: Re: Balancing setting, theme, and character arcs: how to deal with a setting that carries emotional weight but is left behind? When writing a story, how do you find a good balance between the significance

@Kaufman555

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Since it's an historical novel involving international politics, I'll assume that you can't change major events in the plot or Setting.

I'll try a Theme/Character example:

One setting (British Guiana) is talked about but never seen – except possibly in flashbacks. It represents something she's lost (childhood innocence? her family status?) and something he seeks (natural wisdom? escape from formality?).

Since it is the thing that brings them together, I'm imagining a Theme where they are looking for that missing piece of themselves in the other, and that missing piece is represented by a place they don't actually go to in the story. Hence the location represents something that isn't real, or is unobtainable.

Both of them idealize it in their minds, but it represents different ideals to them. When they go looking for the other person to fill the hole inside themselves, these things don't fit…, or maybe they do eventually, but you have something to drive a cross-communication in their relationship – something they'll have to work out before they can accept their reality, here and now, not an idealized fantasy of another time and place.

It doesn't have to be as melancholic as it sounds. They do bond over the subject and their mutual idealization. The "conflict" is that they are expecting the other to be something they aren't, and that could be a pleasant surprise. The arc could be in discovering how to let go of the fantasy in order to develop what's real.

It could also be a round-about way of the other turning out to be the thing they wanted, but in a form they wouldn't have recognized. For example if she associates BG with her family and childhood, ultimately he represents a new family, a fresh start. Likewise if he idealized BG as a source of natural wisdom or chaos, she might turn out to be a "civilizing" influence on him.

Excuse these obvious clichés. They are only meant to suggest how to use the location as a theme in their relationship.

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