How to Shape Your Setting

Stories can come from many places. Maybe you want to explore a particular philosophical angle or maybe you’ve thought of a fascinating character. Don’t forget that your setting can be just as enchanting a starting point. In this week’s blog, we’ll be using setting as an anchor point from which to conjure your story.

In this post:

• Setting in different genres

• Setting as character

• Place and the relationship to people

• Tying place to plot

• Case study

• Take a cue from nature

Setting in different genres

Setting is a powerful, grounding force in all genres. This is immediately obvious for speculative fiction (fantasy, science fiction and horror), but it is still an important facet of other genres like contemporary realism and historical fiction. While the latter have real-world details to pull from, there is still a great deal of research and preparation that goes into settings from all genres.

In fantasy and science fiction, we’re frequently introduced to worlds completely different from our own or societies layered within it. The thing is, they are almost always a reflection of our world today, so you’ll need to think this through and research carefully. World-building—planning out the details of your setting—is crucial to planning your story overall. I could talk ad nauseam about world-building, so you can be sure we’ll look at these extensively in future posts.

For now, consider how your setting interacts with the genre, mood, tone and characters of your story. As readers, we get a particular feeling when a story takes place mostly at night, or when a city skyline is dominated by ornate, Gothic architecture. If you’re writing about a bat-themed superhero, those details would complement him pretty well, wouldn’t they?

Setting as character

I’ve mentioned it before, but it bears repeating that you should treat your setting similarly to how you treat your characters. A setting has its own history, characteristics and even personality. It has a relationship with your characters as well—perhaps even the most important. After all, your characters live in the setting and learn valuable lessons both from and within it. They might even die there.

So take some time to figure out the key aspects of your setting. You don’t have to fill in all the blanks (they probably won’t all make it into the story anyway), but envisioning details like the ones below can ground you as you write and ultimately make your setting feel lived in:

• What’s the weather like?

• What plants and animals are native to the area?

• What significant events have taken place there (and is there evidence of these in the way the place looks)?

• What are the local people like and how do they generally interact with the setting?

Place and the relationship to people

In real life, when people live, work or visit somewhere, they form some kind of relationship with that location. As with your characters, it isn’t always a positive relationship, but it’s a relationship nonetheless.

Think about it: do you have a favourite place? Maybe it’s your own bedroom, a beach you visited on vacation or a college library. You have thoughts and opinions about these places, even (and maybe especially about) the ones you’re not as fond of. A place could make you feel safe, content, melancholy, reflective, nostalgic.

Likewise, a character’s emotional state, and therefore their decision-making process, is impacted by their environment.

Tying place to plot

The plot of a story is almost entirely made up of its characters’ choices. These choices can be influenced by factors like how well they know a place (e.g., maybe they take more risks when they’re at home and feeling confident) or if they feel any sense of danger there (e.g., maybe being lost in unfamiliar woods makes them panic).

Your setting is almost assuredly populated by flora, fauna and/or other people, so there are also rules that govern the space. The rules of a society, for instance, can pressure characters to conform to certain behaviours, or perhaps they feel called upon to break the mould.

The entirety of a setting is not found in its physical details alone. A place is also the dynamics between its inhabitants and how power plays out amongst them. Our own world is much more complex than what we can see.

Case study

You create a setting where an important resource can be found, but is rare elsewhere. Two groups of people live there and are intent on taking it for themselves.

Even with a premise as simple as that, there is conflict and a starting point for more questions about the setting, like:

• Who are the two groups and where did they come from?

• Are they both from this area or are they from elsewhere?

• Who are their leaders?

• What is the dynamic between the two groups?

• Do they know each other from before?

• Why is the resource important to them?

• Is there anyone outside of these groups who might be interested in it?

Take a cue from nature

The thought might have already occurred to you that this really doesn’t sound all that different from real life. We have built up our societies over millennia in response to the environment we find ourselves in, and we continue to add complexity on top of that over time.

A good thought exercise can be looking at a specific time and place in history. Retrace the actions that got us there, identify who the big players were and determine what role their environment played.

While starting with a particular character and working outwards to fill in their world can be a good seedling for a story, so too can painting in the broad strokes and filling in the finer details along the way. You certainly won’t go wrong if you spend some time thinking about your setting.

Even if they don’t realize it, it’s a huge part of your characters’ lives and the tales they tell.

Mary Kehoe provides structural, stylistic and copy editing services for a variety of written works through her agency, Elixir Editorial. From time to time she dabbles in her own writing projects which tend toward the speculative genre.

She is a member of both Editors Canada and the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP), as well as a founding member and former chair of the Toronto Arts & Letters Club writing group. A longtime lover of the English language, Mary is passionate about supporting writers on the journey to inspire the world.