Setting and Story

When I first started thinking about an idea for a fantasy novel, I liked the idea of starting off with a protagonist who grew up on the streets of a major medieval-type city. I love series like The Lord of the Rings, The Sword of Truth, and The Wheel of Time and the premise of having someone grow up simply and then being thrown into grand and complicated circumstances. However, I do find it annoying that each and every one of those books seems to start off with the protagonist in an idyllic rural setting. Furthermore, each of those books takes place in a medieval and vaguely European society. I wanted to depart from that world enough that my setting would be distinct.

I was looking at a site that I frequent, Cool Vibe, and I saw the following image by Nacho Yague. It inspired me to make the setting a medieval society with heavy steampunk overtones.

The Market by Nacho Yague

I found the above picture so intriguing that I set my second chapter in an indoor marketplace very similar to the one depicted. The market in my book, though, is made of brick and has steam-pipes in corridors that run alongside the main hall and behind the stores. It is a place that was once the pride of the city but has now become so run down that its steam pipe corridors house hundreds of the city’s homeless.

I landed on steam power because I had decided that lamps, not torches, would line the wall of the indoor mall, and I had to power them somehow. The steam power is now going to have a fairly significant presence in the novel, and the indoor mall will appear again.

Several other images from Cool Vibe have inspired settings for my book. Where I once only had a vague setting of a monastery for several chapters of the book, I now picture a combination of these two images:

Fantasy Art by Yi Ming Xuan

As Darkness Rises by Noah Bradley

When I looked at the first image, I really liked the idea of the monastery coming out of a mountain or a cliff. When I saw the second, I decided that my book’s monastery would be very near to the sea, although not so close as the building in the picture. That seems a little impractical when you think about the damage a storm would do to a building in that position. However, I definitely want the sea to have a large influence on the monastery in my book. I am going to shape my scenes there around the sea’s proximity to my cliffside monastery made of think white stone (like the Cliffs of Dover).

The addition of the sea and the cliffs has really affected the events of my story and how my characters act, so I am so happy that I found Cool Vibe. For those people looking for a little fantastic inspiration, I highly recommend the site. A word to the wise, though; a few of the images can get a little risqué.