Globe Trotting (Writing Multiple Settings)

Let's talk about settings. Not setting, as in the singular, but settings, such as when you bounce your characters all over the place to tell your story. 

Do you have a sort of "master setting" you tend to use and then sprinkle it full of "little settings" such as how Batman's Gotham City has Crime Alley, the waterfront, etc.? How does this approach work for you?

Brian K Morris: My early work was peppered with planting the story in a spot and leaving it there until I came back to take it home for dinner.

Sheela Chattopadhyay: In my characters' running away from me stories that need fixing, it's all the same continent but different places. I hadn't tried for a bit more simplicity in that world because of how long the story was supposed to be. In my current one, it is within one house so far and that's been working for me.

Sean Taylor: The characters I create or co-create have a home setting. Rick Ruby has his seedy New York underbelly. Fishnet Angel had Los Angeles until she moved to Cristol City. Even then, they're not always there exclusively. Fishnet Angel has traveled to Egypt and to the Middle East in search of the ancient idol she needs. 

Some characters I write, including Golden Amazon, experience their stories all over the place. I've written her in Notre Dame, New York, and now Los Angeles. 

No. Not these Globetrotters.

When you need to bounce around the world with your characters, how do you determine that and how do you make it work as a writer? Do you continue to let a setting become a sort of de facto character in its own right (again, like Gotham for Batman or Los Angeles for Philip Marlowe)?

Sheela Chattopadhyay: In the series that needs fixing, it depended on the timing that the characters needed. In my current short story, it's still based on the timing and pacing. The setting itself is a factor, but I haven't really analyzed if it is at a de facto character level for the story. If it becomes a de facto character, I'm ok with that.

Sean Taylor: I try to work in the character and "voice" of a location, even for settings that are merely temporary or a sort of layover between the major parts of a book's story. For me, if a place doesn't say something specific about the characters or the story, then it's just a throwaway location and could have been anywhere, no a specific somewhere. 

Paul Landri: In Return of the Crimson Howl we made it a cross-country journey so we wouldn't have one setting until the ending. I like to add places I've been into my narrative. For example: Brattleboro, Vermont and Seaside Heights, New Jersey show up in the book. In the upcoming sequel a great deal of it takes place in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn at a bakery that existed in real life and owned by my grandparents (it's gone now but I'm resurrecting it in literary form). Book three will have about 3 different settings so to answer your question, I tend to bounce around until I find a spot to stay in for a while then move on.

Brian K Morris: For much of my current work, I have a setting of Raceway City, which serves as my Metropolis/Gotham City for many of my characters. For other works, I'll set it in real world locations (which means research since I've not been in many of them).

How does needing multiple settings work into your plotting and planning for your novel? Is it something that you have specific reasons for choosing each location or is it more relaxed than that? Give me an example from your work.

Sheela Chattopadhyay: In the stories that need fixing, each one is supposed to be novel length. That's why the fixing is going to need to happen. I chose to have multiple settings because of the plot being quite large of several interwoven characters trying to solve a problem and overcome a common enemy. Each location is often refuge from temporarily escaping th villain, learning something useful to them, and building another ally.

Give it a spin. C'mon!

Brian K Morris: The locations are mostly to disorientate the protagonist and give him/her one extra challenge. This works mostly because my stories tend to take place no less than forty years ago in a pre-GPS age. I also select locations with a bit of a mystique to them, to add to the mood and sense of isolation for the protagonist. For instance, what kind of story can I tell if it takes place in WW2's Paris, or Carnaby Street in 1964, or San Francisco as it rebuilt from an earthquake?

Sean Taylor: Rarely do my character jet around the world to multiple cities in a single work. That comes a lot from the kind of stories I grew up reading. Noir and Hard-Boiled stories danced from setting to setting within a single city, but rarely from city to city. Sci-fi sometimes jumped places, but never really culture to culture, and if it did, each new setting was central to the new culture and what the protagonist was learning about himself/herself/themself. I tend to do the same. The one time I have jumped around is on a novel I'm currently editing called Postcards of the Hanging. In it the main character, a trans women in the '60s who is a sort of spiritual P.I. must go all over Western Europe to stop a plot to use a dead man's blood to bring forth an ancient curse with the help of her hippy ghost assistant. That one was designed to be a globe-trotting adventure, and each city was chosen before of both historical need (something happened there that related to the story) and atmosphere and how it causes the heroine and/or assistant to react.