10: It Was a Dark And Stormy Night: Setting Your Story in Place

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“Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.” ― Anton Chekhov

Setting and landscape can have the biggest influence on your characters, because it’s often the crucible that formulates your story, how you tell it, how you convey it and how your characters develop—major and minor. It’s what sets your story. It’s also what helps you decide what the atmosphere is, and even from whose perspective the scene, even the entire story, is told.

Setting is different than the landscape or scenery around your characters. It includes:

  • Era
  • Geographic location
  • Time of day or night
  • Time of year
  • Temperature
  • Weather (Is your location prone to tornadoes? Dry spells? Long, wet, rainy falls and winters? Tropical?)
  • The characteristics of the surroundings (cold, eerie, warm, friendly, dorm room, sidewalk cafe.)
  • Genre (which I’ll get into more deeply in a later post)
  • Where they  shelter—house (big, small, rickety, new, haunted), apartment, tent, RV, box under an overpass, Hobbit hole, rabbit warren, a haunted mansion—and so on.

There’s a reason that a stage, either sound or play, has a set. It this the environment in which the characters are acting with in and towards. Set also means a collection. A chess set. A china set. A silverware set. A Lego set.

It also means to place. You set your mug down on your desk.

The setting is where all of this takes place. Gabriella set her mug down next to her completed R2-D2 Lego set as she set herself up for work, within the setting of her office.

Notice all the uses of the verb “to set” I used above. You could also write the sentence as, Setting her mug down next to her completed R2-D2 Lego set….

In that case “setting” is a gerund (a verb ending in “-ing”). Setting is also a noun. As you write, you are setting your story in the setting of your location.

Here is where setting, as it pertains to your story’s locale, comes in. Is Gabriella’s office tidy? Cluttered? Hot? Stuffy? In a damp basement? How does she feel about the work she’s about to do? What is the weather like outside?

Setting (and sets), however, can also have mainly single environments. Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope is a good example; it uses one basic set: The living room of the characters hosting the dinner. It’s what goes on within that one environment that creates the story (I highly recommend the movie!)

Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express is another example; the entire story takes place on a train, albeit a few different cars.

Single sets are often done with plays, even intricate ones (Rope was originally a play).

Your setting, of course, can change (even single ones) and the changes can have an effect on your characters. Era also makes changes to the setting. Imagine a high school cafeteria from 1955 and compare it to yours. It’s the same setting, but it’s a different era; tables and chairs will likely be different. Paint. How the students dress. Maybe the cafeteria is now run down. Or maybe it’s gotten a refurbishment.

How would that affect your story, even if it were the same high school, given the era is different, the town has changed, people have changed? Has the neighborhood around the school changed—maybe it was once a clean, middle-class environment and now the neighborhood is caught within financial strife. Or maybe the neighborhood was poor in the 1950s but is now more affluent. Those differences change how you might tell the story, and they also change how your characters behave.

Think of Back to the Future. Marty McFly is sent 30 years backwards in time and is able to (somewhat) seamlessly fit in. What if the same story was told, but he went from 1955 to 1985?

Or think of four high school-aged friends sitting at a pep rally talking about the previous week’s football game. What would go on around them? Now, take those same friends, same conversation, but put them in a hospital room where a friend is gravely ill. Or a cemetery on a cold October night. Or a cemetery on a warm summer night. How would each location change the conversation?

Setting, like all other aspects of the story you’re telling is embellished through action and dialogue, but it still needs a description. And descriptions always are best done with the old rule of show, don’t tell.

I talk about this in my post “Don’t Tell Showingly—Just Show” which is more about over-describing characters. But setting fits as well.

So what does “show, don’t tell” mean?

You can know if you’re telling if your descriptions contain adverbs (words ending in -ly). Adjectives are much better. Adverbs here and there are fine, but too many and the story gets clunky and sluggish. (They’re frequently used in Young Adult literature, which is…marginally…okay.  Children have pretty good imaginations, and I think many authors and adults forget this.)

As Stephen King says: “The road to Hell is Paved with adverbs.”

Are they always bad? No. Even King uses them. But adverbs are like exclamation points which are like hot peppers: Use them sparingly to enhance. And adverbs + exclamation points is the equivalent of tossing both hot peppers and wasabi into your dish. You want the person eating your food to feel a lingering warmth, not have their tongue feel like you’ve melted it off with lava.

So, again…what does show not tell look like?

Let’s start with this sentence, borrowing from the quote opening this chapter: The moon shone brightly on the chunk of glass.

That’s telling.

The sliver of glass sat upon the balmy, night-darkened beach; from where the little piece came, it didn’t know.  Nor did it know of its purpose. And so, it did the best it could to create one by catching as much of the polished silver ball of moon on its thin surface, while the ocean crept nearer and nearer to reclaim the shard.

Longer, yes. But you get far more about the setting and beach. The emotion.

Now, try that same story, but put the shard of glass in a grimy city alleyway. A country barn. A junkyard. A cemetery. Add in something that interacts with it—a cat, a person, the wind, the rain. Show your readers your character’s surroundings, whether it’s that shard of glass or a teenager sauntering into a convenience store for a soda and some chips. What is heard? What can be smelled, felt, tasted? Is the setting warm or hot? Is the A/C on overdrive, making the character happy to leave and go back into the high heat of an August afternoon?

And, yes—inanimate objects can be characters, too. I actually didn’t think about that until I wrote Coming Home and Mt. Hood, Portland, Oregon’s adopted icon and guardian, became one.

Creating a realistic setting depends on your characters and the world you create for them. It’s what powers the narrative.

This is why creating their biographies for your characters is necessary for you. Deciding on the genre and era of your plot. The perspective from which you want to tell your story (present time or reminiscing; first person or third). Which character or characters. So my suggestion is to create a biography for your setting.

Research the area. I recommend this even if it’s taking place where you live

Why would you do so for where you live?

Because memory can be false, even if it’s a place you see every single day. In an episode of Perry Mason, Perry demonstrated this by asking a character if the stripes on the wallpaper in their apartment went up and down or left and right; the character got the answer wrong.

Even I’ve done this. When I wrote Backbeat, I had my characters driving down a highway here in Portland, Oregon, through a tunnel that doesn’t exist. It exists if you’re going east—but not west, the direction my characters go. I have driven and ridden the train numerous times in both directions. Yet, when I wrote the scene, I had the two characters go through the tunnel while driving west. I didn’t realize this until I was on the train, heading into Portland!

JK Rowling also did this; she misremembered how King’s Cross Station in London looks inside and described it incorrectly when Harry arrived for his first trip to Hogwarts.

So accuracy is important for your setting. And the awesome thing is you now have, through the internet, troves of ways to discover how a place you’ve never seen looks. Back when Rowling wrote Harry Potter and the Socerer’s Stone, she would have had to physically visit the station, which wasn’t feasible.

But, to that—John Le Carré set The Russia House in Moscow and Leningrad. He’d never visited either city, and used multiple maps and books with pictures to ensure accuracy—which is important, because someone, somewhere reading your story will immediately notice something you got wrong or simply made up.

This happened on an episode of Criminal Minds which was set in Portland, Oregon. Not only did the incorrectly describe the geography of the area where the murders took place (despite a gigantic map behind them), the murders were set in an area called “Roxy Heights”. There is no such place in Portland. And there was absolutely no reason for the screenwriter and director to (1) mis-describe the geography and (2) give an area a fake name. And to top it off, the huge map the BAU team was using had “Roxy Heights” printed on it.

For one, it irks the people who live in the area where the story is taking place. For another, there was no reason to make up an area within an existing city (I make up a town in Coming Home, but that’s different). And lastly, it’s lazy writing.

Sure, there’s homes where the episode of Criminal Minds is taking place, but all the writer had to do was call that neighborhood by its true name: Portland Heights.

“But,” you might say, “can’t someone just overlook it? Suspension of reality and all that?”

Sure. If your story is taking place in a fictitious town. Or on a planet in a distant solar system. Otherwise it’s as I describe above: Lazy writing. And lazy, inaccurate writing detracts from the story (it also does nothing to move the story along). And when you detract from the story, you disengage the reader. You want your readers to stay in the flow of your story, not be jarred out of it saying, “Wait! That’s wrong! That doesn’t exist!”

Verify, verify and verify again. With all the information you have available to you through the Internet, there’s no reason for you to incorrectly describe a real location.

And, yes. It matters. Inaccuracies like the one I describe above make for bad writing.

In addition to the geography, much of your setting comes from the narrative you choose.

Part of it is your own voice telling the story and what your characters choose to do. That means the point of view you choose will also be part of what determines the setting (what if Cinderella were told from the point of view of one of the stepsisters?)

That also means you’ll need to decide not only whose story it is, but from what perspective, as that, and your narrator’s/narration’s personalities will determine how the setting is filtered.

Meaning, seeing it through a little girl’s perspective would likely be different from an elderly, curmudgeonly old woman. And then you have to decide on the point of view; there are four main ones:

  • First-person (told from one character’s point of view only; they have absolutely no insight into any one else, other than the personal observations.) I walked down the street, feet aching from my cross-town trek after my car broke down.
  • Second-person (“you” are told the story as if it’s happening to you. It’s not used often, but there are times when it works well, such as the Choose Your Own Adventure books.) You walk into the haunted house and hear moaning and creaking. Your skin goosebumps.
  • Third-person omniscient (you get into more than one character’s head and see the story/plot from several points of view. It’s one step away from first-person). George R.R. Martin uses this for his Song of Fire and Ice books, as does J.R.R. Tolkien in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. This is a more complicated way of telling a story as you have to keep straight many different “voices” and who is actually narrating their story as you edit.) Jenna woke up from the odd dream, exhausted. Grogginess clutched at her, and she brushed away lingering confusion as to where she was.
    You know your character’s thoughts, feelings, reflections and thought processes, and you relay them to your reader through your words.
  • Third-person limited (one step away from first-person; it’s told as third-person, but, again, you only have the perspective of one character.) Jim was the kind of guy who always had a joke to tell, though sometimes at inappropriate moments. I think that came from nervousness, because he always seemed to feel awkward at those times. Could happen real fast, too—be all confident in one second, then, in the next, he couldn’t seem to figure out what to do with his hands or how to stand. Sometimes the reason was obvious—a pretty girl talking to him—but sometimes it happened out of the blue.
    Generally, this is accompanied by the narrator speaking from their own first-person point of view.

You can, if it works well, and you can keep it all straight, use a combination of all four. I’ve read stories where this works brilliantly, but I personally have a terrible time with writing multiple points of view. I’ve tried it. And what happens with me is I realize I’m editing one character’s actions from the point of view of another.

You may have to experiment a bit before you know how you wish to narrate the story, and/or from whose point of view it mainly takes place. Point-of-view can also be used artfully to foreshadow the fates or destinies of certain characters (as George R.R. Martin does.)

So how exactly does point of view and the narration affect setting?

Take my example above. I told it from the perspective of the shard of glass.

Now try it this way:

What is this? The beach wondered. What is this object that wants to steal my moonlight? How dare it settle upon my sand and try to become a part of me, uninvited? The beach called upon the wind. Wind—tell me what this is? Tell me who dares to step onto my shore?

The wind gathered itself up, soft and balmy from the sunny, summer day. It blew itself down the beach towards the little glisten of light and hovered a moment, curious as to what who new little visitor was. The wind stopped, startled, as it felt something cut into it, jab it. It looked down and saw sharp edges and a sharp point, sitting like a long, scratching claw pointing towards its brother and sister, Sky and Moon.

Do you sense the differences? The glass sees itself as a little innocent creature, who wants to celebrate the beauty of the Moon; the beach sees the glass as a rude intruder—and the wind, at first merely curious, sees the glass as an enemy. Each narration creates a different feeling to the story. The setting, while still the same beach, is differentiated by the character’s point of view.

I could continue this from the point of view of a piece of driftwood. A crab scuttling across the beach. A human taking a nighttime stroll.

This is why an important aspect of creating your setting comes from research (I’m going to delve further into research in a later post).

Coming Home takes place in northwestern Kansas, in a geographic area where there is an abundance of underground streams, as well as many above ground. Elsewhere in Kansas this isn’t found, necessarily, and I went into my first few drafts thinking all of Kansas was dry and arid. Until I began to research the state’s geography (beginning with Google Earth), I didn’t know that the story I wanted to tell couldn’t take place where I originally envisioned it. I also needed to create a realistic, but fictional, town and county. My setting had to change.

Yes, I do make up some geography in Coming Home that doesn’t exist in that corner of the state—but, in this case, it works because I base it on geography that actually exists there.

Anyone with knowledge of the area in which you’re setting your story will find (egregious) mistakes jarringly wrong and unacceptable. That’s why research is so important. Accuracy is extremely important in creating your setting.

Why?

Because research creates realism, and realism allows you to create a realistic setting. And that allows you to then create the atmosphere you want (suspenseful, easy-going, worrisome, exciting, and so on.)

Even Stephen King, who creates fantastical settings does so in a realistic way. I’d be willing to bet he researched the geography of where he put the town of Desperation in Desperation, as well as how mines are laid out and created, even if though those details don’t appear in the story in great detail. They do to a certain extent as the climax takes place in a mine—but the more details you have about the setting of a scene, the more realistic you can make it for your readers. Having that framework of reality under his belt allows King to create an eerie, terrifying setting in a real place.

Temperatures are different. So are the environments and what’s there (types of trees, animals, plants, locations of water.) A winter mountain forest in the Coast range in Oregon will be quite different from one in the coastal ranges in California, Australia, Chile or Hawaii. Beaches vary. They even vary on each island of Hawaii. Until you know the details of your particular setting or settings, you can’t create a truly realistic scene.

A western Kansas prairie is different than one found in the eastern end of the state; it also differs from the prairie you find in Ottawa, Canada. While weather is similar, it’s still different.

Each location may have a forest, a beach, a prairie, but the information of where those locations are is how you know the setting, and the more details you have about it, the easier it is for you to create your atmosphere and your characters.

It also allows you to possibly come up with a plausible reason for why you have the Kansan landscape rife with palm trees or an active volcano in Tucson, Arizona. If you can come up with an explanation that could be accepted—because you’ve based it on an aspect of real geography—then go for it.

But beyond location and geography, setting also includes each smaller locale as well. A house. A room in a house. A closet, a hallway, a garden, a post office.

A large portion of Coming Home takes place in the feed store that’s been in Lana’s family for three generations. When I started writing the book, I essentially  knew what was sold at a feed store, but not all feed stores are the same.

So not only did I research Kansas as a whole, I researched feed stores, and learned there are all different kinds. One in cattle country in central Oklahoma will carry different items than one found in the middle of New York City (yes, there are large feed stores in NYC) or one situated in Kentucky where thoroughbred horses are raised. Products overlap, but vary based on the needs of the consumers. This is important for you to know, as you can then build your setting in a realistic way.

But even if you become an expert on a specific geographic location, it still comes down to showing, not telling. So think of it as “storyshowing“, rather than “storytelling“.

While you will never use all the information you learn about your area, the richer your knowledge of your characters and their environments, the more interesting and filled-out you can make the characters and their world. The more interesting and filled-out the characters and their world, the more real they are to you. The more real all of that is to you, the more real it becomes for your readers. The more real it is overall, the more you can show, not tell.

This is how you breathe life into your story, which begins to tell itself and you basically become the medium through which the words arrive on your screen or paper.

EXERCISES

1) Come up with a little story (3-5 paragraphs) and rewrite it in different settings, though told in your own voice. You can try:

  • A busy street corner
  • A forest meadow
  • An alpine forest, almost touching the glaciers of a mountain
  • A desert
  • An empty lot
  • Any other location that you want to try

2) Watch, while taking notes the movie Predator, then Aliens. Do not go by memory if you’ve seen them; watch them both.

Both movies have the same story: Humans go/a human goes up against a seemingly unstoppable alien adversary. (Good to also watch about plot development as the story is the same.)

As you watch the movies, take notes, focusing on how the setting affects the storytelling of the differing plots and the atmosphere. What’s different? What’s the same?

Now, focus on a story you’re either actively working on or have waiting in a folder. How can you apply what you sensed about each movie to your stories/plots?

 
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11: Choosing the Storyteller: Narrative and Voice
9: Placing Your Story: Landscape, The Oft-Forgotten (and Sometimes Central) Character