Los Angeles Archives ⋆ Be the Cat https://bethecatblog.com/tag/los-angeles/ random musings of stories and life Wed, 16 Sep 2026 20:01:58 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://bethecatblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/cropped-MalachiteIcon-32x32.png Los Angeles Archives ⋆ Be the Cat https://bethecatblog.com/tag/los-angeles/ 32 32 5279163 Setting: From the Mountains to the City Streets https://bethecatblog.com/2026/09/setting-from-the-mountains-to-the-city-streets/ https://bethecatblog.com/2026/09/setting-from-the-mountains-to-the-city-streets/#respond Fri, 18 Sep 2026 12:00:55 +0000 https://bethecatblog.com/?p=7588 Could your story happen anywhere else? If the honest answer is yes, your setting isn't working hard enough. Here's how to fix that — with examples from 7th Grade Revolution and Secret of the Red Key.

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]]> Setting can be far more than a pretty description. Last week, we talked about how Mark Twain and Kate DiCamillo use their setting to influence their stories. Depending on the storyline, I sometimes struggle with how to make setting work at a deeper level than mere decoration. Sometimes that is the point. The author might want the reader to feel the familiarity of the events of the story taking place where it might be anywhere, including their own backyard.

More frequently, the author is unable to wrap their arms around how to make the setting work for them to the point where the story couldn’t take place anywhere else. I’d like to review two of my works as examples of where the setting is integral to the events, so that should it be set elsewhere, it wouldn’t be the same story.

Washington Academy — When the Building Has Secrets

Washington Academy in 7th Grade Revolution isn’t a generic school. It’s a charter school housed in a post-Civil War mansion in Spruce Pine, North Carolina. The building has tunnels, secret passages, and a cavern no one knew existed until seventh graders had a reason to find it.

The setting does something specific: it makes the students’ rebellion plausible. An ordinary school building offers nowhere to hide, no secrets to uncover, no historical mystery to anchor a plot. But a nineteenth-century mansion with hidden rooms and underground passages? The building itself is practically asking to be explored by curious twelve-year-olds who’ve declared independence from adult authority.

The Blue Ridge Mountains visible from the classroom window are also doing quiet work throughout the book. Dennis looks out at them and feels the pull of something beyond the walls that contain him. The mountains aren’t described at length, but their presence, and the contrast between their wildness and the school’s rigid structures, says something about what Dennis is fighting for.

The setting isn’t just where the story happens. It’s why the story can happen.

A grand old mansion partially hidden by mountain mist
Los Angeles as Living Landscape

A nighttime Los Angeles street scene viewed from above

Secret of the Red Key (Homeless Myths, Book 1), a work in progress, uses Los Angeles in a way worth examining because the city isn’t interchangeable with any other American setting.

Los Angeles is specifically the right place for a story about homeless children who are also warriors destined to give mankind a second chance. Skid Row, the largest concentration of homeless population in the United States, grounds the children’s reality in something undeniably true. Little Tokyo, where the annual Obon Festival takes place, becomes the backdrop for supernatural encounters. Los Angeles sprawls from ocean to mountains, its districts laid out like a patchwork quilt with the Music Center bordered by a cathedral, Skid Row, a park, and the superior courthouse, each piece distinct in texture and character yet somehow cohesive. The tunnel system beneath the streets even becomes both sanctuary and danger as the series progresses.

Each location is doing character work. Skid Row establishes the stakes of the children’s daily survival. Little Tokyo opens a window into a cultural tradition the story needs. The ocean’s edge provides the mythological resonance of a liminal space—neither land nor sea. The tunnels mirror the children’s own hidden existence, invisible to the city above.

Remove Los Angeles and you don’t just lose a backdrop. You lose the framework within which the story operates.

How to Make Your Setting Work

If you want your setting to function as a character rather than decoration, start by asking these questions:

  • Could this story happen anywhere else? If the answer is yes without significant loss, dig deeper into what makes your specific place unique, its history, geography, social texture, and secrets.
  • What does the setting want? A place with strong character has something like an agenda; it rewards certain behaviors and punishes others. The Mississippi River rewards Tom’s wildness and punishes his attempts at conventional respectability. Naomi rewards vulnerability and connection. Washington Academy rewards curiosity and resourcefulness.

An open map covered in handwritten notes and annotations
  • What does the setting know? Old places have history. That history can be a resource, a threat, or both. McDougal’s Cave knows where Injun Joe hides. Washington Academy’s tunnels know where the treasure is. The Los Angeles sewer system knows what lurks beneath the streets.
  • What does the setting hide? Secrets are one of the most powerful tools a setting offers. The cave, the tunnel, the hidden room, the thing in the water aren’t just plot devices. They’re the setting revealing itself to characters willing to look.

Your setting was there before your characters arrived and it will be there after they leave. Give it the weight it deserves.

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