A setting is like a travel ticket: it can transport you to a different world, immerse you in an atmosphere and when done well, it will come to life like a character in their own right.
Take Lucy Foley’s ‘The Hunting Party’. A group of friends decides to celebrate New Year’s Eve in the Scottish Highlands, only to get snowed in by a massive blizzard on their second day. There’s beauty to a snowy landscape, but there’s also isolation. Someone gets killed. The gorgeous Highlands are a hunting ground, a prison and a place of terror once the word gets out there’s a killer on the loose.
Or consider ‘Mexican Gothic’ by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, where an independent young woman checks up on her cousin. The ancient castle where her cousin lives with her husband and his family is odd, to say the least, and as it turns out, full of secrets. As the story progresses, the castle becomes as much of a character as any other family member and just as vicious, too.
In short, a setting is much more than a place where the story happens. It’s a tool that can enrich your story: it can create an atmosphere fit for your genre (e.g. Shirley Jackson and ‘The Haunting of Hill House’), it can bring your characters to life (think Count Dracula or the housekeeper in ‘Rebecca’ by Daphne du Maurier) or ‘Americanah’ by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, where the heroine’s migration from Nigeria to the United States brings about a major change in how she thinks about race and how she’s seen and treated by others.
If we’re talking about a real setting, a place that exists or has existed at some point in time, then digging out facts and stories about it is a good place to start. There’ll still be quite a few blanks to fill in, but with good historical sources, you’ll be able to define the smells, the textures and other specifics about your setting. Once you have all the details, or some of them, take a closer look and develop your setting as if it was a character. For example, like characters, settings will have good or bad days, they will have personal histories tied to specific people or objects, they will have their secrets and sometimes their secret weapons as well as hidden spots and places almost no one knows about.
The more of these details you can flesh out about your setting, the better you’ll be able to use them in your story. If you need the mood to change, you’ll be able to do this by shifting the light or changing the weather. As in real life, people’s mood can change as quickly as the weather and a powerful description of this change will do an excellent job at showing why people are all of a sudden sullen or grumpy.
In my short story, ‘Marcel’, for example, the house acts as a third character coming up between two friends. Yes, it has its own agenda. Is it all in the character’s head or is the house really acting up? I like to think of it as a mix of both. At any rate, Marcel was a good excuse to bring together two friends who hadn’t seen each other in a while and test their friendship.
There are other ways to make use of the setting in a story. You can cherry-pick specific objects that are relevant to the story, or use a town or an outer place as your setting. When it comes to the setting, there are many things to play around with and endless ways to use them in a story.
I suggest you start by tackling a few of the questions below and see where they take you.
1. Write a scene on a perfect day
All settings have good days. If it’s a house, consider the day when it’s tidy, polished and full of laughter and the sun is seeping generously through the windows. If it’s a town, then it’s spring or summer, the trees are green or in bloom, the street artists are performing and the inhabitants are not in a hurry and in a good mood.
Imagine your setting is a character on their very best day, when everything is just right or nearly perfect. Whatever your setting, write a loose scene where you describe both the setting and the people on a perfect day, down to the nitty-gritty details about the shades of ice-cream, colours of furniture, the state of plants and the quality of the light.
2. Write a scene on the most terrible day in history
Just as there are days when nothing goes right and everyone seems to have an agenda, there are also days when you simply don’t want to be stuck in a certain place, be it because the place is cut off from the world thanks to the circumstances, or because of a bunch of people that wouldn’t normally be there. Picture your setting on its worst possible day. What is going on?
Write free-style, describing your setting in as many details as possible. How does the place look as opposed to the perfect scene you described earlier? Who are the people there and how do they behave? Are there any beings, stories or memories that arise on such an occasion? What is the worst thing that could happen at that moment? Make it happen and write it down.
You’ll be able to feed your story from these descriptions whenever you need a change of mood, scenery or more trouble for your characters. If the setting can inflict these things at will, even better.
3. What thing(s) have happened in this place that have left a trace?
Think about the history of your setting. What were the key events that marked it and what have they left behind? Be it physical traces, legends, stories or bodies, list them all and explore them one by one. Such traces are powerful to nudge the characters or push your story in a specific direction.
4. What is a well-kept secret about your setting?
Every place has a secret and while some come to become legends, others die with their inhabitants. Trace back a secret that almost no one knows about today and figure out why. Secrets are useful tools in storytelling and can act as glue to story pieces or as an amplifier of the genre. They are useful even if you’re not writing horror or mystery. Think of the ‘Bridgerton’ series, how secrets about people and places serve to unite or divide the characters and stir conflict. Conflict is the fuel of a story. What whispers will your story be carrying along the way?
5. What characters have nice memories related to the setting and what has happened?
Even the worst places in the world hold nice memories for some people. Maybe they were the place of their first official date (e.g. the garbage dump in the American ‘The Office’ series becomes a date venue for Erin and Andy), or perhaps that’s where they made an important decision, or overheard something that changed their lives. List five to ten such memories tied to your setting and pick two or three to explore in more detail. Put yourself in the shoes of these characters and visit the setting on its non-typical day. Bring out the memories it evokes.
6. What characters have terrible memories related to the scene and what has happened?
Imagine a sunny beach in a tropical paradise at its best, blue skies and perfect waves, except you’ve just been dumped in front of a bunch of strangers and you couldn’t care less about the sun that’s burning your skin. All settings have some not-so-nice memories tied to them, even the most gorgeous holiday destinations. List five to ten terrible things that have happened in or around your setting at any time, then pick two or three to delve into greater detail. Be it a personal tragedy, an accident, professional/financial ruin, or something else, try to see the setting through the eyes of the characters reliving these terrible memories.
7. What are the three objects that best describe the essence of the setting?
If your setting could be distilled into three objects, what would they be? Picking meaningful objects can enhance the symbolism of your story and shortcut your way to the essence. Describe the story behind each object and related persons. What does it represent and for whom? Could you use any of the objects to enhance the symbolism of your story?
Let me know how these exercises work for you and what else you want to read about.
