I’ve been thinking today about what makes a setting like Hogwarts so great.
The first piece of the formula for a captivating setting is to choose a place that is familiar.
Familiarity = An Understanding Reader
Take Hogwarts, which is essentially a school.
We’ve all spent a lot of time at school, many years of our lives. School is familiar, relatable, “homey.”
Thus it makes perfect sense to set a young adult novel series in a school. Who can't relate to being in school?
Why You Should Choose a Familiar Setting
Many writers have done this, not just J.K. Rowling.
Take the Percy Jackson series, based at an academy for demigods. Or The Perks of Being Wallflower, not a fantasy novel by any means, but set at a high school. Or even the smashingly popular podcast series, Serial, which I recently finished (what do you think: did he do it or not?), set in a high school in Baltimore.
Why do schools work as settings? Because they are familiar, and familiarity instantly allows the reader to put themselves in the shoes of the characters.
Other familiar settings, specifically from Harry Potter, include:
- The mall, i.e. Diagon Alley
- A stadium or sporting field, i.e. the Quiditch pitch
- A capital of government, i.e. the Ministry of Magic
- Home, i.e. the Burrow (certainly more than Privet Drive, right?)
Familiarity just works.
How to Take Your Setting to the Next Level
However, how do you take it to the next level and make your reader enthralled?
And that’s where the second piece of the setting formula comes in:
Familiarity + Fantasy = A Captivated Reader
J.K. Rowling doesn’t just write about a normal school. She gives us a castle haunted by friendly ghosts where the staircases move about and the paintings talk and you sleep in four poster beds in the tallest towers of the school.
Who wouldn’t want to go to that school?
Even the non-fantasy examples I mentioned earlier contain elements of fantasy. In The Perks of Being a Wallflower, the awkward and lovable Charlie goes to school with the girl of his dreams—the beautiful, older Sam—and makes friends with the popular kids and is surprisingly unstoppable in school yard fights.
That was definitely not my high school experience. How about yours?
The Setting Formula that Will Hook Your Readers
If you want to set your story somewhere that will instantly hook your readers, the formula is Familiarity + Fantasy.
You take a familiar setting, something so normative that nearly everyone has experienced it, a school, a mall, a sport, a home.
Then you twist it, adding your own fantasies about what that normal place could look lie.
Finally, you set your protagonist (and your villain!) loose in it.
Reader = Hooked.
What is your favorite setting for a story? Let us know in the comments.
PRACTICE
Describe your fantasy school? Would it look like Hogwarts or a something closer to reality, like The Perks of Being a Walflower?
Write for fifteen minutes. When you’re finished, post your practice in the comments section. And if you post, please be sure to give feedback to your fellow writers.
Happy writing!
My school is in a futuristic world where humans and superhumans try to coexist. More accurately, humans try to survive the oppression brought on by the superhumans in a society all their own.
The school is where children go to learn the history of our world and how it came to be this way. They learn the known weaknesses of the superhumans and what to do if they ever encounter one.
At the younger ages, they simply learn how to run when they see a superhuman. But the older a child gets, the more training he or she receives in how to deal with superhumans.
When a child turns fourteen, he or she begins training as a soldier. Soldiers fight in a war against the superhumans. Human society is isolated from the superhumans, and they’ve built protective perimeters to make sure no superhumans get in. But perimeter has to be protected, and this is where the soldiers come.
They have futuristic weapons that send sound waves that disrupt the brain activity of the superhumans. The soldiers-in-training must learn how to use these weapons because they easily vaporize a normal human being.
Soldiers-in-training undergo daily simulations against superhumans, and the realism of it has driven more than a few of them crazy.
Once a student graduates from this school, he or she is full-fledged soldier tasked with giving his or her life to maintain the society their ancestors have worked so hard to establish.
Only those who marry and have a child are exempt from becoming a soldier. So the society that exists behind the perimeter is a very family-oriented one.
That’s all for my fantasy school. I should probably think of a better name than superhumans, but you get the idea.
Tom, great world!
I absolutely love the idea of the superhumans. Mine turned out to be much more just a true desciption of a classroom than anything else. Oh the life of a teacher.
And I love that it is very family-oriented! Always a plus
Thanks, Matt. It’s actually a world I’m developing right now for a story I’m writing. I’m actually a high school teacher myself. Grateful not to be in a school like the one I just created 🙂 Thanks for reading.
Very cool! How does one become a superhuman? Could regular human parents give birth to a superhuman and then the child has to try to keep it hidden so he/she isn’t ostracized?
Actually, they’re genetically created by injection. Or they were. Now they reproduce among their own kind. However, in my story there is one who looks normal but isn’t.
This is such a very exciting piece of fiction. There are lots of great things happening in here. I’d like to know more about the story. Perhaps in the future you could do an extended version of the story.
I was wondering if you could take a look at my story above. It’s called “The Astro Academy”. I’d appreciate it if you could give me some feedback on it.
My favorite setting would probably be Harry Potter. But I’m also a big fan of the settings in Smallville and LOST.
I’m a fan of all those as well!
My favorite setting has to be Larry Niven’s Ring World. Although, the Smoke Ring in Integral Trees has to be the most unique.
This is awesome, Gary. I don’t have any feedback except keep writing this story!
An elephant sits in the back of the room, the same spot
every time. No animal is his predator or his prey; he neither has friend nor
enemy, he simply is. He is the constant in our classroom. If I thought it
appropriate, I would label him stoic. But is it stoicism or a willingness to
accept ‘good enough’ to be good enough that keeps him constant?
From the back we come up front, where we have the Peacock. And yet she is a peacock,
flirting her feathers around the class, she is beautifully colorful… and
distracting to all within it.
The tiger stakes his claim. This is his territory. No other students dare speak up when
he bares his claws. It’s a tiger.
Slowly but surely, each unmorphs, and the class returns to a semblance of abnormal
normality. The fur is gone, replaced with unkempt hair. The slobber at the side
of each’s mouthbeak replaced with the spittle typically seen for a braced
tween.
This classroom is not perfect.
Yet it is also not boring.
Tiger, for we have taken to calling him by his chosen shape, is quick and decisive.
Needless to say, this is actually a good thing in the lives of the surrounding
teens.
Peacock is scared of him, but she would never let on. Her beauty is what she truly cares
about, preening and flaunting, grabbing mini-mirror from her mini-purse and
shifting it carefully to scrupulously examine the outermost edge of her left
eyebrow.
And then we have Elephant. With a bellowing belch, this proud yet elegant beast of a
student is more a large personality than a loud one.
Hey! Thats a nice story. I felt that you’ve used too many paragraphs. It might’ve been a little more nice if you decreased the number of paragraphs and kept those sentences together.
Nonetheless, it was a nice one. Cheers
Hi Naga,
Thank you for the compliment. It’s really not even a story, it’s more just a narration of the truth that happens in a couple of my classes every day!
I went back and read through it. A couple paragraphs were added when I copy pasted it from word, which I’ll try ot remember to fix in the future, I definitely agree it just belabored the reading. Thank you, and thank you for pointing that out to me!
I think you just described one of my class periods. Great description!
Ha, right Tom?! I frequently think of my class as a zoo, and this is just what came out in the 15 minutes. Thanks so much for the compliment, I’m glad you can picture a real class.
Great job! At last someone was willing to talk about the elephant in the room 🙂
Ha, right?! Thanks for the comment!
Haha so fun. Did you ever read the Animorph books? http://www.amazon.com/The-Invasion-Animorphs-Book-1/dp/0545291518
I loved those books so much!
One small thing: the peacocks with the beautiful feathers are always male. The hens are much more plain.
Joe nice connection! I never read them, but I have seen some reruns of it, and some of my nephews used to play pokemon and yugioh and all other wonderful games of fancy!
And thanks for the correction. I knew the truth, but a preening peacock flaunting its feathers is just typically the females in my middle school classroom. Though you’re right, the males jump right in there vying for attention.
Thanks again!
The Nerdvana
Chris walked past the college gate, he stepped
inside the building.
“Good morning everybody, welcome to the St.Weber’s
school of technology, please follow your route maps to reach your respective
classrooms”
The route map was an algorithm. Everything there was
in codes, mathematics and physics were the only thing that ran all the way
round the school. Every student in the college was into his own laptop and was
continuously doing some academic related work. If there ever was a dungeon for
geeks and nerds, this was the one. All the nerds out there could easily enroll
for this, because only those who are of high IQ could crack these retard tests
and get into this.
Would everyone apply to it? Fuck yeah, almost
everybody applied to it. Why? Because it was one of the best in the world in
terms of its size, infrastructure, its faculty and most importantly, it’s got
the best placements for jobs after the graduation. So, many were eager to grab
their seats in it. But the fun fact was that there was a committee which was on
the crusade of only selecting nerds for the sake of this college. Many have
never understood why they got rejected. But this school was a place where there
were all the abnormal geeky guys who suffered from all kinda over anxiety and
OCD issues. If a normal guy were to go there, he was sure to get his mind
blown. Because there were many abnormal and yet smart things running up here.
Every lecture was a two stage one. First one, a digital lecture wherein a
projector would show you various images and videos relating to the topic and
the guys in there will jot in down in a speed which is more or less comparable
to light and then, the second method was even more retarded. A professor would
only clarify your doubts on what you’ve understood in the first stage. Every chapter
should be self analyzed and understood on your own. But the faculty wouldn’t explain
anything to you. And yeah, dating? This was something that was out of the college’s
domain. You cannot even spot a single couple kissing, let alone making out
anywhere near the campus.
Chris faked his attitude and turned out to be a nerd,
performed exceptionally and got selected to that school. And the moment he got
into it, he was awestruck. There were people who never greeted anybody. Girls were
roaming here and there…not with guys but with their own mobile phones and ipads.
And the fun fact was that there were bullies who’d make you memorize idiotic
stuff like the log table and the antilog table to just play around with you. Sticking
an electric pole up his ass felt easier rather than memorizing such crazy stuff.
And then, wham! When he opened the classroom door…
“Wake up Chris, time’s up! It’s your first day at
your new college. Don’t be late, now move” yelled his Mom. He woke up and
realized that it was a dream. A f-u-c-k-i-n-g dream.
First of all, a great job of describing a dream.
It should be “St. Weber’s School of Technology”.
You begin many sentences with “But” or “And”. The conjunctions are not needed. There is also an overuse of the word “Because”.
This I don’t understand. “The route map was an algorithm. Everything there was in codes, mathematics and physics were the only thing that ran all the way
round the school.” How could the map be an algorithm? Do you mean it was interactive, and on a tablet or smartphone? What did you mean by codes? What ran all the way around the school? Mathematics and physics are subjects be studied? Did you mean the buildings where those subjects are studied?
Your third paragraph could easily be broken into at least two, maybe three separate paragraphs. Paragraphing is a friend to the reader, and one idea is to keep the reader reading. Typically one idea, one paragraph.
I personally object to the use of the word “retard”. I have found that the word is most often used by the uninformed.
Thanks a lot for pointing out the mistakes, I will surely improve myself. By the way, I dont think there must be a restriction about what words you need to use when it comes to something like writing. Its a choice a writer makes. Fine, if you dont approve of it. But I personally write what I feel like.
Nevertheless, thanks for your feedback.
Thought I had removed that final comment of mine for the reasons you stated. I have not seen it since, so thought it was gone. You must have read it before I did the edit.
What a cool school! Sounds like the foundation to a very interesting series!
Thanks a lot Joe!
The Astro Academy
By Kiki Stamatiou a. k. a. Joanna Maharis
The Astro Academy is a school consisting of the usual subjects of science, mathematics, and literature, and then there is the special training facility within the school.
Aldine, Lako, Raya, Eyotina, and Eyotitsa have returned to their home
planet after being away on a long journey to help the people of earth set their
recourse for a better way of life.
During the meteor disaster, the five of them were conducting scientific
research in space where there shuttle rested on the moon.
Upon their return, they attended the Astro Academy to find out more about themselves. On earth, they had special powers and abilities to fly on their own, but had to use their powers from behind the scenes. No one on earth knew they could fly on their own. So the used the space shuttle to fly to the moon.
Leaving the space shuttle on the moon, the five members flew back to their home planet where they were instructed to attend the Astro Academy to further strengthen their powers and go about their usual business of trying to solve the problems within the galaxy.
The school looked like a normal school on the outside, but inside their were beams of light going on with the student snapping their fingers. They were automatically transported into the class room where they studied radio active energy, and kinetic energy along with telekinetics.
Aldine was in a special room where she tested her powers to see way into the future, and communicate with the selves of the past as well as those of the future.
She lay on a table where her advisers and commander did tests on her brain to come up with methods for her to give them information on how the past events affect the present events and then those of the future by having her communicate with her selves.
She and her people in her time had to come up with methods to reverse the effects of the meteor on the people of earth. When the meteor struck, the human transformed
into giant plant-like people resembling more like the Jolly Green Giant.
In Aldines school, she was educated in the ways of the past. In particular, she studied scientific measures with the purpose of bringing about powers of greater measure.
Students were taught to conduct experiments on themselves to heighten their awareness of what was going on in the outer limits of the galaxy.
They raised up heavy objects utilizing the power of their own minds.
With her mind, Aldine learned to control what went in the lives of the people who lived in the future. She lay on a table with her eyes closed to zero in on some realm and time in the future.
© Copyright, Kiki Stamatiou, 2015
My fantasy school is more on the Hogwarts side.(Don’t mind the fact that I would absolutely love to go to Hogwarts.)
It would be in a massive castle that will have many twists, turns and secret passage ways. The teachers will be laid back as well as be dedicated to literature and magic. I think that I would have the movie pictures except that you can step into the pictures and be inside of them, also able to move among the pictures.
You would be put into, not really houses, dorms according to your proficiency in writing and magic.