Designing a Narrative Part 1: Setting the Stage
It’s been crazy for the past few weeks here. Outside there was the US Election which still is an ongoing drama, as well as the largest spike in COVID-19 cases to date. With everything going on, it can be hard to pry yourself away from the real world. Alas, I don’t care much for the real world, which is why I try to create stories that lead people away from the doldrums and into uncharted territories where truly anything is possible.
So it is that I decided to start a new series on the fundamentals of designing a narrative. This is going to be geared more towards people who aspire to write a story for themselves, or who are just curious on the how the process of writing a novel from beginning to end looks. I’m sure that every author is a little different when it comes to this, but regardless of your style, there are always certain boxes you need to tick if you want your story to make sense and, well, not suck too badly.
This is part 1, where I will be talking about setting the stage of a novel. I’m doing this first because this is usually the first thing that a creator needs to think of when deciding on what direction to take their plot. We will be doing a bit of everything here such as designing characters and plots/subplots in this series, as well as take a look at how a narrative develops and changes overtime from the first draft to the final, finished project.
Without further ado, lets get started.
The stage of the novel, for me, is primarily two things. It is the universe or place in which your story occurs, and the basic premise of the story itself. In Okey-Dokey Sensei, the physical stage is Toyama prefecture. Why Toyama? Well, the easy answer is that I lived there and I loved it. It’s such a secluded, secret place that even native Japanese people might live their whole lives and not be able to point it out on a map. It’s an unexplored world, ripe with the unknown. A fitting place to set a story that both tells a tale about people and the place they live. With the singular exception of Yoshiko’s mountain estate (I based that off a place I visited in Wakayama prefecture), everything mentioned in Okey-Dokey Sensei is based on a real place, with real people working there.
But location alone does not make a story. A world has to be filled. A question has to be asked, and answered. Dynamic forces must spur a change, and force people to learn an adapt, lest they fall to the wayside and be forgotten. The character of Martin is based off a friend I had back in my University days. A short but hilariously awkward man who people really gravitated towards. He had an honesty and simplicity about him that people loved, and I often wondered how a person like him would have handled living in a place like Toyama. Where would he go? What would he do? How would he react to the culture and society around him?
So it was that my stage was set. I had my idea of place, person, and premise. Toyama, Martin, and the question of how he would make a life for himself so far away from anything normal he had ever known. It’s important to mention that this is all the stage really is. Everything that comes afterwards such as plot arcs and tone and all that other jazz is built of that initial foundation. In Okey-Dokey Sensei, the idea of writing a story like that had probably been stirring in my mind since my second or third month living in Toyama. It stewed and marinated in the deep recesses of my brain until it revealed its delicious storyline. But even that didn’t happen like you might think. That’s a topic for later in this series, however.
With Clocktower, the stage was created much, much differently. Toyama is a real place that you can go to right now. You can be there tomorrow if you really wanted to be and see the world that I have lived in and wrote about. In Clocktower, the city of Sonnerie is complete fiction. Every single thing, from the layout of the city to its inhabitants, to the laws and rules and customs of the society were created by me. Sonnerie only exists in my mind, and you as the reader only experience of Sonnerie what I allow you to experience. In my last blog where I announced the novel, I talked a bit about how the idea for the novel came up. It was wildly different from my previous work, and to be frank, writing it has been far more challenging (but still very fun).
Where Okey-Dokey Sensei is a story about a young man growing into his own and learning about the world, the protagonist is Clocktower is experiencing the opposite kind of journey. He is a middle aged, harsh, and carries the immense weight of his past with him. So here, it benefited me to create a world just for him, and that world was Sonnerie. Investigator Tokisaki is the fish out of water in this new city. He and the reader experience things and people together, and the narrative is driven through his lens and no one else’s. The stage here has it’s person and place, but the premise for me here was more centered upon the place rather than the person, unlike Okey-Dokey Sensei. What would a city like Sonnerie resemble? How would it have grown an evolved? What kind of people would inhabit its streets? What kind of issues would it face? What kind of secrets would it have? There were so many questions about this new world, and who better to unravel the answers than an Investigator.
Well, that’s about it for today. I hope that this has given an insight into how the process starts. Just having a stage won’t get you a novel in your hands, but it’s the first step on a long journey that I hope you have the courage to take!
-CA
