Think About Setting Before Things Get Set

Four walls -- almost -- and a roof : the Steves are zipping ahead with the construction of my house-shaped shed.

Before we started working on building it, we did think quite a bit about location: no room in the house itself and the pitch of the roof was too shallow to squeeze anything into the loft, so it had to be the garden.  Once that was decided, we had to consider where (although you can see from the picture above that our options were limited). In the end we opted for the bottom lefthand corner because the ground slopes away there and we wanted the structure to be as unobtrusive as possible.

The reason I'm going into all of this in such yawning detail is that you have to make similar decisions about location when you are starting to write a novel or a story, and very often your first decision (if it hasn't already been dictated to you by your choice of subject matter) will dictate a lot of subsequent decisions.

Where you set the story can be massively significant.  Thomas Hardy is remembered as much for his recreation  of Wessex, and Emily Bronte for the wildness of the Yorkshire moors, as  for Bathsheba Everdene or Cathy. When you are making your choice, remember that it's not just a question of plonking your story down somewhere, you need to choose a location that can influence and interact with the action, not to mention the characters themselves.  The New York setting of Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Letham defines how the story unfolds - you would be missing a trick if you didn't make sure that the location of your story made an important contribution to the book as a whole.

The novel I am working on the moment is set on a very, very small boat.  This yields some comic potential as the two main characters are living in extraordinary cramped conditions; it also exposes them to danger.  The boat, and the canal it sails down, are vital to the plot and provide a massive  hook for the story as a whole.  So while you are still in the decision-making process, before you have started to write properly, take some time to think about your setting -- it's an interesting and pliant ingredient to play with.