Lesson Eight: Suspense Research – Let’s Talk Setting

April 2008 ACFW On-line Class Lesson Four
Research Your Way to a Book Readers Can’t Put Down
Suspense Research – Let’s Talk Setting

So we’re back looking at setting. Setting can play a role in any book, but you may find it playing a more…sinister… role in a mystery/suspense. It will often set the tone for the rest of the book. How to pick the setting? It needs to be strategic. And I think you’ll find many of the authors I talked to use the setting as an additional character in their books.

The first question I asked them was how they pick their setting. They gave some great stories and mechanisms. We’ll start with Brandilyn’s answer:

Setting is important, as it has so much to do with who the characters are. Setting also affects aura and tone of the story. So far I’ve been able to choose an area I know—such as the California Bay area or northern Idaho. Then I stick a fake town in it. In the reader’s letter at the beginning of the book, I explain where the town is—and how all the landmarks around it, including roads, are real.

For Dread Champion, about an hour and a half south of our California home, I drove to the area with a friend. She drove while I took lots of notes. I found an area to stick my fake beach, and the exact location where the house of my defendant would be. Then I clocked the driving time from the house to the fictional beach—which would be an important detail in the book.

I also needed to know tide information on this fake beach—in the future. (The story takes place in the year the book was released, a year later than when I was writing it.) I found a naval web site that tracks tide times, so I tracked them for the real beach next to my fake one. And I wanted to know the moon phase, and sunrise/sunset times on that particular night. For that info I went to: http://timeanddate.com/.

If you’ve been around ACFW for long, you know that Brandilyn is a stickler for getting those details right, and it shows in her books.

Susan May Warren uses three criteria to select her settings:
1. Have I been there or do I know someone who lives there I can get real information from? 2. Does this location interest me, or have qualities that would interest my readers? 3. Can I use this place to accentuate my plot or theme?

Like Brandilyn, Susan will often travel to the site “especially if it is enroute to an event I have. I also buy maps and “picture books” of the area. Finally, I try and contact someone who has been there, or lives there.” She finds Google Images of the location to be helpful as well. But if she can’t visit, she’ll “email a scene to someone who has been there, or lives there, or sometimes … ask specific questions about their favorite smells, or what distinguishes their location from others. Her final tip on setting: “Details! Only by being specific will readers feel like they’re in that scene.”

If you’ve read any of Colleen Coble’s books, you know how much she pulls from the setting to set her books apart. The setting is truly another character. Here’s what she does:

I think of where might set the right mood I’m looking for. With the Rock Harbor series, I wanted a wilderness setting, but I didn’t want the usual Colorado or Wyoming one. I happened to think about Michigan’s U.P., the last bastion of wilderness in the Midwest. For the psychological thriller I’m working on, I wanted a creepy old plantation house surrounded by black water swamp so I’m setting it near Charleston. Setting is huge for me.

I physically go to the place. I hang out in local restaurants and coffee shops, take pictures and notes about what it looks like. I talk to local folks and often take a tour of some kind to hear the local guide talk about the area.

When she’s in the middle of researching a setting, she’ll browse the web looking for information about [the] setting. “I also read the newspapers online from that area to find out what concerns the community. I like to pull things out that could only happen in THAT PLACE.”

I often get videos of the area, and I also get vacation guides. Pamphlets from the Chamber of Commerce and books like Fodor’s guides. They are invaluable in helping me envision the setting. I also generally get a book on the flora and fauna of the setting. I often read novels set in my place too because often the author is from there and might know more than I do. But don’t ever take details in a novel as gospel.

And another thought I have off of this one is that another great resource for a book can be the phone book from that location. I got one for a location I really want to set a book in by calling the visitors’ center. It’s a wealth of information on businesses, names, etc.

Brandt Dodson takes a little twist from Colleen. Where Colleen picks the location and builds the story from there, Brandt picks the crime, and then picks the location that best illustrates that.

I generally pick the setting that is most relevant to the story I want to tell. In White Soul, for example, the novel deals with materialism, drugs, and crime. What better city to underscore that than Miami?

I think location can (and should) become a “supporting character” to the novel. Setting White Soul in Butte just wouldn’t have the same power as does Miami, although it can be said that there is certainly a segment of Butte’s population that is into drugs and materialism.

In The Lost Sheep, the novel deals (thematically) with sin and the consequences of sin and how far Christ went to redeem us from the bondage of sin. Las Vegas, that bills itself as “Sin City”, seemed the perfect choice.

Brandt is also a fan of visiting the city and the settings used within that city.

For the first 3 Colton Parker novels, I picked Indianapolis because I grew up there. But I also visited every neighborhood and dark alley I used in the novel.
In The Lost Sheep, I flew to Vegas and spent a few days soaking up the ambiance, listening to people talk and studying the way they conduct themselves when they honestly believe that no one is watching their conduct.
In White Soul, I did all of my research on Miami on the internet.

Brandt’s last tip on setting?

Read a PI novel. In fact, read Raymond Chandler. No one is better at making a location a supporting character than he was. His Los Angeles is so real it literally breathes on the page.

Jill Nelson has had some exotic locations for her To Catch a Thief series. But even so, she says Boston picked her.

My setting for the To Catch a Thief series pretty much picked me. Since all the books were art theft-related, I needed a cultural center as a base for the stories. Boston is a logical choice in the US, and I set the first book, Reluctant Burglar, there. I also took my characters to sites appropriate for the particular focus during each successive novel. In Reluctant Runaway, the second book in the series, the art theme is American and Native American artists. Albuquerque, NM, is a hub for Native American art, so my characters went there for much of the story. My new release, Reluctant Smuggler, is set largely in Mexico, since the art theme is Hispanic art. Besides, I wanted to take my characters some place a little more exotic but not so far away that they couldn’t travel fairly quickly back and forth. As you can see, there is method to the madness of picking a setting.

Jill starts with books and then uses the internet for details…

I start by reading books about the place and doing Internet searches for items of particular interest for the story-line. I prefer to go to the place where the book is set. Albuquerque was loads of fun to visit. I’d like to go back. I even made a new friend and fan there who emails me regularly. Time and finances were lacking for me to go to Mexico, but I have a close friend who has traveled to every spot I wanted my characters to visit, so she was a great help. First-hand interviews are invaluable if you can’t actually go to the site yourself.

Assignment: Based on their comments, I’d like you to each go through the national or world section of a newspaper or weekly magazine. Find an article in there that focuses on a setting that could make a great novel. Share the generals of your ideas with us.