8

[ DESCRIPTION AND SETTING IN SPECIALIZED FICTION ]

Now that we've spent some time considering a few ways to establish your settings and better use of description, let's focus on how to put them to work within several specific types of fiction that are sometimes considered to be outside the general, or mainstream, offerings.

Many talented authors write in more than one of these genres. Just look at several titles of novels by the late Dan Parkinson: The Guns of No Man's Land, Gunpowder Wind, Blood Arrow (westerns), The Fox and the Flag (a buccaneer swashbuckler), the Dragonlance Dwarven Nations series (fantasy), Timecop: Viper's Spawn, and the Gates of Time series (science fiction).

He was able to successfully publish in these (and even other) genres because he never forgot something that we've talked about more than once already: Good fiction is not finally dependent on the time and place of the story, but on the story itself.

Let's consider an often used device — the journey motif — that always involves some character or several characters attempting to get somewhere. It's a literary vehicle as old as literature itself, and it works as effectively in modern novels like Cold Mountain as it does in ancient epics like the Odyssey. Sometimes the journey is a geographical one — like Huck and Jim floating down the Mississippi in Huckleberry Finn — and sometimes it's a completely internal voyage, like Helen Keller groping to find her way out of her blind, deaf world in The Miracle Worker. Whatever the particular circumstances, the journey always elicits a change in the central character and usually in others as well. It is this change, and the character's reactions to the journey and its consequences, that allow the journey motif to work effectively in any genre.

Here's how. The settings are worlds apart in Cold Mountain, the Odyssey, Huckleberry Finn, and The Miracle Worker, as different in fact as in The Lord of the Rings and The Wizard of Oz. But what these works all have in common are not their times and places, but the journey that has to be made.

And what ties Dan Parkinson's many novels together is not the fact that some of them take place in the distant future on planets countless light years away, others on high seas fraught with pirates over two centuries ago, and still others on the plains of the American West in the late 1800s. What makes Parkinson's work accessible and enjoyable is that none of his novels are about those places or times. They are about the characters and the dilemmas and struggles and obstacles they face and sometimes overcome. In other words, they're about the story.

Believe me, there really isn't much new under the sun, at least when it comes to basic story lines. What will be new is the unique spin you put on it in the context of the genre you choose, the setting you create, and the description and fine wordsmithing you employ.

You might end up overlapping or you might find a genre that you enjoy writing and stay within it for several books. Some authors of certain genres publish dozens of novels, or sometimes hundreds of stories, over the course of their careers and never choose to try anything different. That's not a crime. Frankly, I'm delighted that a number of my favorite writers have stayed within what they consider to be their genres, since they are such exceptional practitioners of that distinctive type.

Whatever you decide to do — to write within one genre or move around among several — remember two things: (1) the story that you are going to tell will more than likely work within several of the types of fiction and (2) because of that, you'll need to read some good examples of each and keep an open mind when making your decision. Those three characters that you've decided to push into a love triangle in your fiction can go about that dubious enterprise in the suburbs of Spokane or in Dodge City in 1874 or on the eighth planet of Zennotutha or in London during the Nazi blitz. What you have to decide is which setting will let you best highlight the actions of those characters and their situations.

When you get to the place, in a few pages, where I discuss several of the genres each in their turn, don't skip over those that you think are of no interest to you. Consider each one. You just might surprise yourself. Maybe there's a darn fine fantasy story in that imagination of yours, one that you never intended to write.

DOING YOUR HOMEWORK

If you have received many rejection slips from publishers (let's face it, we all have if we've sent off very many queries or samples), you've no doubt come across some version of this phrase: “We suggest that you read some of the books (or stories) that we have published.”

That's good advice, indeed.

Publishers are looking for specific types of stories and novels — and require that they be written in specific ways — because the people who buy their offerings expect certain things. Someone who purchases a Western novel expects to get one, with all of the requisite gunplay and slapping of leather against horsehide and dust clouds billowing up out of canyons and corrals. And that reader will be mighty put out if something called The Maverick of Broken Axle Canyon, with an illustration of a lone cowboy on horseback galloping under a crimson sky, turns out to be a romance involving a tax attorney and a housewife seeking meaning in her life.

Readers generally know what they want. So when you decide to write a particular type of fiction, you need to know what they want, too. Make sure that one of the very first things that you do is read several novels or stories that are representative of that genre. And don't let the fact that you have read some of them keep you from this essential step in the writing process. Okay, so you're about to tackle writing a spy thriller and you read William F. Buckley's Saving the Queen not too many years ago. Read it again, or one of his other Blackford Oakes novels or some other espionage yarn. But this time read it from the perspective of a writer, not just a reader. Look closely at how he crafts his plot. Pay attention to the unique wordsmithing that another author might not use in that particular way in a book in another genre. Take the time to acquaint yourself with how successful writers have written in the genre that you intend to be successful at also. It will be time very well spent.

Let's look now at some special attention that you need to pay to settings and description in a few specialized genres. Remember, scout's honor, you're going to read them all.

HISTORICAL FICTION

Historical fiction is a hybrid of both of those things: history and fiction. Being so it carries with it some requirements that you need to be aware of. The most important of these is that the history part — those things in your story or novel that actually happened — need to be essentially correct and verifiable. By essentially, I mean that even though you can tinker slightly with facts and figures and timeframes, you'd better be careful; artistic license only goes so far. Having General Grant knocking back bourbon in a New York bar in a month and year when he was actually in Mississippi conducting the siege of Vicksburg just won't play. You'll be discovered, I assure you. If not by an editor (the best-case scenario, since it can be fixed), or by a critic (the worst-case scenario, hands down), then by some member of the Daughters of the Confederacy or a Civil War reenactment society or just some reader who is sharp as a tack. Inventing dialogue for historical figures is something that all writers of historical fiction do, but putting those figures in places where they could not have possibly been or giving descriptions of those settings or people that are obviously wrong will deal your credibility more than merely a glancing blow.

Just as you can't play too loose and easy with historical facts, neither can you give too much away about what you and your reader know very well will happen later in the story.

The historical novelist is afforded the luxury of hindsight. But that doesn't give her the right to know of future events in the context of her setting and plot. The officers and their wives at the Saturday night Christmas dance at the Pearl Harbor Officers' Club on December 6, 1941, can't know, in your story, that all hell will break loose in the morning. So your descriptions shouldn't be filled with little clues or premonitions. In a scene set on that evening, we'll need plenty of ice clinking in plenty of cocktail glasses, and navy dress uniforms particularly white against skin tanned dark by the tropical sun. We'll need a dance band playing Benny Goodman tunes and everybody smoking Lucky Strikes and Chesterfields. But what we can't have — unless the story involves a clairvoyant or we see things from a different perspective than that of these revelers — is any forewarning of the Japanese planes that are already flying toward them.

Remember, in most historical novels or stories, both the writer and the reader already know that the ship will hit the iceberg, the stock market will crash, or the zeppelin will explode when it finally gets to New Jersey. But in order for the stories to work at all, the characters can't know these things. So your job is to make your descriptions of them and of the setting completely realistic for that moment, and not serve as precursors for what will happen later. Other parts of the story — the fictional parts that you skillfully weave in among the historical facts — involve things that neither the characters nor the readers can predict. And these will be the core of your tale.

When writing in this genre, pay special attention to the tone of your narrative voice, which is the most constant and sometimes the strongest description that you provide. If you write that novel that starts with the Pearl Harbor dance, and your plot winds its way through the several years of war that followed, then you should continuously make sure that your tone doesn't assume the absolute certainty of an allied victory. As anyone who remembers those years can tell you, there was no such guarantee. I've read more than a few American and British novels and stories set during that war that were written and published before its conclusion. Though the voices and tones were usually confident and patriotic, there was something else there, too, almost hidden between the lines. There was a tone of uncertainty.

In order for your depiction of the time and place to ring true, that uncertainty needs to come through just as clearly in your fiction as it does in those books written when it was happening. So when you have two characters talking about the outcome of the war, don't let them be too cocky about it, unless you make it all bluff and bluster to hike up the other's spirits. And when describing a setting that will change when the war is won, be careful not to mention that, since your characters don't know that it will be the case.

Now that we've gotten those two admonitions (regarding the need for accuracy and the limitation on characters' knowledge of the future) out of the way, let's move on to the business of actual description in historical fiction and to your description of settings in particular.

One way to describe a particular location is to provide details about the place itself. Look at how Irving Stone brings Florence of the Renaissance era to life in this paragraph from The Agony and the Ecstasy:

They went with unmatched strides along the narrow streets, past the Street of the Old Irons with its stone palaces and exterior flights of carved stone stairs leading to jutting penthouses. They made their way along the Via del Corso and saw on their right through the narrow slit of the Via dei Tedaldini a segment of the red-tiled Duomo, and after another block, on their left, the Palazzo della Signoria with it arches, windows and crownings of its tan stone tower penetrating the faint sunrise blue of the Florentine sky.

It is certainly evident that the author did his research, with all the streets and churches where they should be. He works in details even down to the color of the masonry. And this infusion of particulars is a good way to convey the era and the locale to your reader. If your story is set in 1906 San Francisco, you might have your young lovers stroll down one of those steep hills, giving the names of side streets and businesses as they pass them. Some research will be necessary, since those same businesses probably aren't there any longer and some of the street names themselves might have changed in the past century. You'd best not put the Golden Gate Bridge out there in the bay, since it wasn't there in 1906. And your happy couple can't have even a hint of the devastating earthquake that will turn their little world on end, literally and figuratively, the next day.

Another way to establish your setting is to describe small actions or events that are indicative of that time and place, as Colleen McCullough does in the following paragraph from her novel Caesar. Instead of describing some of the landmarks of ancient Rome, which she does, by the way, throughout the book, and to great effect, here she focuses on an event, on one man standing up to make a speech. But notice how she works in the point-in-time just as effectively as Irving Stone does in his little walking tour of Florence.

The jury leaned forward on its folding stools when Cicero walked forward to begin, his scroll in his hand; it was there merely for effect, he never referred to it. When Cicero gave an oration it seemed as if he were composing it as he went along, seamlessly, vividly, magically. Who could ever forget his speech against Gais Verres, his defenses of Caelius, of Cluentius, of Roscius of Ameria?

To answer the narrator's question in that last sentence: I could forget them, if I ever even heard of them. But it's not at all important that I know the texts of those speeches. From the context of the paragraph, I can determine that they were real doozies — fine orations, most certainly. Many, many little scenes like this one, along with elaborate descriptions of places and people, finally come together in Caesar to give us a crystal clear perception of Rome in the century before Christ.

Now how could you use this approach in your San Francisco saga? You might have one of your young lovers pick up the paper and notice that Enrico Caruso is singing in Carmen at the opera house that night (he was on the night before the earthquake; I looked it up) or make some reference to President Teddy Roosevelt (he was the president in 1906; I didn't have to look that one up).

Both of these approaches — physical description of places and focusing on singular events or circumstances — will work well in historical fiction, and in all of the genres.

Remember that overlapping that we talked about a few pages ago? You'll find more of it in this genre than anywhere else. There are historical romances, historical suspense stories, and time travel yarns that most often involve historical settings. There are also historical murder mysteries like those by Ellis Peters whose sleuth is Brother Cadfael, a twelfth-century English monk. And every Western is essentially a work of historical fiction. All of these will require a clearly defined setting and an abundance of good description if they are to capture the time and place.

MYSTERY

Setting and description take on some additional responsibilities when it comes to the writing of a mystery. Here they have to help establish the mood or tone of suspense as well as provide foreshadowing (clues).

Look at how Janwillem van de Wetering uses his setting to establish the mood in his novel The Maine Massacre:

They could see the rowboat left out on the island's shore. The commissaries waited while de Gier went into the shed and came back with a pistol that had a short gaping tube instead of a barrel. The silence of the bay was so vast that the boat's putter seemed like a line of small dark specks on an immense sheet of white paper. A large black bird came gliding from the island and its croak startled the two men, leaning on the jetty's railing.

These two men are investigating a place where a murder was committed, and the author lets the surroundings in which they find themselves paint the backdrop of the scene. The reader is given a number of bleak images all at once: the abandoned rowboat; that ominous gun with the gaping tube instead of a barrel; the vast, silent bay; and even a croaking black bird sweeping in like something out of one of Poe's tales.

This mood, established at the scene of the murder, will be reestablished over and over again throughout the investigation and the final solution of it. In your fiction, do the same thing. Let things — like small rowboats in big bays and even croaking birds — highlight the overall tone that you want to set.

There are basically two types of mysteries: those that are particularly realistic in their portrayals of criminal acts and police procedures and those that are more concerned with the nature and lifestyle of a sleuth (who is often not an official investigator at all, like Sherlock Holmes and Miss Marple) and his or her process of detection. In the first sort, your descriptions will tend to be more brutal and to the point than in the second, with much emphasis on the actual inciting event (almost always a murder) and things like forensic reports and the political pecking order in police departments. In the second, which are sometimes called cozies — alluding I suppose to how we're supposed to feel when reading them — you'll probably have an important scene early on where someone finds a dead body, but you won't spend much if any time describing how it got to be that way. At least not until the very end, when the clever sleuth explains what he has figured out involving the particulars of the murder and, most importantly, the identity of the murderer.

Your emphasis in both types should bemuchmore on the person or persons trying to sort out the crime than on the crime itself. Perhaps the best model for this is practically any movie directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Very rarely in a Hitchcock film do we see the actual deed being done, the most obvious exception being that shower scene in Psycho. What we almost always see are characters' reactions to a crime that they were not an actual witness to, like the James Stewart character in Rear Window, whose dubious hobby is looking into other people's windows only to detect a horrible crime that he has difficulty convincing anyone actually occurred. He doesn't see it happen, and neither do we. What we see is him putting the pieces together, slowly and carefully.

And that is what the reader of your mystery should see.

SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY

While all of the other genres are usually set in places that either currently exist or did at some specific time, these two usually require complete fabrication on the writer's part. But this is not always the case; a fantastic setting could very well be a real place with a few differences.

In the opening pages of Foundation, the first novel in Isaac Asimov's trilogy of that name, a character has arrived at the planet of Trantor, the capital of an immense galactic empire. He makes his way up to the zenith of the tallest building he can find and surveys a sweeping panorama:

He could not see the ground. It was lost in the ever-increasing complexities of man-made structures. He could see no horizon other than that of metal against sky, stretching out to almost uniform grayness, and he knew it was so over all the land-surface of the planet. There was scarcely any motion to be seen — a few pleasure-craft lazed against the sky — but all the busy traffic of billions of men were going on, he knew, beneath the metal skin of the world.

This relatively short paragraph contains immense detail about a place. We see at once — through the eyes of this young man who is taking it in for the first time — the extent of this planet that is completely covered with manmade structures, all its billions of inhabitants hidden beneath its metal “skin.”

In your fiction, let your description of futuristic, fantastic places be as fanciful as you want them to be, but remember this: They must be, first and foremost, a stage upon which your characters do something that your earthbound reader can relate to. Consider that Asimov paragraph; what reader hasn't looked out or down or up at something spectacular and felt a surge of adrenaline? Maybe it was the Grand Canyon or the Eiffel Tower or, in my case, looking up at the enormity of the ceiling of the brand new Astrodome splayed out above me when I was a young teenager. So when I read about the young man in Foundation looking out at Trantor, I knew exactly what he was feeling. Not because I had been there, but because I had been there.

As I said in the last chapter, you must make sure you maintain a consistency in your description when it comes to the rules you've created or those that are already in place, like the actual makeup of the Martian atmosphere. You may have to use more description than usual when creating a futuristic, fantastic place, and you'll have to use earthly terms to do it.

One thing more, the possibility (in all likelihood, probability) of getting proven wrong is something that you shouldn't even consider when writing science fiction, or any fiction that is set in the future. Nobody expects you to be an oracle, just a storyteller. George Orwell missed the mark in his novel 1984, so did Clive Cussler in Raise the Titanic. So what? Neither of them set out to write prophecies; they intended to write fiction. And that should always be your one and only goal.

WESTERNS

Readers of this type are usually quite loyal to the genre, and they have certain requirements. First and foremost, they expect lots of action — gunfights and fistfights and stampedes — and, secondly, they expect these things to be happening, for the most part, outside. You'll be allowed descriptions of the interiors of saloons and sheriff's offices and maybe a blacksmith shop or a cabin out on the prairie. But the lion's share of your description should be of the prairie itself. Use the weather conditions and those wide-open Western landscapes to full advantage. Remember, that old Western song goes “home, home on the range.” It's the range that the reader of your Western is primarily interested in. So give it to them.

You might do that by describing grasslands spread out under a bright sky, the wind rolling along its golden surface like waves on an ocean. Or maybe you'll depict deep, narrow canyons with high, rocky walls, a trickle of a river winding along the bottom. Or you might focus on one of the towns that dotted the landscape of the American West over a century ago. Maybe it will be a mining camp, a boom town high in the Rockies, its streets nothing more than mud after heavy rains, the smoke from its many fires lifting up through pines and aspens on a foggy, cold morning. Or maybe it will be one of the wide-open towns on the prairies that were railheads for cattle drives. Perhaps it will be the cramped interior of a jolting stagecoach, the countryside sliding by outside its windows.

Or maybe you'll invoke the rough, wide-open spirit of the West in your description of a character, making it even stronger by using frontier dialect in your narration. Elmer Kelton does this in his novel Joe Pepper when his narrator, an old cowpoke, remembers a girl he once knew:

I didn't tell you yet about Arlee's sister. Millie was her name. Arlee wasn't much to look at, tall and thin and bent over a little, and had a short scar over one cheek where a Yankee bullet kind of winked at him as it went by. But Millie, she must have took after her mother's side of the family … She wasn't much bigger than a minute, and had light-colored hair that reminded me a little of corn silk. And eyes? The bluest eyes that ever melted a miser's heart.

Now, this voice — complete with winking bullets and “must have took” and “wasn't much bigger than a minute” — probably wouldn't carry your story very successfully, or very far, in other genres. But here, where the characters are extensions of the landscape itself, it fits like a hand in a glove, a buckskin one.

Whatever settings you choose for your Western, wilderness or towns, make sure you provide them in detail. The West — at least our perception of the West — is big, so you should make it big in your reader's mind. It was no coincidence that so many Western movies were filmed in splashy-colored, wide-screen formats. Directors like John Ford and Howard Hawks knew exactly what their audience wanted. And so should you. You don't have Cinema Scope and VistaVision to work with, but you do have all the tools in your kit, your imagination and the ability to wordsmith. So give the guy in Sheboygan the West in all its magnificent glory.

ROMANCE

The major emphasis of romance stories and novels must be romance. But for that love story to work, emphasis must be placed elsewhere as well. Readers of this particular type of fiction are especially interested in elaborate descriptions of clothing and de´cor, of jewelry and limousines, and elegant mansions and penthouse apartments. In other words, they expect descriptions they aren't likely to get much of in other genres. Many romances are played out in these opulent arenas among these shiny baubles, but not all are. Whatever the circumstances or the surroundings, all of those sweet nothings being whispered and schemes and intrigues and infatuations that drive this sort of story will come to nothing if you don't describe them well.

In Affair, a historical romance novel set in Victorian London, the author, Amanda Quick, helps to establish the time of the story by mentioning the advent of street lights, the place by adding a patch of London fog, and the mysterious situation by making a character wonder about the “risky activities” of another.

The weak gas lights that had recently been installed in this part of town could not penetrate far into the fog. So long as he and Charlotte stayed out of the short range of the lamplight, they could be reasonably safe from detection. Nevertheless, Baxter thought it best to make one more stab at discouraging his new employer from her risky activities.

Elsewhere in the novel, we're given this description of a character's gown, which was …

… fashioned of yellow muslin, high-waisted and trimmed with long sleeves and a white ruff. A pair of yellow kid slippers peeked out from beneath the severely restrained flounce that decorated the hem.

Almost certainly, we would never see this much description of how someone is dressed in any of the other genres. But such attention to fashion is one of the hallmarks of romantic fiction. And it serves a function other than giving the reader something pretty to read about; it adds significantly to the overall description of the era in historical romances and the level of society in stories set in modern times.

So does the considerable attention that is paid, in this genre, to the physical description of characters, with an emphasis on pleasing traits and qualities in order to make them more desirable.

This is a good time to reiterate what I said a few pages ago about conforming to genre specifications and giving the reader what they want. In the case of readers of romances, they want tons of description about interiors, decorations, clothing, and characters' physical traits. So you'd do well to provide it, in spades.

HORROR, SUSPENSE, THRILLERS

Here you won't need to pay as much attention to what people are wearing and their handsome houses and furniture as to what they are up to, or quite often what they are afraid of. Consider this single sentence from Stephen King's Salem's Lot:

Matt stood on his stoop for almost a full minute after the sound of the car had died away, his hands poked into his jacket pockets, his eyes turned toward the house on the hill.

That house on the hill will, most certainly, prove to be of some importance in the story. And you can bet, before we know what its importance is, we'll have other characters looking up at it or thinking about it, because Stephen King — considered by many to be the master of this genre — uses foreshadowing exceptionally well throughout his stories and novels.

And so should you. If one of your characters has told another one to never, under any circumstances, go up to the attic, then you'd better mention that attic pretty often, or have that character wonder what the heck is up there. Your readers will most likely not know what's there until late in your story, perhaps not until the very end. But it should be on their minds. And you the writer are the only one who can put it there. Make references to it, have other things remind the character of it. Maybe have a few strange sounds drift down from up there in the middle of the night.

If that mysterious attic is a major part of your story, then its constant presence in that story might be the most important piece of your setting, even though your major character and your readers won't actually see it for a while yet.

Making something frightening when your only tools are words on paper is a tough assignment. But it is exactly what you're signing up to do when you write this sort of fiction. Sometimes the best way to go about it will be with the “less is more” approach, with strong foreshadowing or showing a character's reaction to a scary thing. Other times graphic description of the thing itself will be the most effective way to do it. Think of exactly what you want your readers to see and how you want them to feel and let that guide you in your decision.

SUMMARY: THE SEVERAL SECTIONS OF THE BOOKSHOP

In this chapter we've looked at specific ways to establish and describe settings and to use description in general in several of the different genres of fiction. There are many other types — like humor, satire, action, and war stories, to name just a few. And the techniques we've talked about here will work in those as well. The various writing tools are not restricted to specific genres, not to be used in others. The use of suspense is not limited to a genre that we've chosen to label mystery; it will also be called for in Westerns and romances. The infusion of historical facts will be needed in all of the genres from time to time.

Remember, it's a darned good idea for you, as a writer, to spend some of your reading time in more than just a few of the sections of your favorite bookstore or library. You should recall from the first chapter that I'm convinced that good writing evolves from a trinity of approaches: (1) making good use of the underlying craft of composition, (2) a variety of models (examples) to learn from, and (3) careful and deliberate wordsmithing. And those models needn't, and shouldn't, come only from one or two specific types of fiction that you happen to enjoy reading. Excellent authors are represented throughout the genres, and you can learn a thing or two (or many) from any of them. So broaden your horizon.

Personally, I shunned science fiction for too many years, suspecting that it was just too out there, much unlike the historical novels and whodunits that I preferred. Then a friend insisted that I read Childhood's End, by Arthur C. Clarke, and I was fairly blown away by the strong images that stayed with me long after I finished it. Then came Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, which not only impressed and entertained me, but has had as much influence on my own writing as any other single work. Then I branched off into Westerns and fantasies and romances and any number of things that I would have never thought I would read. I'm a better writer because of my metamorphosis. And to say that I have enjoyed partaking at this much wider table would be an understatement of epic magnitude. I have been a glutton there, and continue to be one. Give yourself over to gluttony, too.

A Short (and Very Incomplete) Reading List for Those Who Want to Broaden Their Reading Horizons Among the Genres

Note: this is a list of personal favorites and shouldn't be considered as anything other than that. I encourage you to read the blurbs on many more books than these before making your selections.

HISTORICAL FICTION

James A. Michener Chesapeake

Margaret George The Autobiography of Henry VIII

Irving Stone The Agony and the Ecstasy

MYSTERY

Patricia Moyes Down Among the Dead Men

Ellis Peters The Rose Rent

Agatha Christie A Murder is Announced

SCIENCE FICTION

Arthur C. Clarke Childhood's End

Ray Bradbury The Martian Chronicles

Isaac Asimov The Foundation Trilogy

ROMANCE

Joy Fielding Whispers and Lies

Amanda Quick Affair (historical romance)

Sandra Brown The Witness

WESTERNS

Louis L'Amour Hondo

Zane Grey Riders of the Purple Sage

Larry McMurtry Lonesome Dove

HORROR

Stephen King Salem's Lot

Peter Straub Ghost Story

Anne Rice Interview With the Vampire

EXERCISE 1

Look at some story ideas that you've jotted down in your journal or notebook or at some of your manuscripts. Now, consider how those stories would work in another genre. How would your plot play as a Western? Or as science fiction? Fantasy? Romance? Would it work as a murder mystery? You might determine that it works best in the type of fiction you've chosen, or, on the other hand, you might decide that it will work better in another. Quite possibly, you'll have to change your setting — and, of course, your description of it — to make it fit into this new genre.

EXERCISE 2

Think of several historical events that interest you and make a list of ways that you might use one or two of them in a work of historical fiction. For instance, the riots at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago might make a fine backdrop for a love story between a liberal and a conservative. True love always wins out, right? Well, this scenario will put that to the test.

EXERCISE 3

Go to the library and locate at least three novels (if you've got lots of reading time to spare) or three short stories (if you don't), each of which is representative of a type of fiction that you have never read. If you're a big fan of mysteries and spy thrillers, then find, say, a Western, a science fiction, and a swashbuckler. Now, when reading them, look for ways the authors went about using craft and wordsmithing and specifically at their settings and descriptions. Make good notes. Learn. Then put your new knowledge to work in your fiction.