Setting encompasses not only place, but also time.
Where does your story take place?
When does your story happen?
To truly understand the depth of feeling that setting lends to a novel, read those writers whose names have become associated with a particular place. The following writers are such masters at setting that reading their books may be the best education you can get in how to write convincingly about place and time:
- Eudora Welty is Mississippi and the Deep South.
- Ron Rash writes so convincingly and heartbreakingly of Appalachia that his novels and stories have become one with the place. When one thinks of Appalachian literature, one thinks of Ron Rash.
- Dorothy Allison’s Bastard out of Carolina, a memoir of desolate poverty and abuse, forever linked her to Greenville, South Carolina.
- By the time I moved to San Francisco in the late nineties, I felt I knew the place by heart, thanks in part to Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City.
- Paul Auster, who has published dozens of books, will forever be remembered for some of his earliest novels, The New York Trilogy.
While Ian McEwan writes primarily about England, his chilling novella The Comfort of Strangers derives much of its tension from the setting of Venice—the convoluted streets and hidden alleys are essential to the feeling of disorientation that leads to the protagonist’s undoing.
Nordic writers seem to have a particular gift for creating settings so stark and extreme that the setting itself becomes a major player in the novel. If you want to know how to do setting, read Icelandic crime writer Arnaldur Indridason (Arctic Chill) and prolific Swedish husband and wife team Sjöwall-Wahlöö (The Man on the Balcony, The Laughing Policeman).
On the more literary end of the spectrum, Pers Peterson’s Out Stealing Horses, named by The New York Times Book Review as one of the ten best books of 2007, is set in the sometimes bleak, sometimes breathtakingly beautiful Norwegian countryside.
By the way, Peterson has said, “I do not plan” (sound familiar?) He compares making art to “carving out a sculpture from some material. You have to go with the quality of the material and not force upon it a form that it will not yield to anyway. That will only look awkward.”
For me, setting comes first. I know the setting before I know anything else about the story. Think about the last great book you read. Chances are, you had a strong idea of where you were early in the book.
A novel or story that opens with dialogue often leaves the reader scratching his head. Why? Because dialogue without a clear picture of who is speaking, or a sense of the speaker’s place, is disorienting. Setting grounds a story. When readers enter a book through a strong setting, they have a more complete sensory experience. Our senses drag us into the narrative. When you begin with setting—the dark alleys of Venice at night, the stark, frozen landscape of Norway—the readers’ senses and emotions are instantly engaged.
Remote as Mars
When writing setting, it helps to make the assumption that your audience has never been there. Think of your setting as a place as remote as Mars: you are describing this utterly foreign landscape to someone who has no idea of what the place is, what it looks like, smells like, what the air tastes like.
Speaking of Mars, I highly recommend Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles for further study on setting. Bradbury puts his character on Mars, and describes the place with such utter attention to realistic detail that we feel not only as though we are there, but as though being there, on Mars, isn’t really that strange at all.
Now, think of one of your strongest memories, from any place or time. Write about the setting where this memory takes place.
Write about the setting where this memory takes place.