Why Setting Matters More Than You Think

By C. Hope Clark

We’ve all moved at some point in our lives. When we went to college, when we married, when we changed jobs, when we retired . . . when we ran out of money or hit success. In our dreams we envision the perfect home. A kitchen we love to cook in, the most excellent back porch, a view of water, or a bedroom that envelops us in quaint security at night. Then there’s the town, state or country we prefer. Not all of us are happy where we are. Others, like me, have found a locale that nourishes our souls. Rip me out of here, or destroy what it represents to me, and I’m lost . . . or coming after you.

In our day-to-day existence, we yearn for that piece of geography that makes us whole, and when we don’t have it, we’re unsettled. So, imagine you’re in your perfect place . . . and it’s ruined. Or imagine you are in a strange location, and like Dorothy and Toto, you cry “There’s no place like home” and vow to find it come hell or damnation.

The power of setting ought to be as intense in stories as in our lives.

I’ve just released my fifth novel, Edisto Jinx, set on secluded Edisto Beach, South Carolina. It’s the second in The Edisto Island Mysteries. Readers love the coastal getaway that’s known for being laid back and poised on the end of the world, far removed from civilization. And they love how I’ve given those naïve residents some crazy murders to disturb that peace and quiet. Characters have escaped to Nirvana, only to find the devil vacations there, too.

I write mysteries, but when I begin a book, my first major decision is place, not crime. You overlook a major tool when you choose place and don’t make it dance the dance with the rest of the players. In the case of the Edisto series, the location nourishes people who’ve escaped the rest of the world to soak up the sun and surf and leave urbania to conjoin with nature. What better way to mess with characters than to ruin that? Place is as important a character as your protagonist, and we all know that if we don’t challenge our protagonist, there is no tale.

I recall my first release in my Carolina Slade series, Lowcountry Bribe, and the chase where a Slade seeks her missing children. She’s frantic, traveling country roads, searching ponds, ditches, barns, imagining the worst. The rural, rustic setting was horrendous enough – no city grids, but when my critique partner asked me why there wasn’t a hurricane off the coast, after all, this was the Carolinas, I smacked myself. Suddenly Slade fought wind, rain and dark, black clouds, in addition to an antagonist. Made all the difference in those chapters.

Where would Moby Dick be without the constant threat of the ocean? Gone With the Wind without Charleston or Atlanta?

The bestseller Girl on the Train, by Paula Hawkins, is based upon the character’s routine, in the city, riding a train. Then she’s rocked to her core by something horrible disturbing that oh-so-normal routine.

Debbie Macomber’s recent release, Silver Linings, centers her characters around Rose Harbor Inn in Cedar Grove. People who should never leave do, upsetting the balance, and then new people appear who don’t fit in. All around that charming little inn the reader becomes intimate with.

Setting dictates the flavor and voice of your story. Don’t underestimate it. As a matter of fact, give it free rein and let it have a serious hand in screwing up your characters’ lives.

_________________________________________________________________________ 

C. Hope Clark is the author of five mysteries and a short recently published in Killer Nashville’s famous anthology Cold-Blooded, alongside Jeffrey Deaver, Steven James, and Donald Bain. She’s also published numerous nonfiction pieces in such publications as Writer’s Digest, The Writer, Writer’s Market, and Guide to Literary Agents, and she speaks across the country at writing conferences and workshops. She’s known most for her origination of FundsforWriters.com , a writing resource recognized by Writer’s Digest in its 101 Best Websites for Writers, for the last 15 years. You’ll find her at www.chopeclark.com and www.fundsforwriters.com

Daring a Mystery Series

By C. Hope Clark

Agents and publishers love series, as do most readers. I’m chomping at the bit for suspense author Lisa Gardner to release another Quincy and Rainie crime story. Gardner’s one of the few mystery/suspense authors I’ll pre-order and not care what her new release costs.

Many readers become comfortable, friendly, even intimate with repeating characters, and remain anxious to see what calamity an author can concoct for them next. That challenge represents both the good and the bad of writing a series.

Initially, a series seems the simplest way to go. You spend the first book introducing and defining the basics of your protagonist: her relationships, upbringing, strengths, and weaknesses. This is ground level construction where you’re laying the foundation, and to your reader, it’s a honeymoon phase. You define her environment, her habits. And with a mystery comes dictating the degree of crime, level of gore, type of law enforcement, and the capabilities of your sleuth to dance in and out of the confines of the law.

Then comes book two. Your protagonist grew in the initial story. She’s different now, changed. You now pen an intriguing plot nothing like the first, but more challenging than the last, because your character has evolved. She’s wiser. Those around her changed as well. Just like in the real world, they applied what they learned to their new conditions. And they grow again.

Book three tests you. Even if you have a bumbling sleuth, she won’t bumble exactly the same. She reacts based on her history, and how it altered her. Here is where many authors fall short. They forget that the reader has grown along with the character. He won’t be deceived quite so easily, and reading inside your protagonist’s head now for the third time, he’ll expect more from her, giving her less benefit of the doubt.  She can’t make the same mistakes. She can’t use the same tactics.

By now you also have a slew of characters to keep up with. If you’ve read a long-lived series comprised of people like Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone, Charlaine Harris’ Sookie Stackhouse, or Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum, you keep up with a huge host of people who step in and out of the stories. Some appear once in a great while, others in every other scene. People age or die. They change professions or get divorced. They earn accolades and they screw up with long-lasting effects. You must get the facts right, maintain the time line, preserve the history, because your readers keep track.

The reader may know you better that you know yourself now. Remember, mystery is the only genre where the reader is pitted against the author, each trying to outguess the other. Each book makes you up your game, because the reader is buying with an urge to best you before you reach “the end.”

The quirks have to get quirkier.

The needs have to feel keener.

The love has to grow deeper.

The past fears have to scar.

The twists turn more complex.

A series gets harder, not easier, in spite of how well you think you know your players. It’s a difficult balancing act, but in the end not only do you amass a loyal fan base for the effort, but you also achieve a satisfaction in knowing you still have what it takes to keep that reader guessing. And that’s the addiction that keeps an author shrewd, savvy and alive.

________________________________________________________________________________ 

C. Hope Clark’s new release is Palmetto Poison, the third in The Carolina Slade Mystery Series, from Bell Bridge Books. First in the series is Lowcountry Bribe followed by Tidewater Murder. Hope is also editor of FundsforWriters.com, voted 101 Best Websites for Writers by Writer’s Digest Magazine for the past 13 years. www.chopeclark.com

TWITTER - http://twitter.com/hopeclark
FACEBOOK - http://www.facebook.com/chopeclark
BLOG - http://www.chopeclark.com/blog

You’re Just Being Modest

By C. Hope Clark

Writers climb hard to the next best story, the next publication, the next review and recognition. We aren’t as much pompous (most of us, anyway) or ego-possessed about the writing business as we are obsessed with writing more creatively, more beautifully. Our profession is more about a gut tingling, adrenaline pulsing exhilaration about getting the words in perfect order than about who else thinks so. But if others appreciate us for doing so, then that’s okay, too.

The serious writer hunts for a better line, every time, until the day she dies.

I have a large, wonderful cadre of friends on Facebook. They are loyal, complimentary and compassionate, and I meet as many as I can at book tours and speaking engagements. They are people I wish lived in my hometown, called me up for lunch, or sent me a card on my birthday. They had wonderful comments about my latest accomplishment.

I wrote a chapter in the 2013 Writer’s Market, published by Writer’s Digest Books. My copy just arrived in the mail. Before I cracked the spine to check my byline, I almost dropped the book. Right on the cover, beside the names Carol Tice and Jane Friedman, was C. Hope Clark, novelist and grants expert. On the friggin’ cover! I literally screamed “Yes!”

Of course I told the Facebook group. They sent congrats and accolades.  One in particular said, “You deserve it...stop being so modest.” And that gave me pause.

Was I becoming arrogant, begging for compliments?

Where was that fine line between sharing success and bragging so I could make sure which side I was on? This accomplishment was not something I assumed would happen. I held my breath when I submitted that pitch. My work is rejected often, and I flounder like others, seeking the right path for the next story . . . a path that hopefully intersects with some editor who gets what I’m saying.

I don’t want to become arrogant . . . much less a diva. I actually fear bestseller status, not that I’d turn it down. Then another FB follower told me I’d arrived because I rubbed elbows with others who’d arrived. That made me sad.

Arriving means you put the car in park; I want to keep going.

Serious writers never think they've arrived. We’re too busy pouring attention into the next story than marking advances. We hold our heads down, pounding out the next paragraph, praying it’s better than the last. I wonder what fluke happened when I land a gig or win recognition. After speaking to others, I’ve heard many say they tripped into success. Sure, you can coax a bestselling author to admit he has a writing routine and diligently studies his craft, but the success? It’s luck and chance, he says. For some reason we don’t readily embrace the you’ve-arrived status.  It’s scary.

New writers don’t realize the many layers of arrival. There’s the level of the first sale. The first contest win and the first five-star review. There’s the first magazine article and the first blog award. Book two is a different situation than book three, which doesn’t compare to book ten.

I'm still a debut author even though I’ve written for FundsforWriters, online, and in magazines for fourteen years. I may have published in Writer’s Market, but in a room full of mystery authors I'm nobody, a newbie just cutting her teeth. With my publisher, I’m a baby, hoping to grow up and be like the other authors who have eight books under their belts, the authors who get instance response when they email the editor instead of having to wait until they can fit the newbie into their schedule.

We need these layers. They keep us humble.

They keep us digging for improvement. The minute we become complacent is when those still clamoring pass us by. I still have a ways to go to be like those who’ve gone before me and done well. The funny thing is they probably feel the same about those who’ve gone before them.

Quit swimming and you sink. Quit eating and you die. You can’t quit . . . period. And modesty has nothing to do with it.

_____________________________________________________________________________________

C. Hope Clark is author of the Carolina Slade Mystery Series, by Bell Bridge Books. The first in the series, Lowcountry Bribe, recently won The Silver Falchion Award presented by Killer Nashville Conference for a new mystery release. Hope is also editor of FundsforWriters.com , chosen by Writer’s Digest for 101 Best Websites for Writers for the past twelve years. www.chopeclark.com / www.fundsforwriters.com