JPC Allen

Welcome to my writing pages!  The main focus of this website is to offer writing tips, prompts, and inspiration to writers, no matter what their genre or skill level. You’ll also find information on my published works and the ones in progress. My schedule for posting is:

Monday Sparks: Writing prompts to fan your creative flame.

Thursdays – Writing tips based on a monthly theme

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What is Your Favorite Time of Year to Read or Write About?

Writing prompt for settings

My bookish questions for today is what is your favorite time of year to read or write about? This is an important question for me because I’m a calendar reader.

What is a calendar reader? I knew you would ask because I’ve made up the term. A calendar reader is someone who likes to read a story during the time of year in which it is set. Many people read Christmas stories during December. I like to reread my favorite stories in the season or month in which they take place if the author has given that setting a particular importance or especially vivid descriptions. For example, I always reread, “The Long Way Down” by Edward D. Hoch, one of the best mystery short stories ever written, in March because that’s when the story is set and the fact that the story unfolds in March is critical to the plot.

Because time of year is so important for me to enjoy a story, it’s also important when I write my short stories and novels. I work the time of year extremely hard in my Rae Riley Mysteries to give the mysteries a distinct atmosphere, foreshadowing, and metaphors for the plot.

When I was younger, I would have said fall was my favorite time to read or write about. I think it’s still my favorite but other season have become more and more attractive over the years.

What’s your favorite time of year to read or write about?

Here are more writing prompts and questions about settings.

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How to Create Memorable Settings that Bring Your Novel to Life

How to Create Settings for your novel

Your settings should work as hard as your characters and plot. Follow the steps below on how to create memorable settings that bring your novel to life.

Identity your major settings

By major settings, I mean the ones you will use in many scenes. My protagonist is Rae Riley, a nineteen-year-old young woman who has just discovered her father and his family and has moved in with them. They live in a rural county in southeastern Ohio. What kind of settings would a young woman move in?

  • Her home–this is a small farm where her grandmother, father, and three half-brothers live. Her grandmothers keeps alpacas. I discussed creating a home base for your protagonist here.
  • Her work or school–Rae isn’t doing college yet in the series, but she works over thirty hours a week as a check-out clerk at the local library, which is in the small town that’s the county seat.
  • Locations of any hobbies
  • Friends’ homes
  • Stores and restaurants
  • Church
  • The woods, fields, and hills that are part of the the southeastern Ohio landscape

This is Rae’s basic world. My genre is mystery, specifically cozy mystery. So I also need to choose settings that I can use in the mystery.

  • Scene of crime
  • Suspects’ homes or place of employments
  • Places to find clues and red herrings

Explore your settings like a tourist

Diving into your settings like you would a place where you chose to go on vacation will go a long way to making them memorable.

Rae needs to be in places where she can talk to suspects. A public library is a great place where that can happen. Anyone can walk through the front doors. In a rural location, more people might use a library because it has services, like the internet, which are more expensive or of poorer quality in people’s homes.

I’ll walk through my library setting and see what else it has to offer. Lots of bookshelves means Rae could overhear a conversation in an adjacent aisle, and it’s reasonable for the two people talking not to realize they aren’t alone. The maze-like pattern of tall shelves would be a great place for a chase. Most libraries have a room with historical documents for the local area–the perfect place for Rae to conduct research with resources that wouldn’t be online.

Rae works with a variety of employees at the library, from the director who is in charge to the janitor. How could these professional relationships affect a mystery?

What else does a library provide for a story? People return materials. What if patron left something incriminating in a book and must get it back? Libraries offer public internet terminals. What if Rae walks by a patron on a terminal and the site she’s visiting sets off warning bells for Rae?

When you dig deeply into your major settings, they will suggest characters and plot that will provide you with the raw material to make your settings memorable, breathing life into your novel in a way that only a carefully crafted settings can.

What memorable settings have you read?

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Using Uncomfortable Settings to Develop Characters and Advance Plot

How to write tension in a novel

So what do I mean by using uncomfortable settings to develop characters and advance plot? The bedrock under this questions is tension–tension is the engine that propels readers from line to line, page to page, chapter to chapter. An effective way to created tension is to plunk your protagonist in a setting that makes him or her uncomfortable or uneasy. But how does this setting create tension, develop characters, and advance plot? Read on!

Creating Tension with Uncomfortable Settings

When we experience tension, we want to relieve it. Hence all the activities people engage in as stress-relievers. The same is true when reading fiction. When a reader experiences tension, she wants that tension relieves and there’s only two ways to do it: keep reading or set aside the book for good.

Placing your protagonist in a setting that makes them uncomfortable ignites questions in the readers’s mind: Why doesn’t the protagonist like where he is? Did something happen in his past? Are the people he usually find here a threat? What’s going on?

If readers are asking questions, that means they feel the tension. Most of the time, they will keep reading to answer their questions and relieve the tension.

Using Uncomfortable Settings to Develop Characters

Revealing what your protagonist doesn’t like is just as important as showing what he does like. For example, your protagonist goes to a very dingy bookstore in a sketchy part of the city. As soon as she enters the store, her thoughts reveal she is uncomfortable. In this situation, an author could introduce some backstory if her discomfort comes from an event in her past. Or she could remember unsavory rumors she’s heard about this bookstore. And yet she’s come anyway. Or the author can make it very clear that the reason the protagonist is uneasy is because of her history with the owner. All these explanations create tension and reveal something important about the main character.

Using Uncomfortable Settings to Advance the Plot

Once you’ve established your protagonist finds a setting uncomfortable, you have to explain why she is facing this setting. Using the example above, the protagonist doesn’t like this part of the city because it’s the poor part her family escaped from years ago. So why is she here? She believes the unsavory rumors she’s heard about the bookstore. So why did she come? The owner is the grandfather who disowned her mother. So why did she come?

All those why questions concern plot. As you write the scene, you can hint at the answer, perpetuating or increasing the tension. Or you can plainly answer it, but that plain answer not only releases the first tension but creates a new one.

For example, the girl visiting the bookstore owned by her estranged grandfather states why she’s come: her mother has disappeared and the cops think she’s just abandoned her. But the girl thinks some harm has come to her mom and she’s asking the only other relative she has for help. So I’ve relieved the first tension and created a second one.

What settings make you uncomfortable? If you’re a writer, how would you use them in a story?

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