How can setting be a character

Do you consider the characteristics of your settings when you're writing? Please leave your thoughts below and join the conversation. Kyle A. Massa is an independent speculative fiction author and a writer for the ProWritingAid Blog. His debut novel, Gerald Barkley Rocks , is available now.

Yes, yes, yes! I love this post and firmly agree. Love books that really include this well. As long as it comes at some point in the process, right?

To me, learning what lies beneath the surface of Arrakis is like watching a character arc unfold. VERY interesting approach! This analogy is really helpful! Your email address will not be published. Notify me of followup comments via e-mail. Currently you have JavaScript disabled. In order to post comments, please make sure JavaScript and Cookies are enabled, and reload the page. Click here for instructions on how to enable JavaScript in your browser. Additional menu. Comments Yes, yes, yes!

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I only recommend tools, books and services that I either use or people I know personally. Integrity and authenticity continue to be of the highest importance to me. Creating a place is about making something visible, an alternative world.

It is important to understand how to create spaces where underrepresented identities can evolve and diverse journeys can develop. As in creating characters that represent the reader physically or emotionally, spaces also offer the opportunity for readers of underrepresented backgrounds to picture themselves.

Let the character appropriate those aspects as personal qualities. Johnson writes about how the people who gathered in the tent identified with the trash strewn around them. Exercises like these will help you improve interactions between characters and surroundings. They will help you enrich your characters by giving more details to readers.

Ask these questions as you write:. Crafting a diverse setting is the first step to creating a world that can stand on its own. Many authors like to create their own worlds because there are no limitations to what can happen, but we have found that it is through these limitations that believability and authenticity appears. Create your settings with the same care with which you create characters.

When you have a diverse location, diverse characters are sure to follow. Treating Your Setting as a Character. By Laura Nsafou In the long discussion of diversity in literature, the focus is on the characters and their unique perspectives. The place, an independent part Think of the setting as an independent element. Settings for enhanced characters After you create a place that has specifically described characteristics and is an independent albeit connected part of your story, your characters must appropriate these surroundings and move around them.

Ask these questions as you write: What is remarkable and what is not in the surroundings? She uses it as she sees fit.

Below she describes a snowy, sleety, windy scene in which a family of men are about to go out hunting:. Hurl is a transitive verb — it takes an object — but Proulx using it as an intransitive verb. For a different take on the exact same topic as this post see Person, Place or Thing? She writes about such places from what you might call an exalted literary remove. The mode is epistolary, poetic, occasionally honest to a fault. The way in which place interacts with human beings is one of the focal points in philosophy, so if you want to know more about that, philosophy is the place to go.

Buildings As Character In Fiction. Wheres your place? You must be logged in to post a comment. Skip to content. Manmade places tend to symbolise the conscious, tamed part of our minds. Hilary T. As evidence, Courage is never, ever believed when he raises the alarm about intruders. Courage has only a PC at his disposal, which is anthropomorphised and talks to him.

This represents an early form of search engines, and comments on to a time when people were just starting to use the Internet. The Internet was much smaller then, and results were much fewer. November of Loading Comments Sin City is the main character of the series according to Word of God. The protagonists refer to the city as a living being metaphorically, mentioning how she thinks and acts. The city is also said to have a negative effect on peoples' state of mind.

Many Batman comics have the characters especially James Gordon and Batman himself discussing the city in their narration. Astro City is the happier version of the above example. The city inspired much more hope and awe, mostly due to being a City of Adventure.

Therefore he feels he has a responsibility to ensure the Enterprise -A has a long and honorable Starfleet career of her own. Though it doesn't appear sentient, it seems to act as a malevolent force. Screenwriting guru Syd Field argues that the main character of the movie Network , is the network. The planet Mars in The Martian is one of the main driving forces of the plot, and is referred to in the second person at times. Mark Watney: Fuck you, Mars!

Live-Action TV. Firefly : The show's creator Whedon considered Serenity the ship to count as a main character just ahead of River's feet. The characters love her to bits, especially her captain Mal who saw her great potential in the flashback episode, her ace of a pilot Wash and her mechanic Kaylee. Played with in the final episode when River tricks the bounty hunter Jubal Early into believing that Serenity, the ship which is constantly anthropomorphised throughout the series, is actually alive, and that she has become a part of it.

She's stationed at Spithead and is as idle as her crew, and slowly dying in the same way as her old frail captain Keene is dying. Her midshipmen are tormented by a nasty bully. Her lieutenants are not effective authority figures.