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The setting serves as the backdrop to the story. When you tell a story. What you are doing is building a world for people to inhabit and grow into. The fantasy genre has a lot of great settings. Consider, for example, Middle Earth, the setting for Lord Of The Rings. It has enough fantastic and unknown elements, Orcs, Goblins, Magic, and so forth, to make it interesting and intriguing to the audience, while still been grounded enough in the known and mundane to make it believable so that the audience can invest emotionally in the characters.

Look at Sam from Lord Of The Rings. He’s a character deeply rooted in the mundane aspects of being Frodo’s Gardner, but as time goes on he is able to blossom into the ring bearers extraordinary protector and stick with Frodo until his task is done. Sam wouldn’t be as compelling without the grounding that his setting and occupation provide him. But he’s not boring either.
How does one go about striking Tolkien’s balance between the magical and the mundane?
its a question to ponder isn’t it?

I am coming to believe that a good writer needs to be a good psychologist too. A writer needs to clearly understand what motivates his characters and spurs them to action. If he wants to do that successfully, he must understand what motivates himself. After all good characters are a reflection of the writer.

I often feel conflicted about many aspects of my life. It is best illustrated in the picture above. The disabled person is caught between the conflicted forces of yin and yang, good and bad. They’re good and bad things to a disability which cause me to feel conflicted about having one. I vacillate toward acceptance or ambivalence. My characters help me straighten out my feelings.

Conflict, It the bedrock of Drama. Drama is a contradiction. It can bring pain and fear, but, it also makes life interesting. Interest and engagement brings us excitement and pleasure. That’s why we read novels or, watch plays an TV shows. It seems to me, that we, as human beings, gravitate towards drama even as we try to avoid it. We like to experience drama vicariously but not as much directly. Like it or not, drama is a part of life.
I deal with a lot of drama in my life. Some of it is forced on me by circumstance, but, some of it is internal and comes from myself. I’ve struggled with certain aspects of myself for most of my life. I deal with Cerebral Palsy. It is a disability that makes it difficult to walk, talk hold things, and move, that can make easy things hard and hard things harder. I hate it, truly hate. They’re are times when i have begged, literally begged, every god and spirit that has ever called to the human soul to change me. I know what anger is because of Cerebral Palsy, I know what fear is because of Cerebral Palsy, I know what frustration and jealousy are, because of Cerebral Palsy It also teaches good things: Patience, empathy, humor, perseverance, and non-linear thinking.
As much as I hate it, I say ‘hate it’ because its the closest phrase I can think of to describe my feelings about the matter, I’m also aware that I wouldn’t be the person I am, without Cerebral Palsy. You can see where internal conflict arises.

So, how do I deal with this internal conflict? Its difficult. Sometimes, it gets the better of me. Each challenge I have to face molds my self-image as sculptor molds clay. I get to know myself through each challenge I face. I have found that writing is a great outlet for voicing things things that I can’t externalize verbally for one reason or another.
I am writing about an Elf who is an outsider. He must live in a world that isn’t made for him. By the end of the story, he learns that if he wants to succeed, he must turn what he perceives as his weakness into his strength. When he does that, his inner conflict resolves itself. Maybe, if I can do that, my own inner conflict will likewise resolve itself.