Setting: Impact

At the end of the last session on Setting, in terms of how to start a story, the matter came up of describing objects in or aspects of the environment that the characters are experiencing because they’re impressive in some way.  A huge ship sailing by, an odd blue plant growing near the road, a person who resembles a celebrity sitting across the room.  All things which we would notice in our day-to-day life, and which we might report to someone later on if we thought it was interesting enough (“I swear to God he looked like he was about to shoot blades out of his hands right there and skewer his coffee!”), but which wind up detracting from a story if there’s no real reason to bring them in.

This point of relevance to the overall story you’re trying to tell is the hinging point of the whole matter of setting and its role in storytelling.  (And it’s a pretty simple and straightforward point, so this winds up being a pretty short post.)

Setting is a tool to convey the reality of the characters’s struggle.

When you’re using language to convey a sequence of events, you’ve got to provide some context to your audience.  Where is this happening, and when?  If you don’t provide that information, the questions come automatically and will prevent the person from fully engaging until they’re provided.

Imagery and background exposition are often a huge part of why we sit down and start listening to a story.  For those of us who pick up stories in order to escape from our own lives for a while, the places the author takes us and the things we see and learn about there are personally valuable experiences and often worth repeating.  But the salt of the meat and the reason we keep listening is always to sympathize with the characters, or try to anyway, and to hear about what’s going to happen to them next.

Setting is the foundation of storytelling.  At least, a story without one portrayed convincingly and engagingly will have to compensate for the lack of one in terms of correspondingly exaggerated characters and/or plot (trouble).  Being able to portray the setting convincingly and engaging the audience with its details without distracting from the action takes careful practice, and I think goes a long way towards establishing a story’s and maybe even writer’s style, depending on how much is left in or out, and how important it winds up being to the characters.

But for now we’re more or less constraining ourselves to the question, How to Start a Story, so we need only worry for now about how to choose the setting that our story needs in order to be itself.  And if setting does its job correctly, in grounding and supplementing the details of characterization, and providing a stage for the action of the story, then it should really only need to be mentioned as it bears on these other two.

So, in the end, all other considerations of particularly interesting times and places aside, and cutting right to the root of the issue of how it’s most important to storytelling itself, the most practical answer to the question “when and where should I start my story” should be “wherever your main character was right before the trouble started.”