The Creative Writer's Toolbelt

Over the past ten episodes of the podcast we've looked at a range of strategies and techniques to make story setting as compelling and attractive as possible for readers. Looking at research and description as well as the relationship between setting and character, and setting and voice. We've explored the creative tension between being "credible" and "immersive" in setting. This episode illustrates these principles with a quick sketch of the settings from three very different stories in very different genres, giving practical applications of the insights.

So you've identified the key information about your settings and characters, and now you have to seed it into your work. If you do it right, you can carry your readers into a rich and immersive world with characters they will want to care about; if you do it wrong you may lose your readers altogether. The stakes are that high, and in this episode we explore the techniques and strategies for avoiding the mistakes and making the best of the information you need to give your readers.

This episode will guide you though the process of taking the raw material of your character research and ideas, and putting them through the prism of the character components to create believable characters together with their backstory.

You might have a lot of research for your story, but how do you apply it effectively to create a rich and compelling setting, not just for the story itself but for the foundational backstory you need to give your work depth and credibility?

In this episode we examine the steps you can take to do this, by laying out the framework and the environment of your work, and then bring your research to bear so that you can create individual scenes that are authentic and vibrant, drawing the reader into the story. We'll explore the way in which settings can be broken down into specific scenes throughout the story so that each scene can be transformed by your research.

My guest this week is the author Becky Chambers, author of the critically acclaimed novel 'The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet'. Becky’s novel was shortlisted for the Kitschies in the debut category in 2014, longlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2016, and it has just been shortlisted for the Arthur C Clarke prize. Becky knows what it is to self-publish and she also knows what it is to be commercially published, since her self-published novel was picked up in 2015 by Hodder and Stoughton. In the interview she shares her experiences and advice on the craft and the publishing process. Many of you will know Becky’s work, but if you don’t just check the search engine of your choice and you’ll see what I mean when I say that Becky is the talk of the town in publishing at the moment.

In episode 64 we looked at what we can do to build and enhance setting in a current project, and in this episode we look at some of the practices and habits we can adopt to help us invest as writers in future projects. We look at how, like the magpie, we need to be on the lookout for the 'shiny things' around us, the unusual the intriguing, the noteworthy. We also look at why it's good to put our research into the writer's equivalent of a compost heap where it can settle and mature into something truly useful for our writing.

Great stories require a lot of research, but there's more to it than just surfing the net for a few interesting details. In this episode we look at how to use our sources wisely and with due courtesy to those who help us. We know there's a lot of great stuff on the internet, but how do we use it wisely? And what about other forms of research, like the reference library? What about talking to people as individuals, and respecting the value they can give our work? And we shouldn't forget the thinking we need to do. What happens to our story when we reason out what might happen, do things still stack up? This episode examines all of these issues, and offer some practical ideas for making the best of the research you do for your work.

This episode is a conversation with bestselling author Peter F Hamilton. In a career spanning nearly thirty years Peter has published seventeen books as well as numerous short stories. He is known for his epic science fiction trilogies including the Void series from his Commonwealth Universe, and the Night's Dawn series from the Confederation Universe. In this conversation Peter talks about the formative literary influences on his life as he was growing up, the preparation he does before writing a million word epic, and why creating the bad guy is such fun. He also talks about the importance of consistency in creating setting, and the enduring power of space and space travel to generate a sense of wonder.

In the previous episode we explored the two essential qualities of setting through describing the need for setting to be credible and immersive. In this episode we focus on one of those qualities, the immersive setting, and we explore how to make the setting an immersive and compelling place for readers by taking the time to research and plan the backstory, creating a mood and style for the setting, and by presenting the setting with sparse, specific, and sensory language.

This podcast starts a new series on the subject of setting, and we begin by exploring why there are only two essential qualities needed for a setting to be effective; these are that a setting needs to be credible, and immersive. If you imagine your setting as a chair, it needs to be strong enough to support the reader, and comfortable enough to hold them for the whole story. This episode provides the practical techniques required to deliver both of these requirements.