“Do you, perhaps, want to move to Portugal?” It asks. “How about this villa in France? Or this compound in the Hollywood hills?”

(4 Tips for Turning Unexpected Settings Into Horrific Playgrounds.)

The eager algorithm sends me these listings not because I’m planning a move or have $5 million to spare, but because browsing real estate listings is a quick way for a writer to explore different settings that might serve as the perfect location for a story.

Every writer has different ways to enter a novel; some start with characters, others with a plot device or a thematic question that just won’t leave them alone. For me, setting is often the element that fully unlocks the big picture of a story and brings everything together. That’s because setting isn’t just a backdrop to story but its bedrock—the foundation that underlies everything from character to theme. It includes the physical location a story takes place, as well as the societal factors that drive culture and create systems of power. What’s more, setting is a dynamic force that you can use to advance a story’s plot, underscore its theme, and challenge your characters.

Using setting to advance plot

External conflict arises when a character struggles against an outside force like nature, society, technology, or other characters—many of which are intertwined with where and when a story takes place.

In some narratives, setting is the main antagonist. Environmental disasters like earthquakes and tornadoes can force characters to partner with unlikely allies and face their worst fears. Even when setting isn’t the main antagonist, it can create situations that move the plot forward, with culture, technology, and climate exerting pressure on characters.

Try escalating the conflict in your story by increasing the obstacles your characters must face. Are they snowed in without enough food? Yikes. What if they’re trapped with a killer? Now that’s dire, and while food’s the least of their problems, the pressure’s still there, adding a ticking clock to the characters’ escape.

Ask yourself:

• How do location, culture, and power systems influence my story? How can setting become setup for the story?
• How can I use setting to make the dominoes tip over, where one problem leads to the next?
• Can I use setting to create a ticking clock?

Using setting to challenge characters

One of the most rewarding parts of reading a story is watching a character change (or not!) in response to challenges. Though setting is an external force, you can use it to enhance internal conflicts and illuminate your characters.

A character’s reaction to the setting can tell a lot about their journey. Do they start out uncomfortable and grow more comfortable over time? Or does the setting trick them into a sense of false security before throwing a wrench in all their plans?

Making your characters physically unsteady can open the door for them to become emotionally vulnerable. Have a character who’s reluctant to face their problems? One who always wants to run away? If they suddenly can’t flee from their issues, they’ll be forced to acknowledge and confront them, leading to change.

Try using setting to influence a character’s proximity and relationship to other characters, or use it to put a character’s goals—whether physical or emotional—just out of reach.

Thrillers and action stories often take advantage of setting to create physical challenges for characters, but the pressures setting can enact aren’t limited by genre. Consider a small-town romance between two rival bakers. What would happen if one of their bakeries floods and they’re forced to share a kitchen? Or perhaps you’re writing a second-chance romance where two exes are stuck on a trip together. What if—I beg of you—what if there’s only one bed? It’s not so easy to run away from each other and their pasts anymore, now is it?

Ask yourself:

• What is my character’s flaw or false belief?
• How can the setting challenge my character to confront their false belief?
• How does my character feel about the setting? Does that change over time?

Using setting to underscore theme

You can use setting to highlight your story’s themes, by either creating a mirror or a contrast between a location and the story’s central question. A haunted gothic manor is a prime example of how a location can reflect a story’s themes—like isolation, decay, and the supernatural—all while creating an atmosphere of dread.

Meanwhile, a crime committed in the most luxurious location can feel just as unnerving as one committed in a crumbling manor. Here, the contrast between the violence and the pristine location can make the act seem that much more monstrous, highlighting themes of class, morality, and power.

In addition to setting the tone for a story, the location can make characters directly confront the thematic question. If Jurassic Park’s fences held and a storm didn’t trap the characters on Isla Nubar, the characters wouldn’t have been forced to battle with the story’s theme of whether man can truly control nature—and whether we should.

Ask yourself:

• What is my story’s central theme?
• What setting best illuminates the theme?
• How can the setting force characters to grapple with the thematic question?

Getting started

If you’re not sure where your story should take place, experiment by putting your characters in new locations and seeing how they react. Then, consider which of those settings best challenge the characters and illuminate the story’s themes.

Need inspiration?

• Browse real estate, hotel, and vacation rental listings. Or, use a map’s street view to get the feeling of physically moving through a location. What do you encounter? Is there anything that might surprise your character or present unexpected obstacles?
• Consider reverse-engineering a location. If there are details you’d like to include in a story, research where those elements can be found.
• Make a mood board to capture the big picture. Any images that evoke your story are fair game, but be sure to include some location details as well. Even if you’re writing sci-fi or fantasy, you can often find real-life inspiration to help you envision your world.
• After you’ve chosen a setting, make sure to include sensory details in your writing to bring the location to life.

Bringing everything together

While setting can dramatically shape your story, it’s important to remember that the building blocks of story also influence each other. As you write or revise your story, use setting to inspire connections between your plot, characters, and theme. When you make the setting an active and interconnected part of the story, you’ll set the stage for natural conflicts and character growth.

And as a bonus? You too might fool a real estate website into thinking you’re moving to a haunted castle on the English moors.

Check out Tanya Grant’s Made You Look here:

Bookshop | Amazon

(WD uses affiliate links)

The post Using Setting to Create Conflict in Fiction appeared first on Writer's Digest.

(Setting the Mood for Readers.)

In my new book, Good Hair Days, the sisters run a Dolly Parton themed hair salon that’s been passed down generation-to-generation to each first-born woman. Because of their southern roots, they follow their late mother’s instructions like dogma, and eventually they find themselves in trouble by way of a renovation gone wrong. To get themselves out of hot water, they lean on each other, their family, and their close-knit community.

When southern settings inform the characters’ decision making, motivations, and behavior, magic happens.

Nature Is Never Far Away

In the South the trees grow thick and tall, the bugs chirp on full volume, and the mosquitos are super-sized. If you spend any amount of time in the region, you’ll take your turn to find a miniature lizard or frog that’s found its way into your residence. Storms downpour in tropical torrents, and Southerners keep an eye trained on the weather report during hurricane season. As we build southern worlds for our stories, these are the elements that our characters will contend with. Perhaps watching a busy butterfly bush is a source of comfort for a character who holds dear memories of planting it with her late grandmother. Perhaps an incoming storm warning upends plans for an elaborate outdoor wedding. Perhaps a character is bitten by a venomous snake off the trail and faces a ticking clock to find help before the venom takes effect.

Feed Your People

First things first, it might be valuable to do an internet search for signature southern dishes unless you already know them by heart. But beyond writing the right menu, southern food is about culture as much as it is the ingredients on the plate. Southerners feed their people. It’s just what they do. They can’t help themselves. Even if you’ve just eaten, you will be presented with food at a neighbor’s home or a family gathering. At minimum a plate will be loaded and wrapped for you to take when it’s time to go. Special occasions call for pulling out all the stops, all hands on deck, and a banquet-worthy array of provisions. Maybe you’re asked to bring your prize-winning red velvet cake or maybe folks rely on you to bring the durable paper plates everyone likes, but whether it’s something big or small, every person helps.

A Southern Turn of Phrase

Southern living might be slower paced than the rest of the world—especially so if your spot is off the beaten track, a mountain cabin with spotty cell service, a beach shack beyond the tourist beach. Southerners often like to tell the long version of the story over a cold drink on their porch. Words aren’t parsed out, meandering side stories aren’t rushed over. Language can reflect this—especially dialogue—but with consideration so the pacing of the story doesn’t suffer. Including southern phrases and idioms in sprinklings also brings the fun, but take note to do so in moderation to avoid sounding hokey.

Mind Your P’s and Q’s

Traditions and etiquette are as ingrained in southern culture as football. Whether it’s required attendance at the family reunion or making it to the baby shower for your second cousin twice removed, traditions—and social rules—run deep. Your southern characters should be aware of the rules, but whether they follow them is up to you. In fact, this is fertile ground for tension and conflict for your story. The main character skipped the church potluck to attend the rock concert of their love interest? They dyed their hair bright purple right before serving as maid of honor in their sister’s wedding? Surely, they will reap the consequences.

No One Size Fits All

As much as paying mind to the customs and quirks of the region matters in building a believable southern setting, your unique voice is required too. Simply put: Southerners aren’t just one thing. Southern culture is the traditional stuff that comes easily to mind, but it’s also newcomers to the region who bring their own traditions, their own dishes, and their own voices. It’s the beautiful thing that happens when what we had before meets something new, and together one place evolves into something more vivid and alive.

Check out Grace Helena Walz’s Good Hair Days here:

Bookshop | Amazon

(WD uses affiliate links)

The post 5 Tips for Nailing a Southern Setting appeared first on Writer's Digest.

(Capturing the Full Spectrum of Experiences.)

That hush fueled my novel When Shadows Burn, a story that crawls through the attics of Southern Gothic and refuses to leave marginalized bodies in the walls. The genre has always thrived on rot and revelation, but its canon tends to center familiar figures like proper white families with skeletons, haunted belles mourning lost plantations, charismatic bigots whose cruelty feels inevitable. I still thrill to Faulkner, S. A. Cosby, Jesmyn Ward, and Tananarive Due’s tangled roads, yet I want the compass needle to swing toward voices those older books kept offstage.

The numbers demand it. More than 34 million Americans identify somewhere on the LGBTQIA+ spectrum, roughly one in ten adults. Autism sits at one in 35 translating to over 10 million people whose sensory wiring diverges from “normal.” When a genre built to expose buried horrors pretends those communities barely exist, that erasure becomes the darkest shadow in the room. Reclamation means letting the marginalized walk through the front door and decide whether the house should stand at all.

I began world-building with architecture, because Southern Gothic lives and dies by setting. The Martian House in my novel stands on the outskirts of Raven’s Cross like an aging Victorian monster. Before drafting a single creaking stair, I traced its history. A bootlegger built it and married a child bride. That lineage meant every scrap of peeling wallpaper carried sociopolitical weight long before any ghost rattled a chandelier. Each detail begged questions: Who hammered the nails? Who scrubbed the blood? Who was never allowed to cross the threshold? Once those questions led, the atmosphere followed with purpose.

Silence came next. Rural towns curate silence the way winemakers curate wine, labeling which truths are allowed to breathe and which stay corked. I underlined every moment a character withheld something. Queer and autistic characters swallowed anger, rewrote memories, endured polite labels like “confused” or “different.” Each omission revealed the machinery of power. Someone always rests easier when another’s reality stays invisible. Once that dynamic surfaced, conflict wrote itself.

I quickly found that writing trauma from inside a marginalized mind required restraint. Readers from these populations already navigate a world eager to showcase their pain for spectacle. I drafted graphic scenes, then peeled them back until only sensations essential to a character’s agency remained. Instead of lingering on bruises, I focused on a breath stolen behind a door and the hush before courage outweighs terror. Instead of cataloging every slur, I tracked the heartbeat-rush that turns flight into fury. The rules were simple. Fear must change a decision. Gore that changes nothing is exploitation.

But I knew hope had to survive the climax. Classic Southern Gothic often ends in ruin so complete it feels biblical, but I will not ask today’s readers, especially queer or neurodivergent readers, to watch another fire without a seed left in the ash. The smell of char lingers, but the sign still stands. Epilogue becomes prologue, testifying that real horror may scorch the ground but never decides what grows back.

For writers ready to drag their own region’s ghosts into daylight, my method loops through three questions. First, what physical space has your community mythologized, and whose fingerprints are missing from its history? Second, who benefits by cash, comfort, or power when that absence stays unspoken? Third, when horror erupts, what small, stubborn act can the erased characters perform that refuses erasure? Answer those questions scene after scene, and Gothic shadows reshape into something more honest, more unsettling, and paradoxically more humane.

The numbers aren’t abstract. At a hometown festival last month, I counted heads. In any 100 residents where I live, roughly 10 are LGBTQIA+ like my son, and three are autistic like me. I picture them drifting past vendor tables the way I once scanned bookstore shelves, hunting proof that our nightmares and heartbeats belong on the page. Hand them the lantern and say, “You lead; we’ll follow.” In a genre obsessed with hauntings, living people deserve the loudest voice, especially when horror is something that shouldn’t be real, but is.

Check out Todd Brown’s When Shadows Burn here:

Bookshop | Amazon

(WD uses affiliate links)

References

Gallop Poll (2025)                                                                    

Autismspeaks.org Autism annual report, 2025

The post Lighting the Dark South: Reclaiming Representation in Southern Gothic appeared first on Writer's Digest.

(The Keys to Conflict in Romance.)

In my debut novel, The Best Worst Thing, Nicole and her love interest, Logan, are former colleagues. While their relationship as co-workers ended years before the novel’s inciting incident brings them back together, the book features a dual timeline, offering a retrospective glimpse at Nicole and Logan’s love story from the very beginning, when it was little more than a bit of workplace banter.

Here are four tips and tricks I used to strengthen my main characters’ workplace tension that you can implement in your work, too.

Set the stage—but don’t overdo it

There’s a reason that offices are breeding grounds for harmless little crushes: forced proximity. For 40-plus hours a week, two unsuspecting employees are just… near each other. All the time. If your characters have a good rapport, there’s no need to overdo it. After all, they’re at an office—not a bar.

With that in mind, give us an early look at a regular day at the workplace. Who’s serious? Who’s cracking jokes? Who’s distracting whom? Perhaps your story requires longing stares or intense yearning right off the bat, but even then, these moments must be earned. Wherever your characters are at, consider offering a quick, establishing scene that shows us who these people are and how they interact.

In The Best Worst Thing, for example, we meet Logan for the first time in a flashback that’s less than a page long. Nicole is trying to get information from Logan to complete a time-sensitive task, and Logan is… showing her a ridiculous computer game he’s been playing all day on his monitor screen.

She teases him, he teases her back, and then we’re out of the scene. It’s zingy, it’s charming, it’s character-forward, and then it’s over.

But the reader knows, for sure, that we’ll definitely be coming back.

Make the mundane sacred

Here’s another thing about workplace crushes: They are, by design, not hot. Bodies are obscured by Banana Republic garb. People sit in cubicles. Somebody from accounting microwaves leftover sea bass for lunch and makes it the rest of the office’s problem for the next three months.

But you can use these banalities to your advantage. You can make the mundane sacred by creating workplace intimacy rituals for your characters. Does he throw a packet of Oreos at her desk every afternoon at 3 pm? Do they have a shared enemy in procurement? The Office is famous for this tactic. For turning universal nine-to-five minutiae into moments that make sparks fly.

Another fantastic example: Natalie Sue’s 2024 debut, I Hope This Finds You Well, in which the hot-mess protagonist, Jolene, falls for Cliff, the HR representative sent from corporate to rectify her (fantastically) bad attitude.

Most scenes between Jim and Pam and Cliff and Jolene aren’t actually hot. Everyone’s wearing chinos and cardigans… and yet: Banter. Butterflies. The unmistakable signs of soulmate-level chemistry, which, when properly dispatched, can pop more in a copy room than on a fancy first date.

You’ve just got to leverage the boring stuff to make the real story stand out.

Play with the setting to propel the narrative forward

You’ve established rapport. You’ve shown sparks. You’ve made the boring spectacular. Now, the story must escalate. Flirting is cute, yes, but forward motion is essential to maintaining that exquisite will-they-or-won’t-they tension. Feelings can’t stay bottled up forever—or, if they do, there should be consequences for that. These are humans you’ve built, and if they’re not together, it should be driving them crazy.

So, once you’ve earned it, put your characters in a pressure cooker. In The Best Worst Thing, we see emotional escalations at a holiday party, during a late-night paper jam, and on a freezing-cold work trip. The chief trick here, in my opinion, is to continue to leverage the “workplace” while actually shifting the setting. This can signal to the reader—and to your characters—increased opportunity for intimacy, understanding, and connection.

It’s simple, too. At a holiday party, for example, characters are dressed up. Their appearances are, suddenly, up for discussion. People are drinking. Spouses and partners might show up. It’s dark out! The event flips the standard setting on its head and offers all sorts of opportunities for interiority, reflection, discomfort, and longing. Little moments in which the characters realize they only know each other in one context, but are perhaps starving for more. For a drink, a brush of the hand, a night out in the real world, a conversation that doesn’t end.

Bonus points, of course, if they can’t have it.

Don’t be afraid to go nuclear

Remember when, in The Office, Jim literally transferred to a branch in another city to avoid Pam? Yeah. Gut punch. And yet, it made perfect sense. You’ve built humans who are falling for each other at work, sure. But they are full-bodied, complex characters, and that means that, when the workday ends, if they don’t get to have each other, they’re in pain. (Or, they’re in denial.)

It can’t be fun and games forever. Eventually, somebody’s going to have to do something big. Yearning and pining and those I-think-you-might-be-my-person moments have to lead somewhere. Does somebody shout a love confession? Try to stop a wedding? Attempt a kiss, then get rebuked?

The bottom line is, after a while, if your characters aren’t getting closer together, they need to be drifting farther apart.

So, if the story requires it, don’t be afraid to slam the office door shut. After all, if you’re writing a romance, your characters will get their chance to open it eventually.

They just might have to wait a while. That’s all.

Check out Lauren Okie’s The Best Worst Thing here:

Bookshop | Amazon

(WD uses affiliate links)

The post 4 Ways to Craft Irresistible, Believable Workplace Tension in Fiction appeared first on Writer's Digest.

(What Is World-Building?)

Here are 10 examples of how you can use sound effectively in your fiction (or perhaps nonfiction) podcast to deepen world-building and heighten storytelling.

1. Establish Setting Through Ambient Sound

Think of ambient sound as the aural equivalent of a setting paragraph. In prose, you might write: The bustling tavern smelled of smoke and spilled ale. In a podcast, you can build the same tavern with clinking glasses, murmured conversations, a lute playing softly in the corner, and the occasional burst of laughter.

A great example of this is The Magnus Archives, which often drops listeners into a location without explanation, simply using a faint hum of fluorescent lights or the drone of a tape recorder to situate listeners in an archival office.

2. Use Sound as Characterization

Characters don’t have to be introduced only with dialogue. Their sound signatures (the objects, rhythms, or textures that follow them) can give immediate recognition.

For instance, maybe a character’s arrival is always marked by the swish of warm-up pants or heavy footsteps with an irregular gate. A fantasy warrior might be defined by the clanking of armor, and maybe a futuristic smuggler always powers down a ship with a metallic sigh. These repeated cues become auditory shorthand.

3. Control Pacing With Silence

Writers know the power of white space. A sentence fragment on its own line can punch harder than a full paragraph. In audio, silence has the same effect.

A long pause before a confession can feel like holding your breath. A sudden drop into stillness after a loud scene can jar listeners into alertness. Even half a second of silence can sharpen a joke’s timing.

Think of silence not as empty, but as intentional space. The absence of sound is still a sound choice, and you want to be sure there are no unintentional silences.

4. Layer Sound for Emotional Resonance

Prose layers tone through metaphor, diction, and rhythm. Podcasts can do this with multiple layers of sound. Dialogue sits in the foreground, but what happens underneath can amplify emotion.

Example: A tender scene might include a faint piano or the distant chirp of crickets, lending warmth. A horror moment could include barely audible whispers under a monologue, or a low drone slowly increasing in volume, unsettling the listener without ever being directly acknowledged.

The trick is subtlety. Too many layers muddy the track. But the right two or three can make a scene unforgettable.

5. Build Tension With Repetition

Writers often use recurring images or motifs, and sound can do the same.

Consider the steady drip of water in a dungeon scene. If it returns across episodes, it builds anticipation: Why does it matter? Or a few distant, unexplained “monster roars” early on. Each recurrence adds dread until the beast finally appears.

Repetition tells listeners: Pay attention, this matters.

6. Use Perspective and Proximity

Audio production can mimic point of view. A voice whispering directly in one ear (using stereo panning) creates intimacy, an almost conspiratorial feel. A muffled argument heard through a wall distances the listener, making them an eavesdropper rather than a participant.

This is the audio equivalent of close third-person versus omniscient narration. Ask yourself: how “close” should the audience feel to this moment? Then adjust the sound perspective accordingly.

7. Contrast Soundscapes

Sometimes the most effective worldbuilding comes from playing the sound against the situation. A gruesome scene underscored by cheerful music, or a high-stakes conversation happening over chirping birds or children playing can disorient the listener in interesting ways and create dramatic tension.

8. Map Geography Through Sound Cues

Listeners can “see” a space through audio cues. Footsteps shifting from tile to gravel tell us a character is moving outdoors. A voice echoing differently in each room maps an environment in our heads. For even more immersion, consider stereo panning sound effects to the left or right, or even moving from one ear to the other to put the listener in the middle of a scene. Those footsteps can move from tile to gravel, and they can also move from the left ear to the right as though the character is walking by the listener.

9. Treat Sound Effects as Symbols

Sounds can function like symbols in prose. A tolling bell might signal both time passing and the inevitability of death. If you repeat sounds strategically, they accrue significance. They become thematic shorthand, much like recurring images and motifs in a novel.

10. Marry Soundscape and Dialogue

Finally, remember that sound is your setting, your imagery, even your punctuation. Pacing is heavily affected by the way the dialogue interacts with the sound environment.

A rapid-fire exchange over pounding rain creates urgency. Slow, deliberate dialogue against a hushed forest soundscape encourages reflection. Moments of soundscape without dialogue can create immersion, tension, reflection, or whatever mood you’re trying to build while also giving the listener a moment to digest what is happening in the story.

As you experiment, listen to how other audio dramas and films use sound. Notice when a silence unnerves you, when a sound effect feels over-the-top, when background noise deepens immersion. Don’t forget to have some fun with it, audio is an exciting medium for creative storytelling.

The post World-Building With Sound: 10 Audio Tips for Fiction Writers appeared first on Writer's Digest.

Subvert Expectations

This is a phrase you’ll hear time and time again from both book editors and movie producers, and for the most part, they’re right. It’s a good thought to keep around while crafting a new story or thinking through a fresh idea.

Like most things, of course, it’s easier said than done. I mean, how does one subvert the expectations of a reader?

Great question, and there are a lot of different answers—everything from playful text design (you have to read it through a mirror!) to shattering tropes (it’s a rom-com slasher!) to unforeseen plot twists (the dog did it!) to shocking character development (Grandma’s an axe murderer?!).

The one I like to play with the most, however, is the setting. The stage, or stages, where the players perform your literary script.

To that end, here are four tips on how to make setting an effective device for your next story, and help you subvert those pesky reader expectations:

Make the setting a character (by giving it character)

In fiction, you’ll often notice that the description of a story’s primary setting isn’t given a lot of word count. This is particularly true in thrillers, when the author is more focused on keeping the reader flipping pages, relying on plot beats, dialogue, set pieces, and just enough character development to let the reader know who the bad guys are.

By taking more time, and care, with your story’s primary setting, you can better immerse the reader in what’s happening with your plot and characters and set pieces, because the world your character live within will become a living, breathing entity.

Are your characters stuck in a bathroom? Take a few paragraphs to describe it. What color are the towels? What do the tiles beneath your feet feel like? What kind of tub are we talking about? Are there cracks in the ceiling? Spots of mold in the shower?

There’s a big difference between two characters trapped in a clean, well-lit modern bathroom, or stuck inside one where the sink shudders and spits brown water from a squeaky, rusted spout and the walls are covered in aged, peeling wallpaper decorated with sad clown faces.

You can apply this practice to any setting you may be dealing with: A house, a car, a forest, an office building, or even the surface of an alien planet. Make the reader feel and see what your characters are feeling and seeing by coloring the world around them in a way that enhances the creepy, scary, hilarious, despairing, or unnerving actions of the story.

Make the setting a problem

What do I mean by “problem?” There a few possibilities. We could be talking about anything from a haunted house (e.g. The Amityville Horror, House of Leaves) to a deadly environment (e.g. Sahara desert, sub-zero Antarctica). Or it could be something not necessarily sinister in its own right, such as a crowded amusement park (where children get easily lost and everyone, it seems, is screaming), a hedge maze (a la The Shining), or an aristocratic mansion where the eyes of the paintings seem to follow you across the room and there are hidden doors behind the tapestries.

Of course, maybe your story doesn’t have anything that overt as part of the plot. That’s okay, too. For instance, I wrote a book called Sarafina where three brothers go AWOL from the Civil War and have to trek from Tennessee to Mississippi by foot. Part of the drama in the story is how untamed the terrain is—how there’s a concerning lack of food, how swampy the land can be, and how long a trip it is without any semblance of civilization. In other words, in addition to the wild animals, bandits, and scary monsters in the book, the terrain itself is one more hurdle the brothers need to overcome. It’s a problem.

Whatever your story, chances are there’s a way to up the stakes by making the setting itself more problematic for your characters.

Contain the setting

One of my favorite tropes is “Isolation Horror,” and it’s no surprise that many of my books and stories use a containment device to make sure my characters’ options are narrowed by external conditions. Much like three of my favorite movies, Alien, The Thing, and Jaws, the idea that the characters are trapped in their setting significantly raises the stakes and the terror. Whether your characters are stuck on a spaceship with a monster, or sheltering in a remote outpost surrounded by hundreds of miles of ice, or in the middle of an ocean with a shark bigger than your boat, the setting itself has dramatically reduced the odds for escape or, you know, living.

In my novel Boys in the Valley, I trap 30 orphans in a remote, rural orphanage, surrounded for miles by nothing but land that’s quickly engulfed by a blizzard (the story is set in 1905, so no snowcats to help them out). Now add demons.

In The Autumn Springs Retirement Home Massacre, I use a different form of isolation on my elderly residents—no arctic landscapes, endless desert or monstrous ocean, but instead the characters are trapped by their own physical, social, and economic standing. Whether they are simply too broke to leave, in need of care, or unable to find someone willing to offer them an alternate shelter, it strands the residents just as surely as if I’d dropped them on a remote island, or the surface of the moon.

By creating a “hotbox of horror,” you can amplify the tension of your plot because the reader knows there is nowhere for the character to run, nowhere to hide, and no hope for rescue.

Think about the setting of your story and ask yourself if you can build a proverbial moat around your setting, thereby ratcheting up the stress for both the characters, and your readers.

Make the setting unlikely for the trope

Referring back to my two novels, Boys in the Valley and The Autumn Springs Retirement Home Massacre, one of the things that makes these two stories intriguing for readers—what I implemented to subvert expectations, in other words—is the combination of a traditional trope with a unique or unusual setting.

In the case of Boys in the Valley, I worked from a fairly traditional concept of demonic possession, but then placed that trope it into a 19th-century children’s orphanage. I then amplified the setting by isolating the boys with the help of the aforementioned nasty blizzard, and made the setting a problem by adding a few adult priests who certainly didn’t have the boys’ best interests at heart.

With Autumn Springs, I wrote a story in the vein of the well-worn slasher trope, but rather than put the serial killer in a summer camp filled with horny teenagers, I dropped the story into an upstate New York retirement community filled with kind, colorful elderly people. I then made sure to let the reader know that most of the residents were trapped, therefore isolating the setting, and gave the communal grounds enough description and character that, at the climax of the story, the landscape itself becomes part of the problem.

Writers like Grady Hendrix, who set a horror story in an IKEA-style home furnishings store (Horrorstor), and Bentley Little, who has created horror stories that take place in an office building and even a DMV, are classic examples of authors who have used setting to subvert the expectations of what can be scary, simply by shaking up the venue into something unusual, or even borderline comical. The hit movie Sinners is another example of taking a classic trope like vampires and combining it with a Southern juke joint during the prohibition era, thereby giving it an entirely fresh set of problems for the protagonists.

Placing your narrative in a setting that is surprising, however, does more than just give the reader something different to chew on; it can also create opportunities for you as a writer to invent new directions to take the story you might not have originally conceived of, or create interesting challenges for your protagonists (or antagonists) as they deal with whatever nightmarish destination has befallen them. You might even expand the trope itself into something that breaks entirely new ground in the fiction landscape.

When taking setting into account, and fleshing out your story world in dramatic and interesting ways, you might just find yourself somewhere you never expected—a horrific new playground all your own.

Check out Philip Fracassi’s The Autumn Springs Retirement Home Massacre here:

Bookshop | Amazon

(WD uses affiliate links)

The post 4 Tips for Turning Unexpected Settings Into Horrific Playgrounds appeared first on Writer's Digest.

(5 Reasons to Set Your Thriller in an Isolated Town.)

For my debut Midwestern Gothic horror novel Sacrificial Animals, I heavily invested in developing an authentic setting that served as the backdrop to the protagonist Nick Morrow’s psychological unraveling. Sacrificial Animals takes place almost entirely on the thousand-acre farm of Stag’s Crossing, a secluded and increasingly menacing patch of land in rural Nebraska that is the site of both Nick’s extensive childhood trauma and the Morrow family’s ruination.

Here are four strategies I utilized over several drafts to help refine the setting of Stag’s Crossing into the vivid environment that it became in the novel’s final incarnation.

Devilry in the Details

Stag’s Crossing was heavily inspired by my family’s farm in Fremont, Nebraska, which made it natural for me to move beyond stereotyped images of rural life in the heartland and dig more deeply into the nuances of the setting. Rather than portraying a beatific and simplified vision of happy dairy cows and bucolic farm boys living in harmony with nature, I was able to evince the darker side of farm life—including the drudgery, humiliation, and cruelty that lurked in dinner table retellings of our family legends.

Details can lend authenticity to the setting, but can also be used to set up plot twists, foreshadowing, or simply as imagery to additionally convey mood, tone, and characterization. A decapitated stag’s head welded to the iron gates of the estate, the guns left hanging and unattended in the Quonset, and the fact that Nick’s childhood bedroom is the smallest in the house all indicate important things about Stag’s Crossing and the men who reside there. They also provide unsettling hints at what might be the Morrow family’s eventual fate.

Psychic Reflections

The environment can be utilized to suggest a great deal about a character’s psyche. Carlyle Morrow, Nick’s abusive and domineering father, built Stag’s Crossing “in dreamy half duplication of the sublime southeastern plantations he had marveled as a boy … atop bedrock that wept at his approach, that refused to yield to his inescapable will as he made great gaping wounds in the ground.” Carlyle’s interactions with the very soil that will become Stag’s Crossing is violent, and this violence extends to his interactions with the sons he raises atop it.

Carlyle’s later disownment of his favored eldest son Joshua is also foreshadowed here—his admiration of the South Carolina plantations from his childhood implies an unquestioning acceptance of racial hierarchy and brutality that is coherent with his decision, decades later, to disinherit Joshua for the “crime” of marrying an Asian woman.

These crucial aspects of Carlyle’s character—his brutality, his racism, his desire to master the natural world at all costs—inform his behavior throughout the novel and irrevocably entangle him in the cycle of violence and revenge that cascades into the novel’s gory finale.

Isolate the Characters

Creating a setting in which the characters are physically trapped can heighten fear and provoke a claustrophobic atmosphere. The geographic remoteness of Stag’s Crossing means that escape is almost impossible. The characters are forced to contend with the ghosts of their pasts—or die trying.

Isolation can manifest not only as physical aloneness, but also an emotional state. Not only is Nick physically stuck at his childhood home, he is also mentally imprisoned there. Consumed with anger, unresolved grief, and visceral memories of his father’s abuse, he is unable to move on. While the horror of Sacrificial Animals eventually reveals itself as part of the supernatural, there is another horror lurking beneath—the horror of Nick’s inability to leave behind his intergenerational trauma.

Atmospheric Disturbances

Once a work has established and familiarized the reader with its setting, moments of interruption are an effective method of heightening anxiety. Usual happenings have become unusual. Something is out of place—but what, and why?

Sacrificial Animals establishes that Carlyle has a deep hatred of outsiders, refuses to let visitors onto his land, and the woods near the farm are uninhabited. Yet when Nick finds a human footprint in the area, he sees it “in the dirt like a warning. What manner of stranger comes to Stag’s Crossing?” When he dutifully reports this to his father, Carlyle expresses a paranoia that “spirits” or some other nefarious and unseen forces are at work.

Something so normal—a footprint in a wooded area—becomes, in this context, a threatening and intrusive sign. Who came to Stag’s Crossing? And why? The footprint remains unexplained for much of the novel, but it is a lingering symbol of the family’s growing unease and serves to develop a relentless, crescendoing sense of dread. 

A strong setting anchors a horror story and its characters in a specific time and location. It provides shape and form to the space in which the events of the work will play out. Sacrificial Animals would not have been possible without the distinctly Gothic locale of Stag’s Crossing. Readers will return again and again to richly immersive worlds; I hope these four strategies might help you craft one of your own.

Check out Kailee Pedersen’s Sacrificial Animals here:

Bookshop | Amazon

(WD uses affiliate links)

The post Dark Corners: 4 Strategies for Developing Horror Settings appeared first on Writer's Digest.

(What Is Magical Realism?)

Bees in June, my sophomore novel, takes place in the fictional small town of Spark, Tennessee, in the summer of 1969. Spark is an ordinary enough place, about an hour outside of Nashville, populated with the type of people sometimes called salt of the earth. Arden is frying up more chicken at the Blue Plate diner, Evangeline is windmilling hairspray over her customer’s fresh beehive at the Curly Q beauty shop, and Darlene is picking out a candy dish at the Emporium second-hand store. Dewey gets the Gazette out every Friday, filled with the town’s latest news, and Shorty Strickland is stocking the drugstore shelves with moon-themed merchandise in anticipation of the historic lunar landing, just a few weeks away. Something else is going on in Spark, though, far from the mundane and straying into the fantastical—Rennie King Hendricks is talking to her bees, and they are talking back.

Bees have rightly been revered in human culture for centuries. They symbolize dedication, hard work, and the power of community. Good luck and prosperity show up when bees do, and they have long been considered a spiritual link between this world and the next. Their honey, beeswax, and propolis are cherished for their curative powers, and the pollination that occurs as a result of their visiting flowers helps feed the world. The mythology surrounding bees is complex and storied, as are the customs associated with them.

One of the most intriguing apian customs is “telling the bees,” rooted in Celtic tradition. Because humans’ very existence is intertwined with the well-being of their charges, beekeepers understand the importance of nurturing that vital relationship. Bees must be kept up-to-date on family happenings in order to maintain their synchronistic relationship with those who care for them.

The most important news to tell the bees centers around death. When a beekeeper passes, the bees must be told, or they will leave their home, cease honey production, or even die themselves. The long-practiced ritual requires the new keeper to knock three times on the roof of each hive and inform the residents of the death of the old keeper, and then reassure the bees that a new keeper has already taken over their care. Additionally, the hives should then be draped in black cloth or ribbon to allow the bees to mourn properly. If the bees feel confident their care will continue, they will stay with the family and everyone’s continued prosperity is ensured.

I first learned of telling the bees from a 1956 newspaper article in the Danville Bee (yes, really) about a swarm of bees who attended their keeper’s funeral in the Berkshire Mountains. When beekeeper John Zepka passed away, thousands of bees gathered at the cemetery to pay their respects to the man who cared so deeply and well for them.

As I researched this enchanting custom of beekeepers sharing family milestones with their bees, I found a 17th-century beekeeping poem, which reads in part: A swarm of bees in June is worth a silver spoon. On that day, Bees in June was born.

Bees in June is a story about dreams, courage, and the quiet magic we carry inside ourselves. Sometimes as sweet as honey, and other times as sharp as a sting, this story follows Rennie Hendricks, a young woman who is mourning the tragic loss of her infant son. Her husband, Tiny, is becoming increasingly violent, while her beloved Uncle Dixon is growing more feeble by the day. She longs for a happy, peaceful life, something that seems as unlikely to her as what’s in the headlines during the summer of 1969—plans for a man to walk on the moon.

Rennie receives help from an unlikely source, her late Aunt Eugenia’s bees. Eugenia came to Spark from Appalachian Kentucky as Dixon’s bride, and brought these special bees with her. Some people called Eugenia a witch, while others knew her as a healer, able to cure an illness when the town’s only doctor could not. The bees have their own POV, acting as a Greek chorus, commenting on the action of the story. It’s not fair to say they meddle in the humans’ lives, but they are not above helping to direct the humans’ paths. With the bees’ guidance and wisdom, along with her Uncle Dixon’s support, Rennie realizes she can accomplish the impossible if she is able to believe in her own magic.

The foundation of the magical realism in my story is the power of the ordinary. Interlaced with the familiar tasks of daily living is the fantastical—a world of bees and magic and hope, bringing light to the darkest places, if only we will look for it. The world is a pretty tough place right now, and we are assaulted with grim news virtually every minute of the day. Bees in June is my effort to assert that the magic of the world is also out there, just as important and real as as any dark headline that makes us weep for humanity.

Check out Elizabeth Bass Parman’s Bees in June here:

Bookshop | Amazon

(WD uses affiliate links)

The post Magical Realism With Roots: Grounding the Fantastic in the Familiar in Fiction appeared first on Writer's Digest.

When I began writing Winging It with You, I knew I wanted to write a love story wrapped in adventure. Something sweeping and cinematic, with passport stamps, plane tickets, and the chaos that comes with reality television. But more than that, I wanted to explore the true adventure inherent in intimacy, forced vulnerability, and the way relationships evolve (and unravel) when people are pulled out of their routines and placed in unfamiliar surroundings. It didn’t take long to see that the turbulence of the journey here was what cracked open the emotional core of this story. 

Setting can be a character in its own right. It shapes dialogue, pushes plot, and carves out space for vulnerability. In this book, it was the glue and gasoline. The thing that brought my characters together and ignited a relationship.  

Asher and Theo begin as strangers with very different ideas of how their day at the airport terminal is going to go. They’re thrown together on a globe-trotting travel competition loosely inspired by “The Amazing Race” but with a twist. They must pose as a real couple. That meant from the beginning, I had to create settings that did more than just entertain; I needed environments that challenged them to ultimately soften the walls they’d individually built. 

I leaned hard into the “forced proximity” trope, which … let’s be honest, is basically catnip for us romance readers. Shared hotel rooms. Cramped van rides. Airplane cabins where thigh touching is a prerequisite. Each setting wasn’t just a pretty postcard, it was a pressure cooker. 

And in said pressure cooker, something beautiful began to simmer. 

Because the truth is, it’s hard to keep your guard up when you’re sleep-deprived, jet-lagged, and brushing your teeth next to someone who is basically a stranger. It’s in the unguarded moments—the ones that happen in-between checkpoints and camera takes—that we start to see who someone is. I wanted readers to feel like they were third-wheeling on this adventure, watching Theo and Asher fall for each other, not in spite of the chaos, but because of it. 

That’s why I gravitated toward settings that weren’t just visually exciting but emotionally revealing. Like the La Tomatina festival in Spain, amidst flying tomatoes and absolute mayhem, it’s how effortlessly Theo shines in the moment, laughing and entirely himself, that nudges Asher one step closer to accepting the truth of his feelings … Or later, in Bali, when Theo pulls away once his feelings become too real during a high-stakes challenge set on a seaweed farm. The location is serene and still, but beneath the surface, everything is unraveling. Sometimes the biggest emotional eruptions happen in the quietest of places. 

My fascination with this kind of closeness comes from my time as a photojournalist in the U.S. Air Force. I spent years stepping into the lives of service members, tasked with capturing moments that told a deeper story. It taught me how much setting can shape a person, how quickly your perspective shifts when you’re far from home, and how much more you see when you’re forced to slow down and observe. That lens—both literal and figurative—deeply shaped how I approached this love story. I wanted every location to matter. Every setting to nudge these characters closer to one another. Every city, hotel room, and airplane ride to hold a purpose beyond the page. 

At its heart, Winging It with You is a story about two people discovering that maybe home isn’t a place. It’s a person. And to write that, I had to take them as far from home as possible. 

The post Setting the Scene: How Travel, Close Quarters, and Only-One-Bed Brought My Characters Together appeared first on Writer's Digest.

Of all of us, Mom understood best what such a change would mean. She was a farmer’s daughter and graduated high school with a very small number of classmates she’d known all her life. Not so for Dad, a city boy who ran free from one neighborhood to another with his buddies as long as he made it back in time for dinner. Dad was headed into new territory with this move, but he did have one thing going for him: The man didn’t know a stranger. Dad could make small talk with just about anyone—farmers, bankers, grocers, doctors, and the gas station attendant—and it served him well. 

The town absorbed us. All these years later, we still refer to the place as home. Since leaving the nest, I’ve made homes in other places, some big, some small. Still, it’s the small places that fascinate me the most. 

When people find themselves taking root in the same space, no matter how or when they’ve arrived, they share, at the very least, geography. You don’t slip into a small town unnoticed. People know who you are. They hold vague notions on how you got there. They certainly know where you belong in the pecking order. It’s an order that’s been in place long before you showed up and will be intact long after you’ve gone. 

If you’re new to such a place, buckle up. Whether you’re the new kid in class or the new face at the PTO meeting, you’re going to mess up. Don’t worry, somebody or everybody will know about it, and someone will take you aside to let you know. You might sit in the wrong pew at church or come up with an idea that’s already been tried before. People might get ideas about you. You’re rich, or poor, or somewhere in the middle. Your kids are well-behaved, or wild animals. You’ve got a shifty look about you that needs to be sussed out by a coffee klatch or committee until someone more interesting comes along. These truths swirled around me as a child but didn’t come into clear focus until I could look at them through the rearview mirror.  

It wasn’t until I was an adult seeking entry into new, small places with my own young family that I came to a renewed understanding and appreciation for just how simple, yet complex things can be when people find themselves occupying the same space in a day-to-day, year-after-year way. There are clearly defined rules, but even those come with mysterious, fickle caveats.  

Differences of opinion and hurts last long enough to become full-fledged grudges, and pack mentalities seem acceptable enough unless it’s your turn to be outside the pack. Small towns take on their own personas, complete with eyes and ears and mouths that open and close. A small town punishes its own, celebrates what it wants to, and rallies when you least expect it.  

Much like Violet Sellers, one of the main characters in my second novel Violet is Blue, I spent most of my childhood sheltered. Our family was neither rich nor poor, but we did not do without. I did not know hardship up close and personal. That’s what privilege will do for you. Privilege was my 10-foot pole. It kept me from getting too close to what I could see with my eyes and even detect with the same nose that knew cotton candy at the county fair and my father’s aftershave. Even to the untrained nose, unfairness that is doled out so capriciously and tolerated so openly has a stench.  

Bookshop | Amazon
[WD uses affiliate links.]

The same things that troubled me as a child still trouble me as an adult, but now I know that small towns don’t have the market cornered on cruelty or kindness, generosity or greed, pride or shame. These and all the other complicated truths of the human condition are merely more concentrated in small communities. How else to make sense of the haunting contrasts we see from time to time, but choose to look away?  

I remember quite vividly faces, specific uncomfortable moments when my unearned privilege made me red in the face, ashamed that I held such good fortune when others in my sphere held so little. Recollections of these unsettling contrasts are not easily shed. They linger, and have made their way into Violet is Blue, where dark is relieved temporarily with light, and joy coexists with heartache. 

Like all the other characters in the series, Violet and her friend Jules Marks call the town of Poulson home, but they have their assigned seats. Violet’s protected existence, made possible by her parents, is a far cry from what Jules knows. He lives just miles, but worlds away with five little sisters in Shakey’s Half. They get their best meals at school with yellow free lunch tickets and are sent home from school often so someone can tend to their itching, crawling scalps. But Jules and Vi find common ground in the hurts they have sustained. As their story unfolds, readers discover just how closely wants dance next to needs and how worn the footpaths between those who have and those who have not.

The post Writing the Pros and Cons of Small Towns in Fiction appeared first on Writer's Digest.