I love to immerse myself in a story’s setting: the physical, cultural, and social place in which the characters find themselves and the events unfold. Sometimes the audience barely notices the setting, and at other times it becomes a character in itself. But setting is the rock on which the story is built. I’ve talked a lot about character (character terms, creation tools, character creation) in past blogs. Today we talk about setting. 

What is Setting?

Setting is the environment in which the story takes place. Obviously the physical place, but also the time (point in history, time of day), the weather, and the social conventions and mores of the place and time. Really, anything outside of the characters (be they human, animal, robot, etc. entities) is the setting. For this reason, sometimes artists and critics will say the “setting is a character, too.” For example, in a horror story, a spooky house may take on a life of its own, becoming, in effect, the antagonist of the tale. In fact, it’s not a stretch to also consider the objects in the story as part of the setting.  

My novelette, Water of Life, takes place in a remote backwoods cabin near a creek on a sleety late November afternoon in 1923. The cabin’s porch is festooned with animal traps and drying pelts. Prohibition is the law of the land, and the hill-country residences don’t generally trust strangers. Just about everyone walks around armed to the teeth. As my whiskey-running detective, Sean Joye, makes his way through the frozen forest, he feels like the woods itself watches him and doesn’t much like what it sees. He needs to locate a missing friend, and the hostile location functions as an antagonist, preventing him from reaching his goal. Think how different this story would be if set on a hot summer morning in 2019.

Range of Settings

Setting can be unobtrusive, a low-key backdrop for the unfolding action. The setting isn’t the focus, although it is a real, specific place. The audience often “fills in the blanks” with what they already know (or think they know) about places such as New York City, London, or Los Angeles. Even with the help of those place-tropes, the artist must construct the version of those realities in which the story will take place. The Manhattan of Sex and the City is an entirely different Manhattan than the Spellmason Chronicles series.

Michael Nye’s All The Castles Burned takes place in in the recent past at a midwestern private school. The reader can apply their experience and impressions of the American Midwest, the 1980s, and boys’ schools.  But it is still a fictional world, not a news report. The book provides enough details of the setting so that even those with no experience of these constructs can understand the environment in which the characters play out their conflicts. 

Some settings are only meant to be a background for the action, without even a proper name. “The woods,” “the kingdom,” or “the village” of many traditional tales and fairy stories lack specific details and could be interchangeable. Is Cinderella’s land distinguishable from Snow White’s? (Although in some versions artists make a creative decision to impart touchstones for the audience—for example, “this story feels like renaissance France” or “that animation seems like medieval Bavaria.”)

Other settings are highly specific places and described in great detail. The setting:

• Presents dangers and impediments for the characters. 
• Is important to the characters’ backstories and conflicts. 
• Sets the mood or contributes to the themes of the piece. 

Worldbuilding

Any piece of fiction builds an imaginary world in which the tale plays out. Even the most literary, drawn-from-the-headlines, realistic story takes place in a created milieu. The artist can draw on real life, but will make decisions, large and small, about how things operate. Audiences are good with “willing suspension of disbelief” if, and only if, the story has internal consistency. To provide that consistency, the artist can’t make things up as they go, not for very long, at least. 

While artists aren’t obliged to stick to the facts, especially in a piece that is clearly fiction, they are responsible for making it all believable and following the rules inherent in the story itself.  

The settings of alternative history, fantasy, science fiction, and other speculative fiction genres require a rigorous understanding of the real world and its history in order to make changes in a consistent and believable way. In Nightjar by Paul Jameson, the setting has notes of the English countryside, familiar to the reader from real life or at least other books, films, and TV shows. But terrible things seem to have happened in the past. A whole new set of reality rules are in play, and the author had to work all that out from the start, to make sure all aspect of the tale would hang together.

Secondary Worlds

The setting for some stories looks nothing like planet Earth, now or ever. The very laws of physics may be different. Absolutely anything is possible. These stories are said to take place in secondary worlds. Some feel familiar, like the various humanoid-inhabited planets of the Star Wars universe and others much less so, such as that of the Avatar films. Viscera by Gabriel Squailia is a great example, full of unique setting details the reader won’t encounter anywhere else. 

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