A fantasy novel with a lame setting is like a rock song played on kazoo. A strong setting adds richness and depth to your book that few other fictional elements can offer. Just consider it your perfectly-tuned Fender Stratocaster.
But one does not simply write an outstanding fantasy setting. It takes time, patience, skill, and perhaps even a little advice. That’s where I come in. Here are five ways to make your fantasy book’s setting unforgettable.
Imagine a house. If you snap a picture of said house and it fits within the frame, the viewer gets a pretty clear understanding of its size. Even if the house is enormous, we see where it starts and where it ends. It’s finite. Now imagine a second photograph of the same house, only this time we zoom in. We zoom so far in, in fact, that our house spills off the frame and out of sight. Since we can’t see where it ends, we’re likely to perceive the house as enormous. For all we know, it could be infinite.
Settings work the same way. If every corner of our world appears on the page, it makes the world feel smaller to the reader. However, if our setting stretches off the page and into our periphery, it feels vast, expansive, and ultimately more realistic. After all, there are many places in the real world around us that many people will never see. So for the sake of realism, we should do our best to emulate this effect in our fiction.
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