Written by Rachel Lee

Writing Workshop

"Creating a World - and Living With It"
A Workshop for Writers
by Rachel Lee

Scale:  Rachel Lee

Let’s start with scale.  This is about the variety of settings you can use for scenes.  To some extent that’s a function of sheer size.  If your world is a small town, the climate, geography, architecture, and culture are likely to be the same anywhere in town.  If your story needs changes in architecture and/or culture, you’ll need distinct neighborhoods, and that means at least a small city.  If your story needs changes in geography, your world will need to include at least the countryside around your town or city.  And if you also need changes in climate, your world gets bigger still.

But scale is not only about size.  I wrote a story about a deep sea diver that I’d intended to set on the Gulf coast of Florida.  Then I looked at an underwater map.  Oops.  The Florida shelf, where the sea was too shallow for the deep dives in the story, extends out far past the twelve-mile limit of international waters.  And I needed the story to happen in U.S. waters.  I had to move the story to the Florida Keys in order to get the underwater scenes right.  When I began researching the Keys, including a visit, I realized it was a very different world than I’d imagined for the story.  Changing the actor that was the setting changed the entire story.

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