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

Scope:  Rachel Lee

The scope of your world is somewhat related to scale, but not entirely.  Here the central question is whether you’ll use that world for a single story, or a series.  If it’s a series, especially an open-ended series, you’ll need a wider variety of problems for your characters to handle, or you’ll end up writing the same story again and again.

A small town can have as many problems as a city or an entire continent, if you find a way to justify them.  Having a transient population, because people are moving in or just passing through, can justify any kind of problem someone might bring from his or her past.  And even a small town is likely to have several influential people vying for local power or prestige.  Obviously cities and larger areas make it easier to justify a wider variety of problems.

And if your story has any mystery or suspense elements, you need to remember the story of Molly and the futon.  I came home one day to find my futon had been torn open and the stuffing spread all over the house.  Ooh.  Cue mystery music.  Except there wasn’t much of a mystery.  The trail of futon stuffing led directly to my new puppy, Molly.  And as it happened, Molly was the only one home.  I’m not a detective, but I could put those clues together.

The moral of the story: to sustain the mystery or suspense, your world needs to have enough scope that your characters wouldn’t immediately recognize what happened and who’s behind it.  You may not need to detail what else is happening; in a large enough town or a city, your readers will take it for granted.  But if your world is very small – four friends at an isolated summer cottage – you’ll have to explain why the obvious isn’t obvious.

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