A Few Thoughts on Setting

Setting is a crucial element of fiction, and as a writer, you should be intimately familiar with your setting. Your reader doesn’t have to be, though.

Give them enough to give them a flavor of where they are, but not so much that you bore them.

If you love writing long descriptions and gentle soliloquies about a flower or the view of a mountain from a stream, have at it. Just be prepared to edit most of it out. Kill your darlings, Darling.

We live in a cinematic society. Everybody has seen a mountain, and a stream, and a mountain from a stream, and everything else. We’ve even seen outer space.

Nobody needs your three pages of waxing and waning about the moonlit sky. 

Yes, you will find published books with this kind of nonsense, and some of them do sell well, but they sell in spite of the ramblings about the nature of a flower, not because of it.

So, please, keep it simple, Sweetheart.

What is Setting?

Setting is the time and place that you’ve foisted upon your characters. It’s also the weather. It can also include things like wartime or peacetime. 

Make sure that you know the goings on of your setting in each scene that you write, but drip it out slowly, a few words or a line or two at a time. Please don’t make us wade through pages of what you think life on Mars will be like. 

Just tell us what we need to know, those facts that are pertinent to the story, enough to put the reader in the mood that your character is in and give them a whiff of salt air, let them hear the hulls of the ships scraping against the docks, and watch the waves roll in. Don’t give us a diatribe on the life of a barnacle. Please.

Maybe if your viewpoint character is tense, the ships may bang and the waves may crash and the salt air might have another ominous scent mixed in, like kerosene or gunpowder. When you do use setting, try using it to your advantage by leveraging it to help set the mood.

Setting Minimalists and Maximalists

The above is the viewpoint of a setting minimalist, but the wide world also contains setting maximalists. I don’t like them. I don’t read their books. I don’t have the patience for it, but others do. They must because there are a fair number of bestsellers that I need to put down in the first few pages due to them being grossly overworded.

Do I think I’m a better writer than the guy who sold a million copies, but who had to tell me all about every intricate thread in his grandmother’s afghan?

Sometimes.

If you’re not sure yet where you fall on the minimalist-maximalist continuum, read some of your favorite authors. Pay particular attention to how they use setting. 

There is no one way, and you do have to find your way. I’ve already told you mine.

Just please, if you’re a maximalist, make your depiction of your setting so vibrant and alive that I can’t put it down.

I’ll give you a few tips on that soon.

For now, as always, happy writing.

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