The Eternal Questions 2: When, Where, How
The WHO AND WHAT questions were character-centric – but the WHY question is a bridge which leads to more than one destination. It’s the motivational link which informs a character’s growth, to be sure – but it is also another kind of bridge, from character into plot and from thence into the setting and the framework of the story, all of which are more closely informed by the rest of the Eternal Questions.
Nothing takes place in a vacuum. Every single story has to happen somewhere in space, somewhen in time. For this, you will need details and continuity.
You need the questions of WHEN and WHERE.
It may be stating the obvious – but your story will be very different if it is set in the Stone Age, if it is set in Italy during the Renaissance, if it is set in China during the Cultural Revolution, if it is set in the American South during the height of the Civil Rights movement, if it’s set in 21st Century New York, or if it’s set on a 25th Century starship hurtling through space. All of these things require setting up, meticulously.
You may need to do research. You may need to do quite a lot of research. Some of the research may be difficult to the point of being impossible. If you are setting a story in an invented world of your own making but which is based on some particular historical time or place you may have a little more leeway with your details – but anything that’s remotely realistic has to be backed up with the best facts that you can come up with because it is a truth universally acknowledged that if you get some tiny detail wrong you WILL get the kind of reader who will notice and who will lose no time in gleefully pointing out your mistakes. Often loudly. In public.
For instance – do not have clockwork in eras where clockwork had yet to be invented (and this runs deeper than you think. You might inadvertently slip and have a character whom you intend to comment on something going smoothly saying flippantly that things are as precise as clockwork… when that character would have trouble recognising clockwork if it came and smacked him on the nose. Hard.) Do not have pieces of clothing turn up centuries before they were supposed to have been invented, or centuries after they were supposed to be obsolete.
Tiny details can matter, and can sometimes be quite enough to establish your time and place – elaborate deconstructions are often neither necessary nor wanted – all you have to do is be aware, for instance, that in a culture that measures time with hour-candles and hourglass clocks filled with sand and sundials the phrase “a few minutes” may have no practical meaning at all.
Continuity comes into play as you keep all of this straight, and you don’t suddenly introduce an anachronism simply because you forgot where or when you were.
These are also the questions that inform the HOW of your story. Murder weapons have to be consistent with your era and with the class or race of the people who are using them. You have to be aware of what your context is, of what your McGuffins can or cannot do under your circumstances, and have your characters behave accordingly. If they know things they will have to have come by that knowledge in a manner consistent with the story – no knowledge is spontaneously generated, and if not given freely then it has to be obtained covertly by scheming or spying or theft or lies or eavesdropping or – well – pick a method, but you have to have a method. You cannot simply have your protagonist reach into thin air and know something JUSTLIKETHAT, or know how to use something they’ve never seen before simply by setting eyes on it. This is particularly annoying when you have people transported from OUR flabby under-exercised world into a space where swords are the weapons of choice… and said people can use said swords without a smidge of training, without ever being so much as out of breath, and without a single bruise or slash added to their anatomy while learning to use the implement in a manner in which it is meant to be wielded.
Most stories can be deconstructed into those six arenas – and it’s sometimes helpful to pose these questions to your story or your characters if they have become mired. They’re interview questions which were supposed to procure the facts for a news story – so USE them, in the manner in which they were intended, to “interview” your story or your characters and find out where they’re at and what they intend to do next. Sometimes just writing down six lists can be helpful – under WHO, WHAT, WHY, WHERE, WHEN, HOW headings – and the lists can be as disjointed and disorganized as you want, nobody else ever has to see them, they’re stream-of-consciousness things where you write the first things that come into your head when you ask that question with your particular story or character in mind. You can keep ‘em or you can toss ‘em, their value lies in unlocking your mind, not in their intrinsic content.
Happy interrogations.
