This month’s theme is all about writing and exploring settings for your novel, and creating a home for the protagonist of your novel is critically important to it. But wait, you say. My novel is a thriller in which the hero never goes near his home. He races from his office in D.C. to locations around the world with the finale on top of the Great Pyramid of Giza and wrapping up loose ends in Cairo.
Keep reading. “Home” comes in many flavors and working it into your novel will add depth, characters, and plot points.
What to Find at a Home Base
If you write a series, a home base can provide a lot of material for your novels. The home base for my young amateur detective Rae Riley is the alpaca farm where she lives with her dad, grandmother, and three half-brothers. What makes this home base so important to Rae?
- Her people. In the prequel short story, “A Rose from the Ashes”, Rae is looking for her father. Her mother has died of cancer, and she has no family. Rae tries to solve who attempted to murder her mother when she was pregnant with Rae in an effort to find her father. She risks everything to find her people, so her family is precious to her.
- Safety. Because these are her people, Rae can retreat here when she needs a refuge to think about the case, test theories with her dad and grandma, or just destress.
Because her home base is so important, threatening it gives me a powerful plot point. When the crack marksman Colonel Sebastian Moran shoots through a window of 221 B Baker Street to kill Sherlock Holmes in “The Adventure of the Empty House”, it means something more when he attacks him in his home than if he shot him walking along the Thames.
In the Nero Wolfe mystery series, eccentric detective Nero Wolfe charges exorbitant fees to maintain his luxurious lifestyle in an old brownstone in New York City. One of his hobbies is orchids. He raises ten thousand plants in greenhouses on the top floor of his home. Wolfe rarely leaves his home to solve cases, relying on his assistant to do the leg work, so the brownstone is a crucial setting to the series. When master criminal Arnold Zeck in The Second Confession decides to issue a warning to Wolfe to stop an investigation, he goes for the brownstone. He machine-guns the greenhouses from across the street.
Threatening the home base can inspire plot points like:
- Protagonist feels vulnerable.
- Protagonists fears for her people.
- Protagonist gives in to fear and lets threat control her.
- Protagonist becomes more firmly resolved to defy threat.
What if your protagonist has no home?
No problem. A motivation for your protagonist can be either to find a home that he has always longed for and never had. Or he has lost a wonderful home and either wants to find a new one, reclaim the old one, or exact revenge on those who took it. Any of these ideas can power a novel and do so effectively because home means so much to readers. It’s a universal concept that any reader can identify with.
Back to our hero of the thriller. How do you work a home into the novel? Perhaps the first attack by the villain is at his office. His people are attacked. If he’s an agent of the government, then home can be his country and he wants to protect the life he knows.
What are other ways to use creating a home for your protagonist to develop the plot of your novel?
Here are more tips on writing settings in a novel.