Years ago, I sent a sitcom pilot to an executive producer in America after he'd generously offered to critique it. He informed me that my script, although high in situational comedy and sharp dialogue, did not take advantage of its setting in any meaningful way. Set in a destitute theme park, the employees often met in neutral spaces, such as the park restaurant or the Ringmaster's office. The producer asked me, "is there any reason this scene could not have taken place on a Merry-Go-Round or Ferris Wheel, rather than in an office?", which sparked the exact moment I came to understand what setting really is.
I have a habit of neglecting setting within my fiction. It's always been an afterthought, ticking an obligatory box, rather than something I felt I could play with. I now understand that setting is not just the wider context, necessary for encompassing a story: it is the story.
Treat this article as an overview of the varying components of building a fictional setting. I'll be going over some problems I've found and how I've solved them. Take whatever ideas of mine you like and run with them!
Building cities and communities — from concept to rendering
Depending on your project, there will be different assets it demands from you. If your project is in a visual art medium, such as a graphic novel, you have a unique array of challenges regarding setting — if the setting is entirely a fantasy world, you have to design it from scratch. If the setting is in, or based on, a real location, you have less of a workload when it comes to devising it, but potentially more responsibility in its depiction.
I've had to invent a fair few fictional entities, such as a high school, an oil & gas company, an auto-repair shop, high-rise flats, and residential suburban properties, not only to make the world feel 'lived in', but to ensure I'm not infringing on anybody's intellectual rights and/or privacy.
Initially, I believed the best approach would be to depict String Theory's setting, Glasgow, as it truly is. This was a good general approach, but it began to fall apart when I needed to find business, schools, and houses for my characters. You can see how this becomes a pretty big problem; I'm not going to choose a real person's house in a real neighborhood to draw a thousand times at every angle imaginable... especially not without their permission.
Another problem is that existing city layouts likely don't conform to what your plot needs them to be. When real people live in the places you're depicting, they're going to know whether point A and point B are a 2 minute walk or a 2 hour walk from one-another, and it will be very frustrating if you're way off.
My ultimate decision has been to set my story in a fictional suburb of Glasgow. When it comes to designing a setting for a graphic novel, there are several approaches you could take:
Real-world depiction
Using real-world photographs of a real location, such as with Google Street View. Though the most straightforward, this method poses issues with privacy and practicality. If you want to place your characters in a vivid scene, you need to be able to rotate that scene on any axis at will. You'll want to be changing the shot constantly, and with it, you need a ton of different angles that you just won't get from something such as Street View. You could certainly go out into the world and take reference images, but depending on what you're photographing you may also run into privacy concerns.
Some examples of using Google Maps and Street View. Side note: I have never seen a stranger building (left image) in my life.
Imagined depiction
Arbitrary:
Using your visual memory to devise settings without being particularly concerned over where each setting is in relation to one-another. This works just fine for certain projects, particularly those which are more casual in nature (like weekly webcomics!). You don't need to overdo anything that really doesn't serve the means of your work. However, when I employed this method my first go around, I could never shake the feeling that I was cheating myself on quality. It just felt unfinished, as though I didn't even care, when I was really just struggling with compartmentalizing the workload.
Setting examples from the original comic (2019). I avoided drawing settings so much that these are some of the only depictions in the first 100 pages.
Detailed:
Using your imagination to plan an entire world from scratch, thinking out every detail and ensuring consistency. In fantasy genres, this method works brilliantly and is generally the go-to. Think of Tolkien's Middle Earth, or The Elder Scrolls' Tamriel. In most genres outside of fantasy, not so much.
Combination depiction
Using elements of both reality and fiction depict a setting. A lot of graphic novels do this: think Batman's Gotham, Superman's Metropolis, Archie's Riverdale, etc. They're based on/in real-world locations yet are distinctly fictional.
Here's a rough idea of my fictional suburb's layout. It's based on an empty gap between a few existing suburbs south-west of Glasgow. The blue dots with my character's names represent where their houses are in relation to Glensyde.
The method I personally find most enticing involves digitally modelling the cityscape in order to generate any reference image I desire. I was initially considering using Blender to do this, which would take a long time (even with assets) but would allow me complete freedom in rotating the city on whatever axis I wished, getting camera angles you couldn't dream of, until I realized that there are actual city builder games to remove the high workload (and replace it with... uh, "fun.") Long story short, I bought the game Cities: Skylines for fourteen dollars to plan the fictional city's layout and give myself a great reference for the overall city.
I thought I would have it completed in time to get this post out today, but this game has a relatively steep learning curve. I think it will end up as an advantage to me, however. I've chosen a map with quite a similar river running through it to the one in Glensyde:
This is nowhere close to the layout. I'm still desperately trying to work out traffic problems (and figure out how to play the game.)
Ultimately, the best method comes down to what feels most balanced. You don't need to overdo your workload on something that doesn't require as much immersion, but in my case, depicting the journeys between locations has been such a problem that devising a layout has become essential.
Culture and backstory at an individual scale: claiming character's voices in a silent medium
Something very, very strange that I experience, and I know some other writers do too, is hearing the voices of my characters in my mind. They have developed accents, specific intonations, even particular vocal tics which I vividly hear. I often will veto certain tics when writing their dialogue, as it's important to strike a balance between endearing and distracting. Other times, I just let it happen, such as with Walt in my novel Maximalism, who hums a great deal more than he speaks (as I modelled his speaking patterns, as well as his body language, off of Jeff Goldblum's.)
There's something a lot of artists do with their characters, called a "voice claim". It's what it says on the tin — claiming the voice of a real person as being highly similar, or even identical, to your fictional character's. This helps people better visualize both the personality and backstory of your character, as there is plenty of richness to be had in putting a voice to a face.
It'd be easy to state my characters all have Glaswegian accents and have that be the end of it, but there is so much variation not only in the wider regional accents of Scotland, but even within Glasgow itself, that it doesn't really do much to say that. Not only this, but a great deal of the characters aren't even from Glasgow originally. If you were wondering why this seems to matter, considering you never hear their voices, this may clarify how I actually work backwards from their accents to discern a lot of their backstory.
I could say Harlene is Scouse because she's from Liverpool, but her accent's actually closer to Manc. Harvey may be from the Midlands (Nottingham) yet there's a bit of cockney in his voice, too; he's never lived in the South, but he's always been around working class people.
That's what's really fascinating to me about the accents of the UK and Ireland, that even with such regional variation, there is still further variation depending on which particular city or town someone is from, what they do for work, who they spend the most time around, and so on.
Charlie is Irish. However, I never knew where in Ireland he was from, because his voice has never quite matched with the Irish accents I'm used to. To me, Charlie speaks softly and with little intonation, which many Irish counties’ accents don’t quite reflect. Due to this, I've had trouble pinpointing his hometown.
His voice kind of sounds like how unsalted caramel tastes: the sweetness is there, but subtle, the texture is thick, smooth, almost cold in your mouth, and there's an uncanny/unplaceable bitterness that is often construed as richness. (Caramel is burnt sugar, which I find very fitting for Charlie's character.)
I digress. Irish accents have specific regional variations, ranging from musical to nasal to rugged to rich, but none were quite like Charlie's — until I heard the accents of County Donegal. Footballer Séamus Coleman is from this county, and has the most similar voice to Charlie's that I've heard so far.
Learning about County Donegal was a fascinating tangent; I found this video, "Is Donegal Ireland's Forgotten County?" to be absolutely enchanting. I would highly recommend watching the whole thing through, particularly the words of the gentleman at the end. This is what I mean about using accents to work backwards. With the way the citizens talk about how everyone looks out for each other (and the craic!), I began to perceive a new dimension to Charlie: homesickness.
Johnny and Side's accents were much easier to define. Johnny’s accent is based on an Onsind song. A rough-around-the-edges punk singer with a high emotional intelligence was always how I envisioned him. I found that claiming Craig Ferguson as his speaking voice melds well, as Ferguson has a rugged masculine energy while simultaneously having a kind, playful spirit, and a sincere emotional depth.
Side, on the other hand, has a voice much like Limmy's. This fits very well, not only due to a shared humour, but also that Limmy’s at times near-whispered hoarseness is well-matched to Side. I also find that Limmy, like Craig Ferguson, is a quick-witted and mischievous person with a scarcely hidden sincerity — also much like Side.
In the earlier version of the comic, you actually did hear their voices; I originally wrote Johnny and Side's accents phonetically. I later made the hard decision to remove these spellings. You can’t really phonetically depict a Scottish accent without writing Scots, and I’m not someone who is going to depict an actual spoken language that I cannot speak. I began to fear that my usage would not be accurate or constructive, thus with a heavy heart I replaced the majority of Scots words, i.e. didnae, een, oan, wean/wain, wis, naw, yer, tae, etc. with their English equivalents.
An example of the phonetic spellings I used. Though I always referenced a glossary, I had trouble keeping up with the consistency and accuracy. There were many mistakes.
If you've ever heard of the subreddit r/ScottishPeopleTwitter, you'll know that it exists mainly for humorous purposes. A lot of Scots tweets are just genuinely funny (Scottish humor is seriously unmatched), but when it hits the point where people are reading these tweets out loud entirely incorrectly, or even pretending to be Scottish to get their tweets more attention (and completely butchering Scots in the process), it becomes clear that not everyone is laughing with people who speak Scots. I don't ever want to be construed as one of those people.
Another example is the Scots Language Wikipedia controversy:
I think this person has possibly done more damage to the Scots language than anyone else in history. They engaged in cultural vandalism on a hitherto unprecedented scale. [...] Potentially tens of millions of people now think that Scots is a horribly mangled rendering of English rather than being a language or dialect of its own.
— Reddit user u/Ultach on r/Scotland, August 2020.
Navigating respectful and accurate portrayals of a culture outside your own can be very difficult. It's equally as disrespectful to incorrectly portray a culture as it is to outright wipe the culture from your story, but the happy middle ground is often far broader than it seems. It does tend to come down to asking, "how much is too much, how little is too little?" Some people tend to act like it's far more of a tightrope than it really is, and I think it's because people tend to overcategorize.
I was once at a cafe, talking to an American. They peered at me and asked:
"Where are you from?"
I answered the name of my hometown.
"That's in America, right?"
I laughed and told them, no, it's a twenty minute drive from here.
"When did you move here from America?" I told them I've always been a New Zealander.
They were dumbfounded — they swore I was from New England!
(I wasn't even wearing any Red Sox merch at the time.)
Over the years I have been asked by people whether I'm Australian, British, Canadian, South African, and even German. Other New Zealanders have even mistaken my accent as American or British, and if you tried to get me to pick out the difference between a New Zealand and Australian accent, I would likely have trouble. I don't even notice people's American accents until they tell me they're American!
The point I want to get across is that all of this stuff is super messy in real life: it doesn't have to (and probably shouldn't) fall into neat categories in fiction, no matter how convenient people want it to be. I do have a New Zealand accent, but that doesn't mean it's particularly definable as such, because I also have my own voice and a range of things which influence it (such as all the American television I grew up watching). This idea applies to far more than accents, mind you. People are, in general, a product of many influences, and there is no one category any person fits into perfectly.
My ultimate advice on writing culture into your world is to do the absolute best you can in the way which feels best for the story. If you feel like you can't do something justice, or it's not your place to write on it, you shouldn't feel like you're doing something wrong by choosing not to include it. I was using Scots entirely in good faith, and removing it was also an act of good faith. It's a kill your darlings situation — sometimes, when you put a lot of work and research into something, you ultimately come to realize that the best thing to do is fight the sunk cost fallacy and make the choice to omit it.
However, don't let that frighten you away from challenging yourself to learn something new, and to make bold decisions in your storytelling. Be fascinated, be modest, and be willing to make big changes when you have to. I think that's what can really makes us better writers.
Detailing a world with symbolism and design — from commercialism to vandalism
I touched on my last post about designing a coat of arms. Since several of my characters are in their final year of high school, I need to portray them in their school uniform fairly often. You don't really see many school uniforms without a highly detailed CoA embroidered on their shirts, sweaters, ties, blazers, scarves, gym kits, etc., which meant I definitely need to have one ready to copy and paste bloody everywhere.
I know very little about heraldry, and initially felt very over my head regarding designing the school's logo. I looked into a lot of the motifs within English and Scottish heraldry in particular, and utilized those to decide what would appear in my CoA.
Draft of the Glensyde Coat of Arms.
It features a double-border, which is apparently quite specific to Scottish CoAs. A saltire (an x-shaped cross, as seen on the flag of Scotland) is referred to as an 'honorable ordinary charge' and divides the escutcheon (shield) into four quadrants (fields). The symbols in each field are referred to as mobile charges. In the north field is a thistle (Scotland's national flower and emblem), in the south is a unicorn (Scotland's national animal), in the east are four horizontal stripes, and in the west is a cross crosslet fitchy (a combination of a cross and a sword). The latin slogan, "ex nihilo, nihil fit" means "nothing comes from nothing." A school may use this slogan to motivate academic effort, and it's also a nice nod to the law of conservation of mass, which is why I chose it. The crown atop has some little oak leaves decorating it, as does the entire shield, with a sort of oak wreath acting as its supporter.
In terms of imagery, it's not the most original thing in the world, but it doesn't have to be. I don't need to think about being original when the school itself probably wouldn't care to be all that original, and would rather want to place emphasis on popular Scottish motifs. It's also just a device to create a sense of depth in the universe and is not a standalone feature of the world to be vigorously analyzed by critics of heraldry. Remember: detail is important, but so is practicality. I researched and designed the CoA in about three hours. That's as much time as a detail like that really needs.
Creating commercial logos:
When trying to come up with a logo for a fictional oil and gas company, I looked at real world oil and gas logos, and realized how awful they all really are (other than Chevron's). Just looking at them gives me acid reflux (again, other than Chevron's). It's mainly the colours which offend me, but I also find there's some sort of disingenuous quality to them, like they're stuck in the mid-2000s and are long past caring.
This information is a brilliant launching pad for coming up with an authentic design. However, how inside the box do I I need to be thinking? Vintage logos are far more visually appealing, and there are trends in graphic design as of late based on circling back on vintage colour palettes and lettering. Though, these trends tend to be on a far smaller scale than an oil and gas company, which is probably only just entering its Corporate Memphis era.
What would the company's founder choose to do? What would Ulysses Coleman want the logo of his own self-made and fairly small-scale company to be?
I keep thinking of the Coca-Cola logo. They've kept nearly the exact same font since 1887 (for 136 years!) while continually simplifying it to keep it relevant to the modern trends of graphic design. I don't really ever drink coke because I hate it, and I'm not exactly a fan of major corporations, but I will admit that their logo is kind of perfect. Ulysses is no marketing genius, he'd certainly be more prone to copying the oil giants than carving his own path with something entirely new, but nothing reflects stubbornness quite like keeping a logo for 136 years because you believe in it.
I would highly recommend using Canva templates to create a ton of concepts. I would personally not use anything I made with a template as the final result, however, but here are a few concepts made through Canva:
The left one is too vintage-looking. The other two are close to what I have in mind, but the one with the knight (center) is too sleek. The one on the right is likely what I will base the final design on. It's perfectly bland and modern, a little bit ugly, yet still more visually appealing than most oil and gas logos, and has that Coca-Cola energy I'm looking for.
Vandalising your setting:
Finally, I want to talk about filling in the 'background story' of your setting. No matter where your story is set, you'll very likely have vandalism. (Considering the aesthetic of String Theory is very much influenced by rebellion, I'll be placing a lot of emphasis on graffiti here. Your mileage may vary!)
Graffiti is a great way to do this in a visual medium. You can go almost anywhere on the planet and find that people have painted words on a wall. If you pay attention to local vandalism, you'll notice a huge amount of both subtle and overt aspects of graffiti culture. You'll see the same tags showing up over and over, you'll notice rivalries and turf wars, you'll see that some artists almost never finish their work without being interrupted, while others seem to throw up new murals in the riskiest places imaginable. You'll notice that nobody ever spray paints cars — if they do, someone may well paint the word "TOY" over it.
Like it or not, vandalism is in every place that people live. It's a constant of the human condition that people love writing their name on stuff — the ancient Greeks and Romans vandalized the Egyptian tombs. If you want to depict a universe that feels really lived-in, graffiti artists and vandals will live there too, and you're gonna have your regulars.
Coming up with an assortment of unique tags is not an easy ask. Considering how a lot of people either change tags to shake suspicion, or only tag a few times before they stop, it's not going to make much sense to only have the same ten names come up in a big city (a suburb is way more believable for that, one guy in my town writes his tag approximately every two square meters on any surface he can find; I've even found it carved in wet cement. Twice.)
A few things to think about are: popular spots (skate parks, abandoned buildings, and alleyways), walls that are patchy from graffiti repeatedly being painted over (often in industrial areas), power poles and lamp posts where people will put stickers, quick tags and flyers, freight train carriages and bridges which attract murals/throw ups, tags scratched into glass/plastic such as bus stops and shop front windows, funny vandalism (on billboards, road signs), political graffiti, and so on.
Me practicing various forms of graffiti. I am not a graffiti artist, so these are not very good, but a lot of graffiti isn't very good anyway. It gets the idea across.
Next time you're in a city, take a look around at what graffiti you can see. It gives a better impression of how it's dispersed than I can really put into words, as well as the subtleties of how the culture operates (being considerate, for example.) There are also graffiti artists who post footage of their tagging, which shows what the process actually looks like, particularly how quick it is. In the beginning of this video by Resk12, you can see how a paint marker is used on small areas, how it takes five seconds (or even less) to write a tag, and how throwing up bubble letters only took him about three minutes.
Concluding remarks
This article certainly covered a lot more information than I expected; beyond anything it's just been me thinking out loud about some ways I'm trying to build more depth into my world's setting. Thinking about all the things that go on beyond the lives of your characters helps shape the world around them, and gives them a far more immersive environment to play in, as well as an environment which actively influences who they are.
That's it for this week, happy 2024 everyone! Next week will probably be on how I'm writing dialogue and composing scenes based around character motivations, but we'll see!
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