Sylvia's novel writing blog

Historical novel writing: Setting

Brazilian loveletter postcard

An important aspect of writing your historical novel is setting. Elements of setting in writing include more than time and place; they also consist of customs, lifestyles, and historical events.

Below is an excerpt from Sneak Peek: Why Setting is Important (from Extended Novel Writing, Writer's Digest / Writers' Online Workshop.

Planning the setting of your novel is an exciting project. It sets you off on a journey that widen the horizons of your idea. The setting of a novel is more than just a description of a place and time. In many great novels, setting plays a role as important as the central characters themselves.

Writers such as Charles Dickens and Herman Melville had much knowledge of, and emotional investment in, the settings they chose for their novels, and the reader feels this. Successful novelists create worlds for their novels that are more than mere backdrops for their characters’ actions. They create settings using these 5 elements that you will use in the setting for your novel.

 

What Setting Includes

In addition to describing the physical characteristics of the village, city or country where your novel takes place, you’ll need to know other elements to round out your setting. You may not use all of them in your novel, but the list below will remind you of how you can bring your story from imagination to reality for your reader.

 

Here are the 5 basic elements of setting:

1. Time period: contemporary, historical or the future; and the language of the period

2. Physical locale: mountains, valleys, lakes & cities; geography: climate, plants & animals, industries & resources

3. Customs & manners: what people are and do in a particular time and place

4. Lifestyles: houses, transportation, foods, dress, education, professions

5. Historical events: what’s happening (or has happened) in the world at large

 

Consider all 5 elements as you fill in the setting for your novel. As you work on your novel day by day, you’ll grow with it. The more you learn about your story’s setting, the more it will translate into the excitement of bringing your novel to life for the reader ...]

 

 Here's how I'm using setting in the historical component of my fiction novel.

1. Time period: Late 1860s, the time of the Galician literary and language revival. This was a time of cultural pride and linguistic renaissance for poets, writers, educators, and so on.

2. Physical locale: City, province, and country: Santiago de Compostela is a small, medieval walled city located in Galica, northwest Spain. It is also a Catholic pilgrimage destination for people all over Europe, second only in religious importance to the Vatican. Climate: cold and rainy much of the year.

3. Customs and manners: Speech, traditions, gender roles, religious, industrious, and superstitions. 

4. Lifestyles: Granite houses and streets, horses and horse carriages, education becoming more available to females. Professions included merchants, fishermen, and farmers.

5. Historical events: Galician literary revival

 

JK Rowling's plot chart for fiction writing

I have modified a useful plot chart that I plan to use for my historical novel. It is based on one that J.K. Rowling described in her internet interview on October 25, 2006: http://60minutes.yahoo.com/segment/12/harry_potter?comment_offset=41. Scroll down the page to the fourth row tab titled "How it Began," and you will see the interview clip titled "Plotting Potter". She used this plot chart to write her Harry Potter books. My adapted plot chart takes the full vertical length of an A4 paper. The table consists of 4 columns and 2 rows. Here is a shortened version of it:

                                                                Book title

Week or Month	Chapter title	Plot thread or event	Subplot thread or event

• Characters (w/ images):
• Spotlight relationships & conflicts:
• POV:
• Setting:
• Customs covered (religion, occupations, hobbies, clothing, etc):
• Sketch:

 

Since my historical novel takes place in the past and present, I will color-coordinate the plot charts so that the chapters taking place in the present will be pink while the chapters happening in the past will be blue. This way, when I line them up on the table or floor, it will be easier to keep track of the plot threads. I will fill out a tentative plot chart before I begin writing each chapter. I may try to briefly fill out all the plot charts before I write a more detailed plot chart for the first chapter.