Why places matter in a story

So my sister left yesterday.

It was raining as I stood there in the midst of in the middle of blaring car horns, and dark skies. It rained later that day. This was Thursday. Today is Friday. It rained today as well.

I’m not sure any of that detail matters.

Something else happened yesterday as well. Something related to writing, and storytelling in general, and the book in particular. I finished the first draft a little while back, and since then, I haven’t managed much fiction. I took a break, hoping that I would be able to start work on some short stories, but I couldn’t. And so, a month or so after I had finished the draft, I began reading it, noting the good, the bad, the things that needed to be changed.

The first draft was reached at after rewriting multiple things, multiple story lines, multiple times. In the previous iteration, I had been trying a first person mode, and eventually I felt that would not get me to the climax that I wanted to get to. And so, after writing three parts in switching first persons, for the three major characters, I re-wrote it all in third person viewpoint.

That necessitated, and  perhaps, because I am a lazy lad, I managed to write that first draft in four parts, with around twelve to fifteen chapters under each subheading. The four parts, still held the same stories, the stories told from the viewpoints of the first three major character. All in all, it was not as much of a third person viewpoint as was the freshly written fourth part.

Yesterday, while thinking about what I had read of the first draft till this point, and the little description I had put up, in each of the chapters, I came to a sudden realisation. I was going to rewrite, and reorder the story, in terms of scenes, places, where the actions happen.

I was going to describe the surroundings, setup the scenario, and then let my characters do their thing. The place, the setting would allow me a chance to truly rewrite the first person in third person viewpoint. And, improve the story. Because, there have been many places, where I have felt that I haven’t described what was happening, because when I had been writing it, the future had been known to me, and I had assumed that the reader knew it too.

It happens.

While writing the writer has a tendency to assume things.

This is it then.

Till the next time. Till the next insight.