solve your problem. Again, as Sleeping Valor has already stated, you would have to let others see your work before they could really give you tailor-fit advice. I hope that what I have given you so far though proves very useful. PM me if it's too obtuse or not clear otherwise.

This is a good/tricky question.

I first read about this concept in one of Orson Scott Card's books and now I swear by it. The best thing you can do to make fantasy seem realistic is to establish the "rules" of your fantasy world solidly, and quickly. If people already know what can and can't be done in your world, then it's not going to be so unbelievable when your main character sprouts a horn and turns into a unicorn on the spot.

I think the same thing works for setting, not just magic - describe it enough where they can just picture it. If you're working in a parallel world, don't describe mundane things that exist in our own reality - we're already assuming there are trees and skies and buildings. Tell us what makes these trees and skies and buildings different. How they all have thatched roofs. How the cut-through behind the inn always smells like freshly baked bread because the oven is just on the other side of the wall. You wouldn't waste a paragraph talking about gravity, would you? That's because no one notices it, and your characters wouldn't either. Write about the things that your characters do notice.

Well, I'm not going to offer a lot of good advice (everyone else has) but I would first like to say, calm down. Do not consider walking away from your hobby because one thing is difficult to do and you haven't learned it yet. Writing is all about learning the craft, ever single time you write something you learn something, and if writers quit every time it got hard we would have no writers! It's frustraiting, but it's OK. You won't be a perfect writer in a day, in fact you will never be a perfect writer. Even when you publish something, you will find "I should have changed this" or "Why did I do that?" So don't beat on yourself for things -- it's all about learning.

Second, read! I'm not sure what sort of books you like, but read more! Reading is really amazing because it's like being fed writing suggestions. Watch how your favorite authors, or other authors in general, mix the two together. Figure out when they talk about scene, and when they talk about characters. Is there a pattern? How do they introduce one, or the other? Are they woven together, or kept seperate by paragraphs? It will help you figure out, somewhat, what you can do to fix your own problem.

Otherwise, I can't think of a way to help you! But everyone else has talked a lot and with good advice.

I don't know if you've considered this, but why don't you try making a fantasy story that totally UNreal? Like satire. Check out TL G-Wooster's story for a good example of a fantasy novel that's purposefully unrealistic:

topic26084.html

But if you're dead set on writing realistic fantasy, it's all about the detail. Know what the citizens of your world eat, drink, what their currency is like, where they sleep, what the houses are made of, where their cities are and what kind of people live in them...know EVERYTHING.

Secondly, take as much as possible from real life. Truth is sometimes stranger than fiction, so tie in elements of your fastasy story with real life. For example, I toyed with an idea for a while of an alternate universe, until I read up on the Bermuda Triangle. That gave me a great idea, and now my "alternate universe" is really the lost city of Atlantis, located about one hundred miles south of Florida, that was closed off from the rest of the world. See what I mean? I tied in fantastical people and places with realistic ones, making them fit together in a way that readers can relate to.

Hope that helped!

~Sunny