In great fiction, the setting lives from the very first pages. Such places not only feel extremely real, they are dynamic. They change. They affect the characters in the story. They become metaphors, possibly even actors in the drama.

In fiction, the setting includes both the time and geographic location in which the story takes place. A literary element, the setting helps initiate the main backdrop and mood for a story.

It includes the surroundings of a scene from the weather to the minute details such as the curtains in the room. The point of a setting is to put your characters in a certain time and place to let a scene play out. Not only that, but a setting helps your reader imagine exactly what is going on while they read your novel.

You'll need to think about creating a worthy setting to support your plot and your protagonist. In novels, the setting (time, place, context) is like another main character.

Physical Locations

Your novel will be set in many locations, both interiors and exteriors. Perhaps your novel begins in an open marketplace in Algiers, or in the attic of a Victorian house, or in the cockpit of a jet fighter, or in your protagonist's home office. You'll have many other interiors and exteriors to create, and some of them may be so rich and intriguing that they reach what authors call a "virtual character."

Some settings will be particularly important to your plot: the bar where your romantic couple meets, where they later break up, and at the end of the novel where he asks her hand in marriage. Or the cliff where your protagonist nearly falls to her death.

Other settings are opportunities to further define your characters. For instance, the details of your protagonist's office, or her boyfriend's bedroom, or her mother's kitchen are extended ways of showing the reader those characters.

Renowned author, Hallie Ephron, states, "Your novel needs a variety of settings unless you want to deliberately create a feeling of claustrophobia" for your reader. This is a valid point.

It's a good idea to start an inventory of all the places where you'll set scenes in your novel, listing the details of each place. As you write, update the inventory so you can keep track of all the details you've added and make the place consistent each time you repeat it.

Geographic Locations

Readers enjoy novels that are set in real places, but if you use a real location you'd better get the details right. Utilize Google maps or images if you have to.

Developing a location requires more than getting the landscape, streets, and buildings correct. The weather, the sounds, the smell, the color of the sky—get these details right and your reader will be transported.

Let the geographic locale shape your characters' behavior. For example, pedestrians on the busy streets of New York or in the subway avoid eye contact with strangers; Texans tip their hats and say "howdy" to everyone. A Milwaukee police officer might have a passion for bratwurst; one of Chicago's finest might be an aficionado of Red Hots (another type of hot dog/sausage).

Below, Stephenie Meyer talks (on her website) about how she used Google to find the setting for her vampire-infested blockbuster novel, "Twilight."

For my setting, I knew I needed someplace ridiculously rainy. I turned to Google, as I do for all my research needs, and looked for the place with the most rainfall in the U.S. This turned out to be the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State. I pulled up maps of the area and studied them, looking for something small, out of the way, surrounded by forest...And there, right where I wanted it to be, was a tiny town called "Forks." It couldn't have been more perfect if I had named it myself.

Here are some ways your novel might reflect the geographic locale you pick:

• How characters talk—word choice, speech patterns, and dialect.

• What characters wear.

• What is considered "good" and "bad" behavior.

• What characters eat and drink.

• How characters travel from place to place.

• How strangers are treated.

Be sure to take advantage of either the fit or misfit of your characters and the setting.

Indoor Spaces

Your novel may have as many as a dozen interior settings. A recurring interior might be your protagonist's home, or the office where she works, or the interior of her car. Create interiors that reflect the characters that inhabit them.

If a character is neat and methodical, his office might be furnished with steel and glass, and a geometric painting might hang on the wall.

The floor and desk of an absent-minded character's office might be covered with drifts of papers and books.

A cheerful, optimistic character's office might be freshly painted with gingham curtains in the windows.

The windows of a morose and brooding character might be shrouded with dusty velvet drapes.

A helpful tip: Sometimes it's easier to write about a room or building if you draw the floor plans where you set the scenes of your novel; this will help you create a consistent sense of the place for your readers.

When you sit down to describe a setting, close your eyes and, in your mind, try to transport yourself there. See what your character would see. Hear what your character would hear.

Is it a mansion, apartment, mountaintop cabin, or homeless shelter? Conjure the details. Maybe it is filled with fine antiques, or battered items picked from yard sales and thrift stores, or minimalist designer furniture, or unopened storage boxes. Is there a large-screen TV or a vintage radio? Does the kitchen have all the latest gadgets or just a microwave for reheating takeout?

And don't forget about the smell. Smells are so evocative of place. Cookies baking or mildew or car exhaust or rotting fish—use these kinds of smells to put your reader there.

Using Real Places

As a writer, it's easier to write about a place where you've actually been. Many authors, following the old adage to "write what you know," set their novels in the town where they live or where they grew up. Then they disguise the place with a different name.

It's fun to use real interiors to set scenes, too. Local readers enjoy finding familiar bars to movie theaters or factory complexes in the pages of a novel. Use caution in creating settings based on real places.

A good rule of thumb: Use a real place if nothing terrible happens there in your novel.

To research a location, nothing beats going there. You can't smell a picture of a street market, or hear traffic on a roadmap, or feel the surge of a crowded busy street from its description, or fully appreciate the beauty of a mountaintop view from a video.

Firsthand research can take the setting in your novel from accurate to visceral. By visiting the settings you write about, you'll find the telling details that make each place unique.

When you go places, take notes or record thoughts on your phone and describe what you hear, smell, and see. Record the sounds of that place. These are the kinds of details that you could never make up. Later, you will be able to use those details that you have since forgotten and create a setting for a scene in your novel.

Using Weather

Whenever you set the novel, there will be weather. Ordinary weather, like cloudy skies or rain or snow, or extreme weather like hurricanes, blizzards, and torrential rain can be exploited to create a backdrop for your story.

Beware the potential nuisance factor in the season and setting that you pick. Set your story in winter in Maine and your characters can't just jump in their cars and go; they'll be scraping and de-icing and pulling on snow boots and parkas every time they go out.

Use weather to enhance your storytelling. For instance, a character who has just suffered a miscarriage would ache as she watches new flowers emerge from the ground in spring. An ice storm can keep a character from traveling somewhere, or it can hold him captive with a group of people he detests.

While it may not be consequential, weather is a given. Even if it doesn't impact your story, don't neglect it. Weather gives a setting authenticity, so even if you don't dwell on it, be sure to at least make the reader aware of what the weather and/or season is.

How To Make Your Setting a Character

Powerfully portrayed settings seem to have a life of their own, but how is that effect achieved? Make your setting a character is a common piece of advice given to fiction writers, yet beyond invoking all five senses when describing the scenery, there's not a lot of info out there about exactly how to do it.

The trick is not to find a fresh setting or a unique way to portray a familiar place; rather, it is to discover in your setting what is unique for your characters, if not for you.

You must go beyond description, beyond dialect, beyond local foods to bring setting into the story in a way that integrates it into the very fabric of your characters' experience.

• Link details and emotions: It is the combination of setting details and the emotions attached to them that, together, make a place a living thing. Setting comes alive partly in its details and partly in the way that the story's characters experience it. Either element alone is fine, but both working together deliver a sense of place without parallel.

• Measure change over time: There are other ways to bring setting alive. One of them is to measure the change in a place over time. Of course, most places don't change much—only the people observing them do.

• Realize that history is personal: Historical novelists think a lot about what makes the period of their novels different from present day. They research it endlessly. Indeed, many historical novelists say that is their favorite part of the process. When the research is done and writing begins, though, how do they create a sense of the times on the page? "With details" is the common answer, but which details, exactly, and how many of them?

• See through characters' eyes: What does the setting of your current novel mean to the characters in it? How do you portray that meaning and make it active in the story?

The techniques of doing so are some of the most powerful tools in the novelist's kit. Use them and you will not only give your novel a setting that lives, but also construct for your readers an entire world, the world of the story.

Creating an Authentic Context

There's more to setting than the time and the place. A novel set in the world of high finance will be very different from one set in the world of high fashion.

It helps if you know the context you're writing about, but it's not essential. Though Sara Gruen had never been to the circus as a child, and she'd certainly not grown up as part of one, her interest in circus life was piqued by a vintage circus photograph and she spent four months researching what would become her bestseller, "Water for Elephants." But she had the advantage of being an experienced horsewoman, so she was well equipped to create the character of Marlena, the circus start with a special empathy for animals and for the horses she trains.

Think about the activities and institutions that will provide a backdrop for your novel. Pick ones that interest you enough to research thoroughly or one that you already know intimately from first-hand experience.

Here are some contexts you might choose for your novel's settings:

• Finance: banks, the stock market, investment firms.

• Gambling: casinos, racetracks, lottery management.

• Art collecting: museums, auction houses, art galleries.

• Journalism: the newsroom, the TV studio, crime scenes.

• Medical research: hospitals, universities, research labs.

• American education system: elementary school, middle/junior high school, high school, four-year university, graduate school.

• Military: branches, national, international, ranks, boot camps, bases.

Whatever context you pick, it's important to learn everything you can about how that context would affect the characters in your novel. For instance, context affects what your characters wear, what jargon they use, what special equipment or skills they need to do their jobs, how their days and nights are scheduled, and whether there's a hierarchy that determines how people relate to one another.

Sweat the Small Stuff

When it comes to creating a believable setting, pay attention to the details. Even small tears in the believability of your setting will stop readers in their tracks.

So once you've picked a time, a place, and a context, you should pay attention to details like these:

• What time of day would the sun rise and set? If you need your character to stand in a pool of light under a street lamp, be sure that it would be dark at that hour.

• How would people communicate with one another? If it's 1965, no one would be using a cell phone.

• How would people get around—short distances and long? If your story is set in downtown Peking, the traffic would be impossible.

• What wildlife would inhabit your setting? Get the birds and the bugs and the critters right for the place and the time.

• Would houses have window screens, basements, tin roofs; would buildings have multiple floors or only one? Earthquake danger, the water table, climate affect what buildings are like in different parts of the world.

Pay attention to the details of the setting you create and your readers will go there with you. But put a condor in the Everglades or an alligator in Australia (their native species are crocodiles) and you risk losing your reader's trust.

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