Guest Post – Creating The Setting: The 5 Ws – Deanna Proach

Creating The Setting: The 5 W’s Characters give a story life, the plot gives it body, but the setting is the centerpiece of the story. It is what sets the tone and the atmosphere. It can even determine the outcome of events in a story. Before the tips, a quip: “The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.” ~ Tom Clancy Clancy is right. Fiction must make sense to the reader. Therefore, it must contain a setting that is realistic. So, before you begin the writing of your novel, you need to know the setting. When creating the perfect setting for your novel, you must think like a news journalist. There are five components to the setting: who, what, when, where and why.

Who - You need to know who the major players are going to be in your novel. Will there be one main character or will you have multiple characters that dominate the story? That will be entirely up to you to decide, but that will also depend on the nature of the book you’re going to write.

What – Your characters will need a center goal to work towards in the course of the story. That goal could be acceptance, or it could be as dramatic as your main character forming an escape plan from a predator.

When – Time is very important to a story. It is what determines whether your novel is historical or contemporary. The ‘when’ factor in the setting could take place as far back as the year 1190 A.D. or far into the future. Regardless, the date in which your novel is set will determine how much research you conduct and how your characters interact with each other.

Where – The ‘where’ factor is much like the ‘when’ factor in that it determines how much research you do. Every city, region and country has its own unique laws, customs and rituals. If you have the time and the money, you can travel to the place of your novel’s setting. The more you know about your novel’s physical setting the more authentic your novel will be. However, if you are unable to travel, you can either research the region via Google maps or you can even fictionalize the city or town.

Why – The ‘why’ factor is the most intellectual part of the setting in that it gets you to think about your characters and your story on a deeper level. For example: why are you writing this novel? What is the central message you want to convey to readers? Why do your characters behave the way they do? These are a few questions you should be able to answer before you begin the writing of your novel. Once you have established the five w’s of the setting, everything else will fall into place.

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Deanna Proach has written a young adult book titled To be Maria. You can visit her at her blog, De’s Stories. (John’s addition: you may also like her author website here.)

Guest Post: Taking Risks

TAKING RISKS

Hello. Can I come in?  (I’m not sure of the rules around here. Should I take my shoes off at the door?)

John invited me. Honestly – he did. He’s off doing NaNo at the moment, so he’s a little busy. And how brave is that – 50,00 words in a month! Even the idea is enough for me to get all hot and uncomfortable. I mean, every day he has to face a blank page and fill it. He can’t decide it’s too sunny and he must go for a walk, or he has the flu and must stay in bed, or the bathroom will be beyond shabby if he doesn’t paint it this weekend.

Risks are strange things. For the five-years old it’s that first step into school. For the agoraphobic peering outside the front door is terrifying. I can manage nice big caves where I can stand up and enjoy the stalactites, but the even the thought of a pothole is enough for me to collapse in a sniveling heap.

But I’ve taken the risk of coming here. In the hope that you won’t throw internet-eggs at me. Such messy things, eggs.

I even – a few years ago – went travelling. Which would be unremarkable if I were young and hearty (as John is). But I’m a middle-aged woman, and discovered that wandering round the world with a rucksack is not what middle-aged women are expected to do. I set off with nothing more than a Lonely Planet and curiosity. I have no idea how many times I was lost; though I have – at last – realized that the best things happen when I’m lost. On a recent trip I was meandering in the backstreets of Hue, in Vietnam, staring at a map, when a local man waved me to join his family’s gathering to celebrate the Chinese New Year. They spoke no English. I speak no Vietnamese. It was one of my best days. (And yes, there is a book – entitled Over the Hill and Far Away, now out on Kindle, with a ‘real book’ version due out in the new year.)

                                                                        

‘Aren’t you brave?’ said my friends.

No, it wasn’t bravery. It was a realization that I couldn’t bear the thought if sitting down when I’m eighty and regretting an opportunity missed. Just as John isn’t missing the NaNo opportunity. Just as I can’t pass by this chance to meet his loyal blog followers.

Just as you . . . ? Dreams can be huge, or tiny. But they need attention. Regret at eighty must be one of the saddest feelings of all. Go – take that risk.

And I’ll make you all very welcome on my blog, should you wish to join me:
http://gapyearsthebook.blogspot.com.

Guest Post: James Hutchings – Creative Commons

Thanks to James Hutchings for this insightful guest post! It’s a must-read for any of you authors or aspiring authors. Oh and happy 11/11/11 everyone. I’m off to NaNo but for now, enjoy James’s company!

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Many writers, whether published or just starting out, are very nervous that someone else will steal their work, whether that be another writer using their ideas in their own stories, or someone making pirated copies of their books. When I put out a collection of my writing, I specifically gave permission for anyone at all to copy my ideas, or even to cut and paste whole stories. I also contacted the Pirate Party, a worldwide network that wants to lessen copyright, and told them that I was giving anyone permission to put my ebook on file-sharing sites. In this post I hope to show why I went against common wisdom.

Creative Commons

I used a free service called Creative Commons. Creative Commons is useful for people who want to give the general public permission to use their work, but with restrictions. In my case I didn’t mind people using my work for non-profit purposes, such as posting on a blog, but I didn’t want to allow anyone to make money off it. Similarly I wanted anyone who used it to give me credit. I could have just listed these things myself. However I’m not a lawyer, and perhaps I would have worded it wrong so that someone could twist what I said to do more than I meant. Also I could have been unclear about what I was allowing and what I wasn’t allowing. Sure, someone could email me and ask, but the whole purpose of having a written statement is so that people don’t have to ask.

Creative Commons has a series of different licenses, which give permission to do different things. They’re all legally ‘tight’, and they’re all summarized in plain language. So all you have to do is go to their site and answer a series of questions, to get to the license that does what you want. In my case I used the Attribution Non-Commercial License.

Why?

That’s what I did. But why? Common sense would suggest that I’m giving something away for free that I could be selling. However I believe that, in the long run, I’ll be better off. The main reason is that I’ve seen how many people are, like me, trying to get their writing out there. Go to Smashwords and have a look at the latest ebooks. Then refresh the page ten minutes later, and you’ll probably see a whole new lot. The problem that new writers face isn’t that people want to steal your work; it’s getting anyone to show an interest in your work at all. If someone passes on a pirated copy of my work, it might get to someone who’s prepared to buy it – and that someone would probably have never heard of me otherwise. Even if they don’t want to pay for what they read, I might come out with something else in the future, and perhaps paying 99c for it will be easier than hunting it down on a file-sharing site.

Science fiction writer Andrew Burt tells the story of someone who disliked his book, and to get back at him decided to put a copy on a file-sharing site. The effect was that he got a small ‘spike’ in sales immediately afterwards.

I also have some less selfish motives. Many people would assume that the purpose of copyright is to protect authors and creators. Leaving aside the fact that someone else often ends up with the rights (how many Disney shareholders created any of the Disney characters? How many shareholders in Microsoft have ever written a line of code?), that doesn’t seem to have been the intention in the past. The US Constitution says that Congress has the power “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” Note that protecting ‘intellectual property’ isn’t mentioned. The authors of the Constitution seemed to see the point as getting ideas out there where people can use them: almost the exact opposite of keeping them ‘safe’ and ‘protected’.

The original idea of copyright seems to have been a sort of deal: you have an idea, and we want you to get it out into the world where it will do some good. To encourage you to do that, we’ll give you a monopoly on its use for a limited time. After that, anybody can use it (it will enter the ‘public domain’).

A lot of people don’t know that copyright used to give a lot less protection than it does now, especially in the United States. In the US, it used to be that works were copyrighted for a maximum of 56 years. Today copyright in the US can last for over 100 years. In fact Congress keeps extending the time. In practice, they’re acting as if they never want ideas to go into the public domain.

This is great for the owners of ‘intellectual property’. But it’s hard to see how this “promotes the Progress of Science and useful Arts,” or how forever is a “limited time.” In a sense it’s a theft from the public. Anyone who publishes work has accepted the deal that the law offers, of a limited monopoly in return for making their idea known. Congress has been giving them more and more extensions on that monopoly, but doesn’t require them to do anything to earn it.

It probably doesn’t matter that much that Disney still owns Mickey Mouse, or that Lord of the Rings is still under copyright. But remember that these laws don’t just apply to the arts. They apply to science as well. So an invention that might save lives could be going unused, because it isn’t in the public domain and its owner wants too much money for it.

Conclusion

I’m far from an expert on either the law or the publishing industry. However I hope that I’ve given you, especially those of you who might be thinking about publishing some writing, a different take on the whole issue of whether authors should worry about their ideas being stolen. At least I hope I’ve shown you that there’s a different way of thinking about it, and that that way doesn’t require you to just give up on making money; in fact that it might be more profitable as well as better for society.

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James Hutchings lives in Melbourne, Australia. He specializes in short fantasy fiction. His work has appeared in Daily Science Fiction, fiction365 and Enchanted Conversation among other markets. His ebook collection The New Death and others, is now available from Amazon and Smashwords.