One of my pet hates is fiction that reads as though the writer knows *nothing* about what they're writing about. Now, I'm not demanding that you are an expert on every topic you cover, but some decent bluffing would be nice. And even the simple things are botched up! I mean, it doesn't exactly take a lot of planning to come up with a believable *setting*. . . .

I think we are all guilty of this, and it is an unforgivable offence. We write things as they appear in our minds, completely forgetting that the reader doesn't see the same mental picture. Sparse description of the setting throughout the entire story serves to leave it in limbo, with the reader having no clear idea of where it is meant to take place. Take, for example, the plethora of 'Spike and Buffy meet in a motel somewhere and shag each other's brains out' stories out there. Very few of those actually make me picture a motel room in my mind - most just dredge up a vague idea of a dowdy room with a double bed, and that's it. Not exactly detailed.

Now, I understand that not all readers are bothered by this, but it bothers *me*, so it's a fair bet that it bothers a fair number of other readers as well. In the above example, one thing is plainly obvious - the writer has never seen a motel room in their life, outside of in the movies. And in the movies, all motel rooms look alike. Thus, all motel rooms in stories *sound* alike. With this is mind, the setting disappears almost completely. We are trained to ignore what is 'standard' - it is a human blind spot. So, a 'park' described as just 'a park that looked like any other' is registered something in the mind as just 'a park. Green,' and promptly forgotten. The story then takes place in green limbo.

What does this tell me? The author did not bother to research. The author didn't put in the time and effort it takes to *go* to a park and observe all the things going on around it. The author didn't take note of their surroundings last time they were in a park. The author doesn't think that the setting is important enough to make sure we know where we are. Not a problem is you're writing dialogue or an abstract vignette - *big* problem if you're writing an action sequence that destroys half the scenery.

Okay. Rant over. Now you know the annoyance of 'no setting' - and perhaps diagnosed it in bits of your work. But how, exactly, do you fix this without flooding your story with lots of purple prose? Take a leaf out of award-winning writers' books - quite literally. Have a read through some of their 'mood setters' and see how they achieve setting and surroundings. One trick I, myself, am partial to is the 'three object' mention. It's simple, and effective.

This trick works no matter what your setting is, and it's incredibly easy to achieve if you've been to a setting similar to the one you're writing about. Take any setting - for example, a graveyard. Now, I could talk about the trees there, about the rickety nature of the benches near the gravestones, about the couples that stroll through as though it's a park. I could, but I won't. Why? Because it's expected. That won't make anyone picture a graveyard any more than my going on about the greenness of the grass.

The 'three object' mention is simple to do once you know what the graveyard looks like in your mind. So:

1. A small toy plane, still bright red despite the years of dust and grime dried in streaks into it, was propped against a chipped gravestone. It was almost completely encased in the tall stinging nettles that undoubtedly had meant its abandonment.
2. Over on the other side of the graveyard, the far left, as a matter of fact, you can see the sun shining through the ruined arches of what remained of the chapel. It filtered through the mortar and brick as though they were made of air and hit the small pavement they protected. Once you got near enough, though, you could tell that it wasn't a simple pavement they were protecting. Random rays of light picked out the names and dates on the broken gravestones that made up the ground - and that stretched out a path deep into the heart of the graveyard.
3. Follow the path, and sooner or later you would come to the back wall. Here too, something sinister and unholy ruled. Faded gravestones, plucked out of the ground, the souls they kept anchored forgotten, had been bricked in to the high redbrick wall that fenced in the graveyard. Forget the graves and the trees and the sunshine - the graveyard itself was made up of the bones and last earthly remains of its inhabitants.

And that's all there is to it. A little poetic and purple, sure, but you could work on that. You could refine it and fiddle with it.

But *why* does it work, you ask. Why three objects? Why must they be strange? Well, three has always been an important number when writing. Two objects seem too few, and four are too many (well, duh). In public speaking, three is the golden number of points you have to make before you wrap up. Any more and the audience will start to forget the first one. Any less and your argument seems bare.

We can also look at this in a graphical sense. You can plot these three points in a triangle. If you had any more, it would be a square, say, which would make the area covered too big - you'd have to have a fifth point in the centre. It starts to get rather crowded. So, three is best.

Strange is also best. It helps you remember things. Talking about a redbrick wall will mean that everyone knows and remembers what you are talking about, but, on the whole, it is far too ordinary to stick in people's minds. In short, they don't notice it. However, if the redbrick wall is in fact made up of bricked-in gravestones. . . . . it gives your setting an entirely different feeling.

The great thing about this trick is, it works even if the setting is completed ordinary - you don't need a path made of broken gravestones to add character to a setting! After all, what setting is exactly like any other? Take a hotel room, run down and neglected - this would be the US motel room, I think. In my story, "Homecoming" ('Day 4'), Spike ends up in one such hotel room in Victoria (for the non-Londoners, that's a place in south London that's both posh and run down at the same time. Not quite sure how they managed it, but there we are). It *is* like every other hotel room in run-down little hotels in Victoria, but simply saying that won't help the reader much if they've never seem one before! So - Spike despairs of having to wash his face in a sink where other guys have probably um, relieved themselves in already. He wonders if the light bulb will ever be changed, or if he'll have to make do with the small nightlight perched on a near-lethal shelf above his head instead. Someone next door is playing inane music that gets on his nerves.

And so, the annoying, horrible, *forgettable* hotel room is created in the reader's mind. It's as simple as that.

If you don't want to just have strange objects mentioned - or the setting calls for more description - there are other tricks you can employ to fix it in the reader's mind. One obvious trick is the 'setting fits the mood' - easy to do, if equally easy to botch. Tread with care!

For this, I'm going to go back to the Angel/Spike chase in "Homecoming" ('Day 2'). They end up in Hyde Park, entangled on the green. That is not the most noteworthy aspect of the scene, though. Hyde Park looks extraordinarily threatening, fitting Spike's mood. He is frightened out of his wits - not of Angel, but of the memories that are threatening to drown him. Thus, Hyde Park takes on sinister aspects. The trees curve menacingly over them; the swans are dirty rather than pearl-white and very, very inquisitive. It's almost dawn, and the dew makes the earth damp to the touch when they eventually collapse on it.

Now, I was quite happy with that description, and from the feedback I got, it would seem that most people were quite happy with it as well. Now, an example of a cliché can be found when Willow looks at St Paul's Cathedral. That description wasn't disliked - no idea why, because *I* wasn't overly fond of it - but it was very, very clichéd. Willow's waiting for a revelation about London, and it comes to her in the form of the morning light hitting the inner dome of the Cathedral and lighting it up from the inside. Okay, it sounds impressive, but it's still clichéd - avoid.

I would recommend against that second one if you haven't written much before. Very easy to fall into nasty traps you have trouble getting out of. In fact, the single most useful tip I give people - and one which I will be using again and again for my new story, "Buttercup" * is *research*. It sounds simple enough to be done without thinking, but it *isn't* - people just don't research their settings enough. It's not all that hard!

First rule of researching - nothing is insignificant when it comes to writing. You want to set a story in a park? You go to a park and see what it's like. See what the trees look like in the evening, as opposed to the morning. See what the weather does to the grass and to the people walking there. See if dogs are allowed or not. Anything that can be noted *is* noted. You don't have to turn up and fill up a notebook writing about the leaves. But what strikes *you* about the place that you feel is worthy of note?

I'm going to delve into "Buttercup" as an example, here. This is the first draft. Actually, it's the second draft after I got rid of all those annoying spelling and continuity errors. But, it's the first draft in that it's what I came up with as version first. There is next to no setting or backstory here - it probably doesn't make much sense. That's okay, because I sent it to my wonderful beta for this - hi Erykah! *grin* - and she asked me a load of questions: these ones.

Now. Bearing that in mind, I arranged a trip to Basingstoke. Why? Well, I've been there before, but not to the graveyard. I've been to graveyards before as well. I could just as well have taken an image of a graveyard from my head, fiddled with it and set it in Basingstoke. No one but the native-born would know any better. There is no reason why you shouldn't do the same - or why you shouldn't do as I'm doing this weekend, and go to the graveyard with your beta (luckily, she's a friend in real life and doesn't live too far away *grin*), a laptop and a webcam and get busy. *grin*

This is the result of our efforts. I like to think that it's *much* better. . . . .

The above is for commonplace settings. For things you've been to. For places you're reasonably familiar with anyway. But what happens when you want to take Spike on a trip through Europe? Chaos, that's what. I remember reading stories set in a 'peaceful' Europe. I think I must have blinked and missed the three seconds in history that Europe was peaceful. Europe is *never* peaceful! If in doubt, have a war! The chances are, *something* would have been going on at that time.

Oh - and just for the record? The people of Romania/Transylvania would *not* have been terrified of the 'Dracula' myth. The moment I read that I give up on a story. The book wasn't released in Romania until 1993 because of the Communist regime. And when it was, it just caused widespread puzzlement. So. If you're going to be writing about something that you really know nothing about, you need to do some serious bluffing.

I'm afraid that when it comes right down to it, what I mean by 'bluff' is in fact 'slog'. That's right, more research. Did I mention that this is why authors crave feedback? Look at the amount of work that goes into writing! The best to do the research would be to travel to the place you're writing. This is why I've set "Homecoming" in London. *grin* If you *really* can't afford the journey to Prague to look at the buildings and investigate the way things were at the turn of the century, then bluff. Get a book out on Prague that has some decent photographs or drawings. Or, better yet, read a travel guide. They do a lot of the history research for you, in an attempt to force-feed you culture.

Basically, use what you have to make up for what you haven't. If you've never been to Prague but want to set your story in the Town Square, go to your local town square. Have a look at old pictures of how things were where you live, and write *that* instead. Only people intimately familiar with Prague will know the difference. I, for example, have never been to California, and have never even heard of a place called Sunnydale there. If I had, I might have coughed up the money for the plane ticket. *grin* However, I worked at a university for a few months last year, and will be going to university next autumn myself. So - I bluffed. I made up assignments, I asked American friends what their curriculum was, I rewatched episodes of 'Buffy' to see what Giles' living room looked like, and put some of my parents' furniture in there if I couldn't see the picture properly.

So, there you have it. All I know about writing an effective setting. Oh, there's other stuff I could talk about - how to avoid purple prose, how to choose what mood to complement your work, etceteras, etceteras, you get the idea. Truth be told, I can't speak with authority on those subjects, because I'm still working on them myself. I am, first and foremost, a writer, and as such, the first thing I do is *read* when I'm stuck. Travel books, historical novels, and my friends' fiction - anything that gives me a new handle on setting and ideas and description. Then I buy myself a Travelcard, get on the tube and set off for the other end of London to gather information for the next few parts. So, if you want to write about your surroundings, get out of the house and have a *look* at your surroundings!

This concludes our party political broadcast. ;-)