Essential Settings for Writers

For stories about real-life people doing real-life things (and not fantasy), writers can use what I call Essential Settings. These are the normal places a character might go, normal boring landscapes that are typical of real-life and not the Mythic Settings I describe here. Writers must flesh out these Essential Settingsand develop them to the point where they not only influence the MC but might even appear to the reader as a character themselves.

For instance, I recently read The Help recently by Katherine Stockett. It’s a wonderfully written regional fiction novel about race relations and growing up questioning your culture’s entire code. Could The Help have happened anywhere but Jackson, Mississippi? Likely not.

The city Stockett describes does not have Mythic Settings such as caves or vessels or forests or labyrinths. It is neither a quest nor an adventure story or fantasy. Instead, The Help follows very real people on their daily journeys through life, and it takes place in very real settings. Similar to other southern fiction or literary novels, it is less metaphoric and more straightforward. To a fantasy writer it might even feel mundane. Literary fiction can seem to focus less on the place and more on the character’s inner dialogue and conflict, yet its landscape or SETTING is just as important as its character arc or plot.

2 Ways Writers Build Real Life Settings

So, how should writers approach literary or regional fiction Setting or Sense of Place when we want our writing to heal, to reflect, or to impact?

1.        We must embrace Essential Settings. Writers need to describe real, often mundane places in our fiction that nevertheless has a tremendous impact on the story and the character arc. A kitchen. A bedroom. A farmhouse. A pub. A car, office or prison.

These places are not mythic. They are actually quite ordinary, yet our job as writers is to create robust settings that will capture a reader’s imagination and propel the story forward. Unless you are writing a sitcom, the setting is not simply a backdrop; it is essential.

I like the example of Poldark; the story takes place in the countryside and a farmhouse. But through the visuals of the film and the impact the landscape has on the story, we experience a far-from-mundane setting. The Poldark story simply could not happen anywhere else.

2.        Another way for writers to develop Essential Settings is through enhancing sensory input: what does the place smell like, sound like, even taste like? In Poldark, the most impressive sense is distance and isolation. The characters are alone because the countryside is so vast, so rural, so unforgiving. This landscape lends itself to the romance, the desperation, and the attitudes of the characters who interact with the MCs.

In Stockett’s The Help, we experience Jackson as busy and loud with lots of movement and noise. We see its bus routes, children playing outside even at night, the solemn quiet of the churches after a killing, and especially we see the houses where the women work. These are normal houses, not castles or anything special. But Stockett helps the reader see incredible details within them that immerse us in the 1950s and 1960s South: phone cords stretching from the wall to a pantry, linoleum counters, tall ceilings, 1950s brick ranches, a sub-par room with a toilet built hastily in a garage.

These are the details that create such a strong Sense of Place that The Help could not have happened anywhere else. We are immersed in the hot, steamy south, amid fields and old shantytowns and new brick subdivisions. Stockett explores Setting in her story as completely as she explores character development and story arc. Because of its sensory development, you could almost say Jackson Mississippi is a character on its own.

The Writer's Craft: Setting for Writers

These essential settings are the normal places our characters go, but we as authors cannot write them as if they are normal. To the reader, every setting must be vibrant, robust, surprising. Every detail must elicit an emotional response or at least provide a sensory experience. Not a spaceship like The Martian? No problem. Even your front porch can be a visceral experience for your reader if you approach Essential Settings with imagination.

The writer’s craft is to build a world (whether fantasy or real) that is so immersive that the reader feels as if they are jolted into a new place when they close the book to go to bed at night. What, here? I’m in the present? But I was sooooo immersed in X, I was just there.

Learn these Essential Settings and Mythic Settings with me at upcoming writer’s workshops where we get inspired and brainstorm the most immersive Sense of Place for our stories.