The setting of a story is like the stage for a play: it transports your audience to a new world and brings your novel to life. Setting is one of the most important elements of a story, creating a mood, revealing insights into the theme, reflecting on characters, and anchoring your plot.

The setting of a story establishes the time and place in which the events of your story occur. It's when and where your characters live and act and can include many different aspects of their world.

1. Physical Location: The geographic and physical landscape, which may involve particular buildings and rooms. For example, your characters may live in a small town, or spend most of their time in a spaceship or office cubicle.

2. Time Period: When the story takes place, such as the Victorian era, distant future, or present day.

3. Culture and Society: The customs, values, politics, fashion, technology, and general vibe of the environment in your story. For example, is it a totalitarian dystopia or a peaceful village? It could even include slang or distinct languages.

4. Climate and Environment: The weather, seasons, and natural features in your story, like forests or oceans.

Settings may be fictional or realistic, contemporary or historical, fantastic or mundane—whatever your fiction genre calls for. But every story requires a particular setting that immerses readers in the tale you’re trying to tell.

When and where your story takes place can profoundly shape your characters and plot. Settings generally fall into three types: geographical, temporal, and cultural.

1. Geographical Setting
Also known as location or place, geographical settings are the environment or geography of where your story takes place—whether real or invented. They can be rural, urban, suburban, wilderness, outer space, fantastical, and more in order to evoke a certain tone, theme, or push forward a specific plot. For example, rural settings like Little House on the Prairie's 19th century Midwestern prairie evoke themes of family, simplicity, and connection to the land. Meanwhile, the empty halls, endless corridors, and isolated location of the remote Overlook Hotel in Stephen King's iconic horror novel The Shining cultivates an oppressive, creepy tone.

2. Temporal Settings
Temporal setting is the time period or era of your story. The time of your story setting will have a massive impact on your narrative, shaping your plot events, the technology available to your characters, their roles in society, and more. This is especially true if you’re writing a historical novel. But it can also impact theme.

Science fiction stories like Ready Player One, set in 2045, explore where current technologies could lead. And medieval-inspired works like Lord of the Rings create a realm that evokes mythical archetypes, emphasizing heroic struggles.

3. Cultural Settings:
The cultural setting of a story includes the customs and social rules that shape your characters. For instance, in Jane Austen novels like Pride and Prejudice, the strict social expectations of upper-class 19th century British society dictate the characters' actions and drive their romantic tensions. The men and women in her novels would act very differently if the stories took place in a modern story setting with different social mores.

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Why is Setting Important?

Writing isn’t a visual medium (unless you’re writing a comic book). This means the words you choose to describe your setting paints a picture in your readers’ minds. The details you divulge on time period, place, location, culture, and more builds authenticity—whether it’s an authentic modern day New York or an authentic spaceship in a galaxy far, far away. But beyond the image you want to create for your readers, setting has a profound impact on several pieces of your story:

Story Setting Affects the Mood
Setting can change the overall tone of your story. Everything from weather to architecture to colors, crowds, natural elements, and physical details work together to create a distinct atmosphere. For example a dark, rainy city can provoke a sense of bleakness while a sunny beach town can evoke lightheartedness.

Setting Contributes to Theme
When you create a setting that’s aligned with your theme, it can emphasize the central message. For The Great Gatsby, the lavish Jazz Age mansions underscore material excess. In Brave New World, the futuristic setting brings the ethical dilemmas of technological advancement to the forefront. The vivid backdrops in those stories makes their themes impossible to ignore. When writing, research historic time periods or societal issues that enable you to create settings that reflect your message.

How the Setting Affects Characters
The time and place in which your characters live should shape their beliefs, motivations, obstacles, and the choices they can make. Like real people, your characters are products of their environments. For example, a novel set in 1945 in New York City will create a vastly different backdrop compared to a small town in the American South in 2020. The sociopolitical climate, cultural zeitgeist, fashion, slang, entertainment, technology access, and accepted social roles would all be different—and so would who your characters can be as people. Protagonists also tend to chafe against the restrictions of their native environment, seeking adventure, meaning, or progress not found in their status quo world. So character arcs often depend on breaking out of their initial confined time and place.

Setting Ties to Plot
The plot of a story has to align with the setting you establish. Whatever time and place you choose to put your characters in, the world needs to follow the constraints of it—whether that’s culture, technology, or social roles. For example, a quest plot in medieval Scotland wouldn’t reference modern technology. And even fantasy or science fiction novels usually adhere to rules within their made-up worlds, such as magic systems or biology. Setting can also contribute to the plot by presenting conflicts for your characters that are tied to the time period or location. Factors like a snowstorm can help two romance characters stuck inside fall in love, or force characters in an adventure to seek out shelter.

Examples from Classic Literature:

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë:
Brontë evokes a gothic tone in her description of the bleak, windswept moors around the old manor, Wuthering Heights:

"One may guess the power of the north wind, blowing over the edge, by the excessive slant of a few stunted firs at the end of the house; and by a range of gaunt thorns all stretching their limbs one way, as if craving alms of the sun."

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
This passage from Twain immerses us in the time and place of the Mississippi River and antebellum South. The river is a setting that symbolizes a journey towards freedom:

"Sometimes we’d have that whole river all to ourselves for the longest time. Yonder was the banks and the islands, across the water; and maybe a spark—which was a candle in a cabin window; and sometimes on the water you could see a spark or two—on a raft or a scow, you know; and maybe you could hear a fiddle or a song coming over from one of them crafts."

By now you must have understood why focusing on the setting of your story is this important. Without an immersive setting, the story may feel salt-less and spice-less!

Daily activity:

This week's focus is on Setting & World-building. Much intensive template works will be done by the writers this week. To get a taste of the starters, comment and tell us about the place your story is nestled into. The name, and a few lines of description about the place. Let us have a peek into this world that you're creating!

• How's the overall progress coming along?