Heart of Story: Part III Setting

Setting is the end result of world building.  Your setting is the portion of your world that can be viewed through the characters’ eyes.

Many writers get hung up on setting.  It needs to be interesting but characters and conflicts are the focus of any real story.  The setting is just the backdrop.  There are rare times when the setting can be a supporting character and can often be a source of conflict but it will never stand alone.

Imagine your fiction as if it were a painting.  The setting is the canvas.  Character is the brush through which you translate what is in your head to the canvas.  Conflict is the paint that adds color, texture and life to the painting.

World building is fun, it’s interesting and it’s very gratifying for a lot of writers.  You need to world build until the world is a real place in your mind.  The reader is only going to glimpse a small portion of that world, but you know so much about the rest of it, that any portion you show will be real to the reader as well.

The trap many writers fall into is the dreaded world builder’s disease.  This happens when you spend so much time creating the world that you never really write anything in your novel.  There are people who do this for a few months and get bored only to move on to another project, while others will world build for years, decades even.  Think J.R.R. Tolkien without ever making it to print. 

I think this happens for a number of reasons.  World building is fun but I think it is a way to cope with the fear of failure for many writers.  If you are producing material, usually in the form of a chaotic encyclopedia, then you can say “Yup, still writing that novel. Been workin’ on it for ten years.”  This is a good cover as to why the writer never finishes anything because non-writers don’t realize that a book can be cranked out in a few months rather easily with the time and effort to dedicate to it.

If you find yourself developing world builder’s disease I would suggest that you stop and take a step back from it for a few weeks.  Then look at what you’ve created, even if it’s all just in your head, and ask three very important questions:

1. Whose story is this?
2. What conflicts must this character (or characters) overcome?
3. What will make this story interesting to anyone other than myself?

How’s that for a miracle cure?  Bing, bang, boom, you’re cured. 

If you can’t answer these three questions, then you need to read fiction in your genre and anything else that might interest you.  You need to study the craft of writing and storytelling.  You might have to accept that you’re world, though it was fun and all consuming for you, might not be interesting to others.  Maybe just walk away from it for a while and work on something fresh and new.  You might walk away from it forever and that might not be a bad thing.

I realize that I’ve largely downplayed the importance of setting.  Setting is only less important than character and conflict.  It is one of the four elements of the Heart of Story and there’s a very good reason for this.  Aside from being simply where the story happens, setting plays several major roles in your writing.

Setting directly influences and defines character and conflict.  A boxer from America is going to act, think, talk, move and fight differently than a boxer from Brazil or Thailand.  It effects how characters interact with the local population, the types of natural dangers (man vs. nature), the use of language and an almost endless variety of other factors. 

Setting is the mood, sight, sound, smell, taste and feel of your story.  It doesn’t end there.  Setting can take many forms.
• Society
• Government
• Economy
• Religion
• Climate
• Time period
• War
• Environment
• Disaster
• Culture
• Fads and trends
• Generation

Again, all these don’t need exploration here, but in your mind.  Any one of these topics can lead me to a story.  There are countless other examples as well.

Setting can play as much or as little a role in your story as you like as long as the character and conflict stand out and draw in the reader emotionally.  If they are emotionally invested they will stop to enjoy the scenery.  Here’s another list of things setting can do
• Create conflicts (man vs. man, man vs. society, man vs. technology)
• Decide how much or how little exposition you need or can get away with
• Offer endless sources for rich description to help make your story more real

If all of that was too heavy, here’s the short and sweet version. 

Think of setting as the car your characters are driving around in while talking.  Is the car a Corvette, a Cadillac, a Cavalier or Chevett?  How much will any of these options dictate about the story, characters and conflicts?  If it’s a Corvette, at least one of them is rich or a car thief unless the ‘vette is a junker.  If it’s a Chevett, they’re dirt poor, afraid of change or just about anyone in the mid-80’s to early 90’s.

Setting doesn’t just dictate character and conflict but it can and should create tone and mood.  Think of any of the Dark Knight movies and Gotham is practically a character on it’s own.  It’s dark, gritty, mean and corrupt.  Only Gotham could have created Batman, like an antibody to its own disease ravaged body.

I start with setting to find my characters and conflicts.  In fantasy and sci-fi I like the setting to have its own arc, just like a character.  It has its own conflict and the setting must be changed by the hero or be destroyed by its conflict.  This is a great source for meta-plots in serial storytelling.

Next post in the Heart of Story: Resolution!

Listeing to: Weezer- Say It Ain’t So  This is one of those bands I never think of but whenever they come on the radio I crank it and sing like a crazy foo.  Yeah, I can sing too ;0)