How to Write Setting in Fiction
The way the craft of fiction is taught-at least traditionally-relies too heavily on either ill-defined concepts or empty suggestions.
Because of that, I’ve tried to suggest new ways to think about writing stories: characterization has nothing to do with physical appearance, dialogue is the best way to drive conflict, and there is no such thing as plot driven stories.
Beyond questioning how we approach craft, I’d even go so far to say that once you truly understand the elements of fiction- plot, scene, character, dialogue and setting-you start to see how they are really one thing (trippy, I know).
In the same spirit, I have a very different way to define setting:
Setting is the combination of scene descriptions and blocking narrated through a specific voice to produce the effect of atmosphere.
Atmosphere, so achieved, is when setting transcends a simple environmental backdrop to become a character in itself that drives the verve of your story.
This is what reviewers, critics, or just anyone that leaves 5 stars on your book’s Amazon page means when they say something like, “I loved the setting so much that I didn’t want to leave it when the book ended.”
If you want to create an atmosphere so real that people aren’t struggling to finish but sad when it ends, then you should be focusing on creating atmosphere not setting.
How is Setting Traditionally Taught?
Okay, I’m a bit dramatic. They’re not getting it all wrong. In fact, it’s important to know the traditional mode in which setting is taught to attain the building blocks for a more integrated approach.
Typically, though there are variations to this, setting is thought of as comprising time, place, and mood.
Time in setting consists of two aspects. First, as an era. Edwardian England, pre-colonial America, post-World War II Poland are the first component of setting as time that must be defined, or implied, in your fiction.
The other way time as a function of setting is employed concerns the plot more directly. How long the story is in narrative time will affect the way in which setting is developed. The story that takes place over one day compared to the story that takes place over a hundred years will reveal setting details across the plot at a much different pace.
Place is what most, especially new, writers think constitutes a setting. Without a place for the story to happen, well, then the story doesn’t happen. No story, no setting. Simple, right?
Not really.
Place encompasses not only the environment that characters inhabit but the socio-economic factors of the environment.
If we want to write about the Stock Market crash of 1929 the place in which we set our events are crucial. A large family on the Oklahoma plain will have much different place details than an East Prussian aristocrat preparing to winter in his castle. Which says nothing about how such a disaster in the western world would affect a North African nomadic herder.
When you consider place, don’t just pick a backdrop. Conduct the research necessary to provide the larger, societal details that will directly impact the choices your characters will make under pressure.
The final element of setting is mood or the way in which a story is told to convey a particular feeling to the reader. Mood, in all it’s glory, is responsible for such stock phrases as “it was a dark and stormy night” or “once upon a time” both of which are well known signifiers for the particular story we are about to read. Mood can, and should, be more complex-more on that below-but as a basic element know that it’s really the style (but not Point of View!) in which you choose to narrate a story.
What’s a Better Way to Approach Setting?
Setting + Blocking + Voice = Atmosphere
I like simplicity so let’s conceptualize this as an equation:
Setting is the details that are noticed by the narrator in time and space. For first person narration this will be simple (but not easy!) because all our main character needs to do is relay a laundry list of whatever their eyes are roving over in that minute, right?
As if.
Setting, in your own life, is experienced through the combination of the five senses. A good restaurant wouldn’t be nearly as pleasurable if all we could do is taste the food-though it would still be awesome-we need the clink of glasses, the laughter, the sounds of hard soled shoes scraping across the floor as people crush in to escape the January cold. You need the whoosh of the winter wind scything through the space and the door slamming back closed under its own power. There’s the sound of pans hissing with oil, the smoky, floral, leathery tobacco of a good red wine pressed against the nose. The entire place is a feast and that’s even before dinner arrives. You must do the same with setting in your fiction.
Further, it wouldn’t do to just tell us everything they are experiencing through the senses. It would become a smooth wall of boring detail. We don’t want that. Instead, remember that all fiction is designed to make it more interesting than real life.
Part of that design is to show us who characters are without telling us. Return to that restaurant. Put your main character at the table. Who are they? A bon vivant that lives for the next best thing, going from here to there in search of the deepest pleasure? Has rich wine become their blood and hot, buttered bread their body?
Those two characters will have vastly different experiences at our restaurant, the details they relay will not be the same. In that sense, though they inhabit the same space, they are not in the same setting. Blocking is how characters are moving through time and space. We borrow this concept from our friends in theater and, though little considered by fiction writers, it’s indispensable to maintaining the suspension of disbelief in our readers.
Or are they a tee-totaler, fitness fanatic, dreaming of their next 100-mile ultramarathon and the freedom of coming down a trail, just as the first light of the sun bleeds over the distant, snow-capped mountains-a blessing before they make that last, hard ten-mile push and complete their physical victory?
Blocking must be carefully thought out in both loud and quiet scenes. A fist fight, night journey, magic carpet ride all require the writer to supply precise details about how everyone on the page is moving through physical space to not only ensure the readers’ comprehension but to also ensure they don’t question the plausibility of the action. How many unrealistic escape scenes have we read? Good, believable, blocking will make sure no one can shake their head and mutter “that’s impossible.”
Blocking doesn’t just convey movement in time and space but also the elements, like props, that are available to characters in that space. Props can convey a character’s undisclosed feelings. That’s why we not only populate rooms with chairs, tables, pictures, but also stacks of magazines or children’s stuffed animals. That way, when a couple is sitting together and one of them knows the other is unfaithful but can’t bring it up in conversation they can reach for their child’s favorite fuzzy bear and distractedly tear its head off in a symbolic display to what infidelity is doing to the family. Blocking is an overlooked aspect of setting-especially in genre fiction-that will give your loud scenes plausibility and quiet scenes subtext.
Voice is the psychological affect that the elements of setting and blocking have on the narrating character, including the unnamed narrators of 3rd Person Point of View.
There’s a lot of talk about voice, particularly in literary fiction, as the element that is strongest in a “natural” writer. I don’t buy that.
Mostly because I think that, though some people start with more talent than others, writing well is a skill. Those skills can be identified, taught, and reliably replicated to varying degrees by anyone who feels the calling to write fiction. Prioritizing voice as the most important identifier of talent alienates writers of potential.
I reject the notion of voice as a paramount element for a technical reason too: it can become the most boring part of a writer’s style, especially if it doesn’t change as the story demands. Think of Hemingway, his stripped down and adjective free prose was groundbreaking.
At first.
His later career became tyrannized by his prose style even if the events of his story didn’t demand such declarative and adjective-free writing. It’s why Hemingway’s writing is so easy to parody today.
Rather than having a defined, writerly voice, you must adapt this tricky element to the events of the story. Getting this right is crucial to building characterization because voice is the meeting of a character’s disposition and their setting/blocking. Just like our gourmand and adrenaline junkie in the restaurant, that psychological milieu is communicated through voice by relaying the precise details those characters will notice because of who they are as people.
A traumatized child born in Syria during the height of the civil war making a daring escape with unscrupulous smugglers their parents have hired to get them out of the country will have a decidedly different voice than yet another novel about an undergrad at some expensive private college in New England lamenting how utterly boring American life is.
Our Syrian child might also have the disposition of Anne Frank, who after years of hiding from the Nazis to escape her eventual death still believed “in spite of everything, that people are still truly good at heart.” Perhaps our child doesn’t see the smugglers as shifty, their loyalties sold to the highest bidder but instead as loving fathers doing what they must to keep their own families alive. The precise details that the Syrian child notices on the journey into the heart of horror reveals who they truly are through the way the writer employs voice.
Atmosphere is achieved when you combine setting, blocking, and voice in way that drives your story to a surprising but inevitable conclusion.
How Do I Apply All This Stuff to my Writing?
You could just do the bare minimum of description- ahem, I’m looking at all of your thriller writers right now- to maintain the illusion of your characters actually living in time and space or you can do the work to map out the whole of your novel’s physical scape, plan exactly what your characters will do once they encounter that reality, and pick the precise details that will create the mood your narrator will supply to the readers.
Map, plan, pick. It’s simple but not easy.
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Originally published at https://www.notmfa.com on February 26, 2022.
