Authors Electric

I’ve been out and about the last couple of days, and with more to come. The reason? Twofold, really. One is to spend some time with my family – my wife and I have next week off, and it’s the school holidays here in Scotland so what better opportunity. The other reason is more selfish – I’m looking around for inspiration and ideas of locations that may fit into current or future stories. Although I generally write contemporary crime for adults, I try to place it in a setting I’m familiar with, which usually means Edinburgh and its surroundings. As I usually have a few ideas of certain key scenes when working out the details of a book or story, I find it helpful if I can ground them in real places. My most recent book for adults, The Missing, had certain elements of the plot altered when I wrote the first draft as I worked in real places. (Of course, I usually change the names of places, although a person familiar with the area will almost certainly know what I’m really referring to.) ...

Setting is a basic building block for any kind of writing. It doesn’t matter whether it’s fiction or non-fiction, prose or poetry or drama. There are lots of definitions of setting but I like the Wikipedia version the best: The setting is both the time and geographic location within a narrative or within a work of fiction . [It] helps initiate the main backdrop and mood for a story. Setting has been referred to as story world [1] or milieu to include a context (especially society ) beyond the immediate surroundings of the story. Elements of setting may include culture , historical period , geography , and hour . Along with the plot , character , theme , and style , setting is considered one of the fundamental components of fiction . [2] Water Lilies by Claude Monet. Image source: Metropolitan Museum of Art (Open Access initiative) But sometimes setting can be even more than that. It can rise to the level of a character, the star, the reason why this work was writte...