Although I am a writer
(and a soon to be published author!), I consider myself a reader first and
foremost; starting as a child when I’d read from sunup to sundown, and whenever
I can squeeze a book in now. And as an avid reader and lover of storytelling, I
want to be pulled into a book from the outset; I want to become so immersed in
the pages that everything else slips away. Reading is my absolute favourite thing
to do—imagine! You can fall in love, be horrified, be inspired all from the
comfort of your couch or bed—but it also serves as a great escape from reality.
Nothing pulls me out of the stresses and anxieties of the real world (of which
there are many, especially in the last handful of years) like getting lost in a
good book. And I think that one of the best ways to ensure that a reader is
hooked (whether that’s me reading or someone reading my book) is with setting.
So, it’s probably no surprise then, that creating and crafting setting is my
favourite part of the entire writing process.
I treat setting as though
it’s just as important as the plot and characters and structure—this is how I ensure
my sense of place and world building leaps directly off the page to pull my reader
all the way in. In this way setting can become a character in its own right. A city
or town or planet or dystopian hell-scape on a far-away star that can live and
breathe and be its own multi-dimensional character.
Some authors prefer to
write about places and locations that exist in the world, but I prefer
fictionalizing them, so that my reader can picture themselves being dropped
right there without any preconceived idea of what the place is really like. My
debut thriller, Twenty-Seven Minutes, takes place in fictional West Wilmer, a
small rural town that could be found anywhere in North America. The kind of
town that everyone knows; surrounded by a patchwork of razed fields, a long dusty
highway, and rusting water tower. A town where there’s one Main Street and one
local bar, in the case of my debut this bar is Flo’s, and where everyone knows
everyone else and has for generations; where no one really leaves, where the
secrets linger within the town’s borders and gossip can take on an insidious
life of its own.
When crafting my setting,
I want the reader to feel it and smell it and live in it for the duration of
the story. To that end, setting is one of the first parts of my writing
process—where do I want this story to take place? When? How? Further: How can
this small fictional town of West Wilmer help tell the story of its characters?
And as a thriller writer, how can it help add tension for the reader?
Twenty-Seven Minutes
is a thriller about the transformative nature of grief and what happens when long-standing
secrets become impossible to keep buried. The decision to set this in a small
town meant that I could draw on the aspects of one—how close-knit communities
can sometimes feel claustrophobic (adding tension to the story), how everyone
knows everyone’s business (making it hard to hide from your past) and how those
hard-to-hide secrets can weigh so heavily on someone that they begin to unravel
(adding more tension and a propulsive sense of a ticking clock) for the reader.
The irony here is that
I grew up in the middle of a very large, very busy city. But I spent many
childhood summers on the farm where my mother grew up, in a rural town on the
East coast of Canada. During those idyllic summers, I learned to swim in the
Ocean, hang laundry on a clothes’ line, eat vegetables pulled directly from the
garden, borrow books from the Book-Mobile that would rumble by the old farmhouse,
and hear nothing at night but crickets, and nothing in the morning but crows. I
learned the art of “visiting” neighbours, and the smell of barns and old
churches and the joy of pulling into the parking lot of an ice-cream bar on the
side of the highway (trust me, nothing tastes as good as when it comes from a bored
teenager behind a splintered wooden counter).
As writers, we must be
keenly observant and attuned to noticing even the tiniest of details—this is
how we add layers of reality to our stories, how our characters come alive, and
in terms of setting, how readers can really feel themselves in that place—and it
was that incredibly stark contrast of those quiet rural summers spent on the
farm, to my loud and busy and boisterous city life, that made such an
impression on me during those formative and impressionable years as a wide-eyed
young girl, that I fell in love with setting, and especially small towns. Twenty-Seven Minutes by
Ashley Tate (Headline, £20) THE QUESTION - For the
last ten years, the small town of West Wilmer has been struggling to answer one
question: on the night of the crash that killed his sister, why did it take
Grant Dean twenty-seven minutes to call for help? If he'd called sooner, Phoebe
might still be alive. THE SECRET - As the anniversary of Phoebe's death
approaches, Grant is consumed by his memories and the secret that's been
suffocating him for years. But he and Phoebe weren't the only ones in the car
that night. Becca was there too - she's the only other person who knows what
really happened. Or is she? THE TRUTH - Everyone remembers Phoebe, but local
girl June also lost someone that night. Her brother Wyatt has been missing for
ten years and, now that her mother is dead, June has no one left - no family,
no friends. Until someone appears at her door. Someone who knows what really
happened that night. And they are ready to tell the truth?
Ashley Tate can be
found on X @tate_ab and on Instagram @ashleytateauthor
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