Setting

Setting as the World

Setting is the environment in which a story takes place. A story’s setting can have both physical as well as psychological effects on the action and characters of the story. How much differently might a story turn out if it were set in a crowded city instead of on a deserted island?

Your routine, your neighborhood, your take on home, history, climate, and the cosmos are unique, like your voice, and inseparable from your voice. As a writer you need to be alert to your own vision and to create for us, even make strange to us, the world you think most familiar.

Description has earned a bad rap with overlong, self-indulgent eulogies to wallflowers, furniture, or even alien planets. Bur setting involves everything that supports and impinges on your characters. The props of the world artifacts and architecture, infrastructure, books, food, fabrics, tools and technology—create and sustain identity. People behaving in relation to their surroundings define both space and time, and reveal much more.

Assignment:

Draw the floor plan of the first house you remember living in. Take a mental tour through the house, pausing (and marking on the floor plan) where significant occurred. Walk through again, making a list of these events. Pick one of them and write about it. Pay attention to the setting and the atmosphere of the event. How does your relation to the space, light, weather, walls, furniture, and objects affect what you are doing and feeling? Explain in detail, does the space represent safety or confinement?