How to Create Settings
Characters in stories must be located somewhere in time and space because readers need to feel situated and fairly quickly.
Characters’ emotional reactions to particular settings reveal much about their personal inner workings. Settings also convey tone of the story by showing elements such as darkness, dampness, desolation vis a vis searing light, dry air and packed urban crowds. Being in particular places during specific times can make characters feel free, trapped, anxious, terrified and any number of other emotions.
There are three types of settings writers may want to consider: Historical, Geographical, and Physical. These aspects of story impact the way readers react. All three types of settings can impact characters mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and physically—and thus can impact readers, as well. Failing to build environments that characters operate in can leave readers confused. Characters are impacted deeply by their place and culture; their stories are part of the larger narrative they spring from. Even if they are in outer space or under the deepest sea, they must be somewhere.
Historical settings include the era, the decade, or the year in which a story takes place. Knowing details of the customs and technology of a particular time period can help readers understand the possibilities and constraints characters may face.
Geographical points to the need to set the story in a specific location, due to the wide variation of acceptable and beyond-the-norm behaviors in various places. Even places close to one another such as the northern or southern part of a state or a city can impact the meanings of actions and reactions. Writers can place characters in imagined environments, but even then, readers need to have a “world of the story” set up.
Physical settings can include elements such as time of day, day of the week, indoors/outdoors, weather, and so on to convey a story’s mood or atmosphere. Many cultural elements, as well, can be key in this regard. For example, a story that happens in a mosque would likely set up different expectations in readers from a story set in an igloo or in a cave. Readers will bring a different mindset to a story happening in a men’s clothing store than they will to one taking place in an elementary school.
How to create settings
The essential tool for creating setting is use of concrete details, zooming in to appeal to all five senses: sight, sound, smell, touch, taste.
One of the best ways to set the stage for a character is to create a word picture of a room of personal importance such as bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, the interior of a truck, etc.
For example, Donna Tartt in The Secret History supplies details to convey the main character’s urge to get away from home:
“I grew up in Plano, a small silicon village…. My father ran a gas station…. Plano. The word conjures up drive-ins, tract homes, waves of heat rising from the blacktop…. a sad jumble of objects: the sneakers I wore year-round; coloring books and comics from the supermarket…. I watched television lying on the carpet of our empty living room in the long dull afternoons after school.”
Along with specific details, another tool for building settings is the use of simile and metaphor to create imaginary sights, smells and sounds in a reader’s mind. In Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour,” the main character—shocked by news that forces her to reconsider her life—sits in her own room, in front of an open window through which she can “see in the open square before her house the tops of trees that were all aquiver with the new spring life. The delicious breath of rain was in the air. In the street below a peddler was crying his wares…. countless sparrows were twittering in the eaves.”
PRACTICES
Use both of the approaches noted above (specific details and metaphors/similes) to sketch in words at two different settings that the characters you created for the Character Practice could inhabit. Include Historical, Geographical, and Physical elements of the settings.
Research into your favorite published writer’s settings. Quote two different sections of effective setting in one of his or her published works. Imitate these two sections using different specific details that would fit a setting for the protagonist/antagonist you created in the Character Practice.
