How much effort can you put into devising a setting for a story before you start getting just plain strange?
When I wrote a children’s novel a couple of years ago I used the spreadsheet function of Open Office to create a giant sheet of graph paper that I could draw on by adding a background color for the cells. I created a floor plan for the house that the main characters live in. Then I laid out the farm that they live on. Then I did a map for the small town that was next to the farm. I did everything to a certain scale. Then I used a city directory from a real small town from the time period of my story to figure out what kinds of businesses the town would have. Then I identified the same kind of businesses that existed in the city where I live at roughly the same time period and whose buildings still exist so I could get property tax records to know how much land area each business would take up in my fictional town. This helped me maintain a sense of distance for when the characters needed to move about and the map helped me describe the town and remember where things are so I wouldn’t confuse the details.
I wanted the character names to be authentic for the story's time period, so I consulted a Social Security database for common first names based on the decade that the characters were born based on their age at the time of the story. For last names I used the names of congressmen and senators who have come from the part of the country where my story is set.
Was this too much effort for a children’s story?
When I wrote a children’s novel a couple of years ago I used the spreadsheet function of Open Office to create a giant sheet of graph paper that I could draw on by adding a background color for the cells. I created a floor plan for the house that the main characters live in. Then I laid out the farm that they live on. Then I did a map for the small town that was next to the farm. I did everything to a certain scale. Then I used a city directory from a real small town from the time period of my story to figure out what kinds of businesses the town would have. Then I identified the same kind of businesses that existed in the city where I live at roughly the same time period and whose buildings still exist so I could get property tax records to know how much land area each business would take up in my fictional town. This helped me maintain a sense of distance for when the characters needed to move about and the map helped me describe the town and remember where things are so I wouldn’t confuse the details.
I wanted the character names to be authentic for the story's time period, so I consulted a Social Security database for common first names based on the decade that the characters were born based on their age at the time of the story. For last names I used the names of congressmen and senators who have come from the part of the country where my story is set.
Was this too much effort for a children’s story?
