: 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

@Rivera824

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As I was trying to find my own answers, I thought for a while about changing my settings in order to satisfy the theme and characters. This wasn't working for my story because it was so difficult to find a new setting that could fulfill all the criteria needed for my plot, but in case this helps others, here are two ideas I had:

1) Unify the foreign settings into just one region that can be thematically significant and also allow the plot to take the characters back there, providing wish fulfillment and resolving emotional threads. It also cuts out the need for a third set of cultural and environmental exposition.

2) Reduce the significance that British Guiana plays in the themes of the book by making it essential to only one of the characters. If the naturalist goes there for research, the woman he meets could be an immigrant from the second country where the plot elements happen. She could still attend the lecture about BG because she's interested in the wider world, or they could meet for entirely different reasons, but they would still have the ability to bond over travel, foreign experiences, perspective on English culture, longing to go back to other places, etc. Then we get the wish fulfillment about going back, give the second setting more of the emotional weight, and reduce the emphasis on the less relevant location.

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