Setting is a Story Builder too

An equal part in the trinity of plot, character… and setting

I drove by this riverside house every time I took my sons to hockey practice. It was one of a half dozen such homes, built on pilings. The Fraser River, near its mouth to the Pacific, is an oddity: salt-water and tidal. There were times when the water was swirling underneath the house, and other times it was mud.

That little house over the river birthed …