phenomenon for her climax? Is it her descriptions? Is it the healing rain of flowers on Catie Washington? Is it how it brings Mitch and Abby together?
I would argue that it is not one aspect of the tornado or its effect that gives Pickard's sequence its power; rather, it is the cumulative impact of all of them. A tornado is just a tornado. To create the tornado effect on the plot, Pickard had to put a number of Small Plains residents in a whirl.
What is the Big Event in your current manuscript? How many people does it change? How many of those changes do you portray? To create the Tornado Effect, you will need to portray all of them. It's extra work but the extra impact will be worth it, don't you think?
In certain fiction, the setting lives from the very first pages. Such places not only feel extremely real, they are dynamic. They change. They affect the characters in the story. They become metaphors, possibly even actors in the drama.
Powerfully portrayed settings seem to have a life of their own, but how is that effect achieved? Make your setting a character is a common piece of advice given to fiction writers, yet beyond invoking all five senses when describing the scenery, it doesn't seem that anyone can say exactly how to do it.
Do you ever skip description in a novel? I do, too. Obviously, merely describing how things look, sound, taste, feel, and smell is not, by itself, going to bring a location to life. Something more is required. Is it a setting that is unusual, exotic, or unexpected? If so, our job would be easy. We merely would have to find a spot on the face of the Earth where a novel has not previously been set. The Gobi Desert?
Unfortunately, the Gobi Desert won't do when your novel is about pioneering the American West, coming of age in 1950s Minnesota, suburban angst, or vampires. If those are your subjects you will have to find new ways to bring to life Durango, Lake Wobegon, Levittown, or sexy urban nightclubs. Others have visited your setting before, too, and may even have colonized it.
Does anyone dispute that the tidewater Carolinas are the kingdom of Pat Conroy? After The Prince of Tides (1986) or Beach Music (1995), who would be crazy enough to set a novel in that unique territory with its Charleston gardens, Gullah dialect, and marshes of waving cattails? Yet Conroy is far from the only contemporary novelist who has effectively set novels in the coastal Carolinas. Sue Monk Kidd, Mary Alice Monroe, and Dorothea Benton Frank are just a few who come to mind. That Conroy got there first hasn't hurt those authors' sales, or even diminished their settings.
The trick is not to find a fresh setting or a unique way to portray a familiar place; rather, it is to discover in your setting what is unique for your characters , if not for you. You must go beyond description, beyond dialect, beyond local foods to bring setting into the story in a way that integrates it into the very fabric of your characters' experience.
In other words, you must instill the soul of a place into your characters' hearts and make them grapple with it as surely as they grapple with the main problem and their enemies. How do you do that? It takes work but the basic principles of powerful settings are not exceptionally hard to grasp.
Let's look at some examples.
LINKING DETAILS AND EMOTIONS
As a child, did you have a special summer place? A family beach house, or a lake cabin? One that's been in the family for years, rich in history, stocked with croquet mallets, special iced tea glasses, and a rusty rotary lawn mower?
For me the special summer place was my Great Uncle Robert's farm on a hillside near Reading, Pennsylvania. "Uncle Locker," as we called him, was, as far as I knew, born old. He loved his John Deere tractor but didn't particularly like children, especially not after my younger brother dropped the tin dipping cup down the front yard well.
Uncle Locker raised sheep. He stocked the lower pond with trout. He had
I would argue that it is not one aspect of the tornado or its effect that gives Pickard's sequence its power; rather, it is the cumulative impact of all of them. A tornado is just a tornado. To create the tornado effect on the plot, Pickard had to put a number of Small Plains residents in a whirl.
What is the Big Event in your current manuscript? How many people does it change? How many of those changes do you portray? To create the Tornado Effect, you will need to portray all of them. It's extra work but the extra impact will be worth it, don't you think?
In certain fiction, the setting lives from the very first pages. Such places not only feel extremely real, they are dynamic. They change. They affect the characters in the story. They become metaphors, possibly even actors in the drama.
Powerfully portrayed settings seem to have a life of their own, but how is that effect achieved? Make your setting a character is a common piece of advice given to fiction writers, yet beyond invoking all five senses when describing the scenery, it doesn't seem that anyone can say exactly how to do it.
Do you ever skip description in a novel? I do, too. Obviously, merely describing how things look, sound, taste, feel, and smell is not, by itself, going to bring a location to life. Something more is required. Is it a setting that is unusual, exotic, or unexpected? If so, our job would be easy. We merely would have to find a spot on the face of the Earth where a novel has not previously been set. The Gobi Desert?
Unfortunately, the Gobi Desert won't do when your novel is about pioneering the American West, coming of age in 1950s Minnesota, suburban angst, or vampires. If those are your subjects you will have to find new ways to bring to life Durango, Lake Wobegon, Levittown, or sexy urban nightclubs. Others have visited your setting before, too, and may even have colonized it.
Does anyone dispute that the tidewater Carolinas are the kingdom of Pat Conroy? After The Prince of Tides (1986) or Beach Music (1995), who would be crazy enough to set a novel in that unique territory with its Charleston gardens, Gullah dialect, and marshes of waving cattails? Yet Conroy is far from the only contemporary novelist who has effectively set novels in the coastal Carolinas. Sue Monk Kidd, Mary Alice Monroe, and Dorothea Benton Frank are just a few who come to mind. That Conroy got there first hasn't hurt those authors' sales, or even diminished their settings.
The trick is not to find a fresh setting or a unique way to portray a familiar place; rather, it is to discover in your setting what is unique for your characters , if not for you. You must go beyond description, beyond dialect, beyond local foods to bring setting into the story in a way that integrates it into the very fabric of your characters' experience.
In other words, you must instill the soul of a place into your characters' hearts and make them grapple with it as surely as they grapple with the main problem and their enemies. How do you do that? It takes work but the basic principles of powerful settings are not exceptionally hard to grasp.
Let's look at some examples.
LINKING DETAILS AND EMOTIONS
As a child, did you have a special summer place? A family beach house, or a lake cabin? One that's been in the family for years, rich in history, stocked with croquet mallets, special iced tea glasses, and a rusty rotary lawn mower?
For me the special summer place was my Great Uncle Robert's farm on a hillside near Reading, Pennsylvania. "Uncle Locker," as we called him, was, as far as I knew, born old. He loved his John Deere tractor but didn't particularly like children, especially not after my younger brother dropped the tin dipping cup down the front yard well.
Uncle Locker raised sheep. He stocked the lower pond with trout. He had
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