It’s All About the Setting
It’s All About the Setting
It’s All About the Setting
The Story Writer’s Path
Where do your characters live, work, and play?
Setting is a fundamental of fiction along with character, plot, theme, and style. Janet Burroway, author of the seminal text, Writing Fiction, says that character is the foreground of fiction and setting is the background. This background can — and should — be used in a variety of ways.
Mapping the Novel
What you need to know before you start writingwritingcooperative.com
It’s easy to underestimate setting. It’s just where your characters live, after all. Right? But imagine To Kill a Mockingbird not set in the south. Or the Harry Potter books not set at Hogwarts. A River Runs Through It not set in Montana. Your favorite science fiction not set on another planet — or in a different time (because time is a part of setting, also, but we’ll get to that).
How important is setting, anyway?
Think how different you feel and act in different places, the mountains vs. the ocean, for instance, or the city vs. the country. We tend to have emotional reactions to places, perhaps for mysterious reasons we can’t identify, or because of something that happened to us. I tend to fall in mad love and mad hate with places for no discernable reason. Like Boston, for instance — just never could quite bond with that city. But I fell instantly in love with Chicago. So go figure. The same is true for your characters, and so why not use this? Among other things, reactions to place show emotions and reveal more about our characters.
We identify strongly with the place we find ourselves and seek to understand our relationship with it. Every time I write a journal entry, for instance, I automatically, without thinking, start by saying where I am — “Outside again, and it’s cold.” Or, “I’m in LA, sitting in the sun.” This is part of what I call rooting the reader in the scene, and it is crucial for novel writing. I’m going to talk about it more later.
Let’s turn to Janet Burroway once again for some more insight:
“Our relation to time, place and weather, like our relation to clothes and other objects, is charged with emotion, more or less subtle, more or less profound. It is filled with judgment, mellow or harsh. And it alters according to what happens to us. In some rooms you are trapped; you enter them with grim purpose and escape them as soon as you can. Others invite you to settle in, to nestle or carouse. Some landscapes lift your spirits, others depress you. Cold weather gives you energy or bounce, or else it clogs your head and makes you huddle, struggling. You describe yourself as a ‘night person’ or a ‘morning person.’ The house you loved as a child now makes you, precisely because you were once happy there, think of loss and death.”
So how do we even begin to evoke these kinds of emotional responses from our setting? There are many aspects to consider. Read on for a rundown on them.
Three important elements to a good setting
According to editor Nathan Bransford, the following are keys to an engaging, vital setting:
1. Change Underway. Great settings are dynamic. The best settings are those that are inherently linked to plot. Some examples: Dirty Dancing set against the backdrop of the big old Appalachian hotels losing business. To Kill a Mockingbird, with all the tensions of a small town and racism, Lord of the Rings, a world in turmoil. “Something is happening in the bigger world that affects the characters’ lives,” Bransford says.
2. Personality and values. Certain traits are ascendant, such as every man for himself in The Road, or normal values have become skewed, as in Catch 22.
3. Unfamiliarity. “A great setting shows us something we’ve never seen before.” Someplace we’ve never traveled to (and likely won’t) or someplace that shows us a familiar place with a fresh perspective.
What does setting comprise?
Big Setting
“Big” setting and “little” setting are my own terms for different kinds of setting. “Big” setting, to me, is the broad strokes — city vs. country, and the specifics, Manhattan as opposed to Boston. Within big setting you’ll find interior and exterior settings. The locations we choose to live in define us. Someone who adopts a back-to-the-land lifestyle in the country is very different from one who loves the big city.
The spaces we choose to live in also define us, such as a high-rise apartment versus a home with access to the outdoors (which is vital to me, but may not be vital to you). And the interiors of our locations further define us. The places we choose to frequent say a lot about our personalities and lives. For instance, does your character prefer to eat out at a rollicking brew pub or a genteel French restaurant? Each choice of setting says something about character.
These choices can be congruent with your character or incongruent — lots of room for conflict here, such as sending a prima donna out to the farm, or vice-versa, a farmer to the big city.
Little Setting
“Little” setting can be thought of as objects, the things we surround ourselves with. These days we all have smart phones and Ipads, whereas not so many years ago they weren’t even invented. In that short time, these small objects have transformed the world. The things we surround ourselves with evoke who we are. Objects define us. This is true to a fault in our society, as the popularity of shows such as Hoarding: Buried Alive show.
Objects can have a huge impact and become a part of the plot. For instance, I have a friend who only recently got a smartphone. Before that, she used an ancient flip cell. And that limited how people could reach her — no texting, difficult to call because of bad reception. In one of my novels, the main character is a baker who owns a special apron her mother gave her. It becomes a key part of the plot late in the book. In another, heroine carries her journal with her everywhere. When she leaves it behind once, the hero must take it to her — giving them a chance to see each other again after swearing not to.
Temporal Setting
Time is part of setting. This is obvious in the case of historical fiction. But time is important in contemporary novels as well. In our fast-changing world, a day can make a difference. Take, for instance, a novel set on September 10, 2011 as opposed to one set the day after.
Time can figure into story in other ways, too. Consider the popularity of a “ticking clock” in thrillers and mysteries. Time can move slowly and languidly in a scene, or fast as a rabbit hopping by. These are all choices that you, the writer, can control.
Societal/Cultural Setting
This is a huge part of setting. Think, for instance of Anna Karenina, or any number of novels that exist in a societal milieu. Whether your characters exist in an upper-class world or a working-class world or any place in between makes a huge difference.
Power Structure
Every setting has a power structure, from the kitchen to the boardroom. Characters behave differently when power shifts and changes. If you’re an underling, you act one way. Should you suddenly gain some power, you act completely differently.
Weather Setting
Antarctica is very different than the Tropics, and the weather of each place has an impact on its characters. We tend to think of people living in tropical weather as laid-back and casual. The heat makes them so — it’s too hot to get angry. On the other hand, intense heat can also inflame tempers and bring situations to a head. Conversely, cold weather drives one inside to hibernate. Perhaps a character’s emotions are chilled, just like the weather.
Types of Setting
Realistic
Self-descriptive, probably what most fiction is written in.
Symbolic
Setting can be used symbolically. For instance, what I mentioned above, with a character’s emotions as chilly as the weather.
Action
If the setting and the character are harmonious, then the setting will assume its place in the background and it won’t be noticed as much. If they are inharmonious, the setting will assume a much more important place in the novel.
How To Write Setting
So now we come to the all-important question: how to use all this information about setting.
What You Need to Know
At minimum, you need to know the following settings for your novel:
— Your character’s big setting (ie, what city does she live in?)
— Your character’s home
— Your character’s work
— Any place your character or characters hang out, such as a “third place.”
Once you have these elements identified, you’ll want to make sure you have them firmly placed in your mind so that you can describe them. Some writers draw out a floor plan of their character’s home in order to keep it straight in their head. You can also create a Pinterest board or print images of what your character’s home and workplace might look like. And if you’ve invented an imaginary world, a map — for you and ultimately for your readers — will come in very handy.
Ways to weave setting into your writing
Descriptive chunks
This would be traditional description, when you pause in your narrative telling to offer some description. Example:
“A coloured topographical map of Rhodesia shows the west and the northwest of the country as pale yellow fading to green, which means that is it low and hot, barely undulating as it humps toward the Zambezi River valley. It means that when the wind blows it picks up fists of stinging sand and flings it against your skin.”
Don’t Let’s Go To the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller
This is the most common method of getting in setting.
Woven in as part and parcel of the story
This is when the setting is so much a part of the story that it is interwoven in the narrative, as in this story, Swept Away, by T. Coraghessan Boyle, which is set on the Shetland Islands:
“The wind skreeled off down the street, carrying bits of paper, cans, bottles, old bones, rags, and other refuse along with it. The bird woman’s eyes blinked open. Robbie Baikie, all fifteen stone of him, lay pressed atop her in a defensive posture, anticipating the impact of the car, and he hadn’t even thought to prop himself on his elbows to take some of the crush off her.”
(Here’s the link to read this story online.)
How to root the reader in scene
It is so important to keep the reader away of where she is at all times. My students are familiar with my comment, “root in scene.” I write it on their manuscripts all the time and talk about it constantly. Without rooting the reader in the scene they can feel lost and unmoored. It’s easy to do this, just hark back to the physical setting. Always start out with a sense of where we are (make sure you mention the setting at the start of the scene) and then keep referring back to it. This is when the use of little setting items can come in handy. Such as if there’s a scene where a character is cooking, you can write things like, “She measured a cup of flour and thought back to her conversation with June.”
Pitfalls of writing setting
The novelist Scott O’Connor talks about the following as pitfalls of setting:
— When it is used just as a backdrop, like a painted backdrop on a kid’s stage set. If you pulled the setting out, it wouldn’t change a thing. It doesn’t add meaning or nuance to the story.
— When it is beautifully written and evocative, but it goes on too long and thus doesn’t add to the story.
We’re looking to find the sweet spot where the setting is inextricable from characters.
Let’s write some setting
The following exercise should get you started on creating setting for your story. And remember, as with all aspects of story, more will come to you as you write. So even if you don’t know everything yet, jump in anyway. Let your mind go wild and just write. If you’re really stuck, describe where you currently live — the bigger location, then your house, etc.
This will be a series of timed free writes. Set a timer. Don’t think, write.
1. Big setting. Where does your character live? City? Country? 10 minutes
2. Your main character’s home. Does he live in a house or apartment or a trailer on ten acres? 10 minutes
3. Place of work. 10 minutes
4. The weather. 10 minutes
5. Any objects of importance? 10 minutes.
Good luck with writing your setting and I hope you enjoy working with it as much as I do.