Setting the Scene

Every time I close my eyes I see part of the setting for my latest manuscript. Part of the fun of writing fantasy is the creating of a whole new world. I have been fixated on trees this week. Partly because those deciduous trees that are glorious golden red and creating their very own carpet of orange red leaves that I seem to see everywhere.

My idea is that my trees, growing in a land of perpetual winter, have no leaves. Which leads to no leave litter. This has raised some interesting questions for me. Such as how do they grow with no leaves to produce sugars from photosynthesis? Did they ever have leaves, would they develop anything else?

Then watching the news that the cherry blossom festivals are not going ahead this year in Japan, all I could picture was a flash of colour on my naked trees. Perhaps there should be something special and unexpected...

The lack of leaves and leaf litter would also mean that the forests of my world would have a very different smell to the winter forests that we would wander through in our world. Their growth would also have an effect on the type of animals or birds that would live there. And this would lead to what type of animals the people that live there would hunt and eat. How they would hunt them; how they would cook them. Who does the cooking and how the food is served.

I must admit that I haven’t actually done a lot of writing this week, but I have done a lot of thinking. Those trees appear every time I close my eyes. I can even feel the walls of the dwelling in which the people live while I run on the treadmill at lunch time. I am thinking about my new world all the time. So when it comes to writing I am going to be able to sit and write. I will have worked out those tricky questions and the scenes will be more clearly formed before I reach for the keyboard.

With a clearer idea of what my world is I know that my writing will be better, the scenes will fit together better. The reader will hopefully see, feel and smell the world well enough to immerse themselves in the story and wander through my leafless forest with a better understanding of those that live there.

Happy Scribbling.