How can I make a high school setting less boring, bland and generic?

now mind you, my series takes place in middle school so technically it ain't really a high school setting. nevertheless i still need help to make the whole high school setting more realistic you know and maybe add some surprising twist here and there.

Can someone delete this because I made a typo. The title was suppose to be ' how can I make a high school setting less generic, boring, bland'.

You should ask those kinds of things by hollering. (Triangle button.) Also, the mods are capable of renaming threads.

Thanks

@ewolf2015: It would depend heavily on your narrative needs and the context of the story. What is the story about, where and when does it take place, etc.

On a more generic note, you could give the school more character by giving it a certain sport/activity that it centres its culture around.

edited 28th May '16 12:30:29 PM by peasant

Make it realistic and give it a sprinkling of interesting characters—students, faculty, support staff, parents, et cetera. It'll be memorable if readers remember the people in it.

If any one is wondering what the series is about then here:

• Character list: http://sta.sh/05bzkf5ozs4

edited 28th May '16 7:11:42 PM by ewolf2015

Here's the thing: the moment I see someone post a trope list for their story I know they swung and missed.

In Maddie's words.

Got rid of it.

Give actual conflict into the setting, not just your main character. If it's a public school, there's like lack of budget, run down facility, underpaid staffs, high drop out rate etc. If it's a private school, the conflict would be rich donors parents practically running the school, obsessed with funding, vanity from the richer students, bullying for the poorer students etc.

I personally would recommend you avoid at all costs the high/middle school cliches, write new and interesting characters, don't do the typical "blonde Alpha Bitch ", " Jock Jerk " , etc. And as others have said, try giving the school some sort of conflict or "culture". Unless your shooting for a slice-of-life story, give it some sort of hook, something to say "Hey! This ain't your typical school story!"

I home this helps.

i'm afraid i can't do new but i can do interesting

Interesting works too! Its your story, I was just trying to help.

Focus on the characters. Characters breathe life into any story; great characters can make an otherwise unremarkable tale into a modern masterpiece. So try to make your cast interesting, unique, and distinct from each other, and your story won't be boring, much less bland & generic.

Another thing; don't fall back on hackneyed stereotypes. Yes AlphaBitches exist in the real world, but in high school stories they've long been played out. Same for the Jerk Jock, unless all you need is an easy villain or a bully to establish another character, his victim, as The Woobie.

It would help if you know a lot of high school stories.The Alpha Bitch and Jerk Jock are generic but some stories manage to avoid them like Daria. Decide who and what your focus is. Degrassi has a large cast and gets into serious issues.

edited 29th May '16 5:40:55 PM by lexicon

You can make the school cool too! The semi-futuristic school in Puella Magi Magica Madoka was instantly interesting. It was like 20 stories tall with huge, open hallways and glass walls... and it implied a kind of fantasy world, without being overtly weird or impossible. The classrooms had smartboards... It was like a really fancy school for rich kids, but not a magical school. Perfect for the urban fantasy story.

Think about the stories you like. Are there any schools that stick out to you? What did those authors do?

> An interesting appearance or location (a school on a cliff? a school by a smoke-spewing factory? what fits the tone of your story?)

> A unique school culture (baseball-obsessed or has a huge arts program or weird clubs)

> A cool uniform, or even if there's no uniform, what do the students wear? what's fashionable? (most of my ideas are visual, sorry)

> Classes available / class schedule (is it quarters or semesters? what electives are there?)

> What are the punishments? (detention, extra homework, volunteering?) What do you get punishments for? (Are they strict about no hats? Tardiness? Bad language?)

> What's the power structure? Who are the good teachers, the bad teachers, the socially powerful students? (at my high school there was a gym teacher who would drive a van around the school and pick up any students who tried to ditch and drive them back. uber creepy. every student knew his name)

I think the most important question is how do your characters interact with the school? What's the importance of the school? Are they running around after class solving mysteries? In that case, you might want to set a creepy tone, make a few suspicious characters... In manga featuring delinquents, the school focus is usually on the teachers, and bad, selfish, power-abusing teachers who break the protagonist's faith in adults and authority and good teachers who restore it and encourage them back. In romcom the focus tends to be on classmates, and the cheerful social structure of the class. People chat in big groups and you can recognize the group dynamics. Lots of Those Two Guys and whatnot.

Because in the end, school is boring. And if your characters do all the interesting plot stuff outside of school (drama at parties or fighting crime or what have you), there's no need to do a bunch of exposition about an interesting-but-nevertheless-irrelevant school. At best, the school will stay in the background and not distract from the good stuff. Make it contribute to the tone of the story, for sure. But if it's not ground-breaking, that's probably okay.

edited 31st May '16 3:58:35 AM by jec

Once upon a time, I had my characters go through a high school setting (yeah, I'm a pretty little snowflake). And you know what? I actually took heat for it from beta readers; they said it seemed like i was spending a disproportionate amount of time having the characters putz around in school, and they had a legitimate point. It was supposed to be a story about fighting the lord of the dead, yet there was a pep rally scene before there was even a proper villain established.

So I guess that I'll answer the thread's question by posing my own: how important is your school to the events of the story?

In my case, I feel as if I made my story stronger by (eventually) hacking out the school segments entirely. I'm not saying that you have to do the same, but there's a point in there worth considering. What does your school contribute to the story? What do the characters, the plot, or the story at large gain whenever there's time spent on campus? If there's some essential element that you can't do without, highlight it. Use that as a guideline to proceed. Maybe there's a mystery that needs to be solved, or a prickly teacher that's constantly cramping the main characters' style. Maybe you can use the school to illustrate a point — or, you can use it as a hub for some of your best scenes. A food fight, for example. So basically, find out what gives your setting its character and play that up.

Failing that? I'll go ahead and echo what others have said: focus on the characters, an the rest will fall into place a bit more smoothly. You can't spell "character" without "care", after all.

It was visually distinct; it also wasn't particularly memorable in and of itself. Certain students, and their story, is why it's remembered at all.

Which is just an application of the repeated advice that to make a high school setting interesting, you make the characters interesting, and integrate them into school life.

Why does this have to set in high school anyway? I abhor high school as setting...simply because it's so much more limited in terms of plot possibilities in comparison to places that involve adults. The latter tend to have more characters who have enough agencies of their own to move forward the plot.

Adults tend to have more access to driving, alcohol, money, sex, etc than teenagers do, after all.

Limited access can be as interesting as full access. Especially if a person is being introduced to it for the first time.

I don't really know how to make the whole high-school thing interesting. I tend to find the manufactured cookie cutter disney highschool sitcom drama soap thing to be not my thing. If you want to create that kind of story but interesting, I am the wrong person to ask. If you want to create any other type of story but set in a school, my advice is, as other people have said: instead of a story set in a school, have a story whose setting includes a school. A school is just a building after all.

Well, the question was, "How to make a high school setting interesting?" So I'm assuming the author has some reason for what they're doing and am answering the question. I mean, maybe it's a visual novel that needs a quirky school backdrop. Maybe this is a story about high school life with social drama or maybe the Big Bad is the finals test for a desperate kid trying to get a scholarship to college. There's lots of assumptions here that the OP doesn't know what s/he's doing... when this could be an interesting discussion and the success and failure of school settings.

In Madoka, the school's design undoubtedly contributed to the tone of the story and foreshadowed fantastic elements. How great was Homura's strange conversation in that strange school hallway? It was a way better choice than Generic Japanese High School #244. I'm glad the writers went past "School settings are bad" to "We're writing 13-year-olds, school is a thing for them, we're gonna use school to establish their ordinary life before magic shows up, how can we make this place as interesting and worthwhile as possible?"

Guys I just had a link to my story pitch guys. Also am I female silly.

and one more thing i figured out what i should do. maybe have the series take place during either weekends or breaks most of the time. at times it will have them go to school only if it's important to the plot.

Sounds workable. If the school setting isn't particularly important to the story, focus on more interesting places that are.

The thing is, the school in question was interesting visually but not much more than that. I'd argue that works much better in animation than in prose; an odd descriptor here or there remarking that the school is rather sterile would've sufficed. Different artforms, different emphases.

edited 3rd Jun '16 1:08:47 PM by SabresEdge