Imagine it staying that way for the next two hours while the characters and the story unfolds without a single speck of setting or stage design in sight.
Imagine going to the movies. Imagine scrunching down into your comfy velvet seat with buttered popcorn in hand, waiting for the main feature to begin. The lights go down, the music begins and the actors come out against a white blank screen and act out the entire movie against a plain backdrop with no setting, no indication of where the story takes place, or how it fits in to the plot.
How long will you stay in that chair?
Try imagining Gone With the Wind without the backdrop of Tara and the spectacular landscape of the old South. Or Sound of Music without the mountains of Austria. How about West Side Story without the backdrop of New York City’s mids 50’s dark alleys? What would Avatar have been without the fantastic alien landscape of Pandora?
Not possible. Or at least not very exciting. Where a story takes place is just as important as the characters. In fact, many experts will tell you that setting IS a character in your story. And we agree, which makes setting the perfect segue from our character study of session one of our Behind The Words Writing Workshop.
Moving into session two these next couple of weeks, we turn our focus to the setting of your story. You can see from the above examples that without a well thought out setting, or even the wrong setting, the rest of the story will fall flat.
If you think about it, what other element does setting remind you of? Yes! Characters!
The Setting As a Character
Your setting has its own story. It had a life full of history before your characters arrived there and will continue to have one long after they’re gone. Towns are born, cities developed, even land masses grow and evolve.
Every place you can think of whether it’s a rural local, a well known city, or some planet on the other side of the galaxy is going to have a background. It’s going to have secrets that can either help or hinder the characters. It will have its good side and bad.
What about things like family? Friends? How do those transfer over into building a setting? Well, if it’s a town, it had to have founders and other people who made it grow. Who are the care takers? Who runs the government and the shops?
More Than a Place
A setting is more than a physical place. It’s also got atmosphere, that intangible element that creates the mood. Mood is an interesting thing and like your characters the more you base something in reality, in things that are familiar, the more success you’ll have with having your readers fall into it and believe it.
Mood includes all the senses. Imagine walking into a friend’s house. There may be dinner cooking on the stove, the sounds of water running in the shower upstairs, the house looks lived in, but not to the point of being an immaculate museum. Maybe the family dog runs up to greet you at the door?
Sounds welcoming and friendly, right?
Take that a step further…what if nobody’s home? Suddenly that warm, welcoming home isn’t so welcoming anymore. There’s a little hint of growing anxiety as you search the rooms and find each one empty. The food is starting to burn on the stove and the dog hasn’t been fed.
You’ve just created a setting for a possible murder mystery or thriller.
Think about your novel, where does it take place? Is it modern day or some other point in time? What is the overall mood you’re trying to create?
Tell us about your setting.
Over the course of next week we’ll be discussing the different types of settings for various genres. Creating a fantasy setting takes just as much work as an historical one. Even if you look at something like Lord of the Rings, Star Wars or Avatar you’ll find that big chunks of those worlds are based in reality. They all contain just enough familiarity that we’re able to suspend our disbelief and allow the whole story to come alive in our minds.