As the years go by and I make more films, I am increasingly interested in capturing place as a vivid backdrop for my films.
Fiction wouldn't be much fun without its fair share of scoundrels, and they have to live somewhere.
When I work on a novel, I usually have one character and a setting in mind.
If I had, say, a tall, amateur male lead living on the campus of a rural college (Six Years), the next book might feature a short, cop who lives in the heart of Manhattan (Missing You).
It's been a very interesting exercise as a writer - writing a little family group, like The Incredibles or The Simpsons or something like that, and setting it in a big Star Wars-type setting. It's been really fun, definitely different from the kind of thing I normally do.
I often think of setting as an important character in my story. 'Dark Powers' takes place in Doncaster, a Maryland Eastern Shore community rich with watermen and historic atmosphere. I modeled it after a stunning little town called St. Michaels, but since a lot of bad things happen in Doncaster, I changed the name.
Sometimes the fantasy writers set their novels in an ancient Earth, sometimes a parallel Earth, or, quite often, they offered no explanation at all as to the temporal and geographic location.
I often put any project I write in a different decade just to roll the thought around in my head. There's a thriller I've written that I think would be nice to set in the '70s or '80s, just to take cell phones away from the movie. There's nothing like the piercing ring of an old-school telephone to really scare an audience.
At a certain point my novels set. They set just as hard as that jam jar. And then I know they are finished.
It's very important to set your place in a concrete environment. I think Chekhov said that the important thing when you have a play or any kind of novel is to set the roots in a concrete place.
It’s the place of the story, beginning here, in the meadow of late summer flowers, thriving before the Atlantic storms drive wet and winter upon them all.
Places are extremely important when writing a long story because place shapes a character.
I've always set my stories in places I know well. It frees me up to spend more imaginative time on the characters if I'm not worrying about the logistics.
I've had a five- or six-year down-spell as a writer, and now that most of the other contracts are cleared or down to the last book, I have a chance to do what I want to do - specifically, something set in New Orleans.
When I went to Hong Kong, I knew at once I wanted to write a story set there.
With 'Holes' I was troubled that there weren't very many female characters. I tried to put them in where I could. But the setting didn't lend itself to girls.
I think the location is almost as important as casting the leads of the movie. The location on 'The Purge' was crucial to that movie working.
I wanted to set 'Heading Out' in a real world, a concept I originally struggled with, as I don't have a proper job.
There I was limited to what happened the same way I am with Riel. It doesn't feel like a great burden to have your story, to some degree, set. I am enjoying figuring out what I think is the most dramatic way of telling this set of historical facts.
The surfeit of bad trends pushes me to set my stories in worlds which are often diminished versions of our own present.
I write what I call precinct drama, and I tend to write things set in the workplace. Having an institution which gives a workplace its distinctive identity is really important to creating something which feels different.
It's much harder to write a script that involves two people in a single location than 20 people in 30 different locations.
Most of my books have something to do with L.A.
Ever since I first visited New Orleans back in '89, I've been intrigued by the French Quarter. I always wanted to set something in the Quarter, whether it was historic or contemporary. Unfortunately, I was always tied up with previous commitments - earlier multiple contracts - and could not get a crack at it.
When I first started writing, I wrote a book called 'Bruiser,' and it was pretty much set in Chicago.
