Notes on Process, Part I

Setting, or, Seeing is believing

I can’t speak for other novelists, but when I am in the preparatory stages of a new novel, as I am right now, the most important idea to get ahold of - before character, even before plot - is setting. And by setting I don’t even mean place and time, like Boston in 1915, or Salem Village in 1682. I mean the granular details, the minutiae of the physical …