Setting: Where

Last week the series on when to set a story ended somewhat abruptly, but we'll return to that before we're through discussing settings in general.  Moving on, it's a good time to discuss where a story will be set.

As mentioned earlier in the discussion of beginning stories, determining setting is an odd thing, because, at least for me, it's not really something that a conscious decision is made about.  Instead, starting a story is, in general, a sort of inter-connected problem with three components, where an idea for a setting, a character, or a problem suggests itself practically out of nowhere, bringing the other two parts of the system with them at virtually the same time.  It’s hardly ever a matter of “I like this story, but should it be set at place X or place Y?” so much as “I was thinking about place X, and an idea for a story came to me,” and so forth.

However, as with the previous topics of the How to Start a Story theme, it would definitely be profitable I think to talk about the different kinds of locations stories tend to be set in, and what the consequences in terms of workload and impact on the story various kinds of settings will have.  The better one understands the tools of storytelling, the more effective the story.  Or something, just bear with me.

Kinds of Locations

Like with the sketch of the aspects of selecting time periods in which to place the action of a narrative, the meat of the discussion here is basically in the different types of locations that suggest themselves when a story is crossing that imaginary threshold between the possible and the interesting.  But the run-down will be brief this time; as always, time is limited and we’ve got to keep moving forward.

Here and Now

The simplest and yet often most difficult setting to write your story in is where you are when you’re writing it.  Unless there’s something difficult and dangerous going on, or you’re inhabiting a place that is unusual or unique in some way, it will likely be a struggle to find a story in a place that’s excessively familiar.  Especially when you’re trying not to write something semi-autobiographical, and want to distance yourself from the characters somewhat.

However, that said, I highly recommend that anyone who seriously wants to be a writer sit down and write about their surroundings once in a while; daily isn’t necessary, but if you’re never pulling the things you write about from your direct experience, it’ll be much more difficult to start to get a sense for which things are worth describing in day-to-day life and which get taken narratively for granted.

Distant Lands - Real

This category exists in two sort of sub-categories, which I’ll call direct and indirect.  Direct distant locations are those which you don’t have convenient access to while you’re writing, but where you’ve been enough times or where you had a memorable enough experience to give a reliable feel for the place.  Basically somewhere you may have gone on vacation, or found yourself stuck in unexpectedly, or  traveled through once on the way to somewhere else.  Think over where you’ve been and what you’ve seen; if you remember a place, odds are there’s something there worth writing about.  Get to a pen or keyboard and explore that.

Indirect locations are trickier, especially here in the information age, because it’s easier than ever to imagine that we’ve been to places that we’ve never actually seen.  I suppose it used to be part of the real charm of National Geographic (in most aspects it still is) and James Bond movies, for instance, that you got to experience faraway and fantastic places as if you’d really been there yourself, while sitting comfortably either in your home or not far from it.  Right now, however, this minute, if I want to know what it looks like at least to stand and look around at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, I can open a new tab on my web browser, plunk the little Google Maps man down across the street, and look at what the summer leaves looked like on the trees on whatever particular day it was that that particular set of photos was taken.  We are immersed in an inordinate wealth of visual and auditory information, basically whenever we like, and the temptation to use that information as a substitute for actually having been there.  It will likely take further research and a lot of imagination to bring a location you’ve never been to to life, but of course it’s worth trying out.  

Distant Lands - Archtypes

Moving further away from the concrete particulars of our own living rooms, past real places we’ve never been to and even further towards the opposite end of the spectrum, we find ideas of places, sort of generic categories of places rather than specific places themselves, when we really only need to hint at the kind of location in order to get the story moving.

To me the foremost example of these is “at sea,” because to everyone but the experienced sailor, the ocean is the ocean.  There can be waves or a calm, and you can be in a life raft or a operational vessel with a destination, but this setting is otherwise virtually featureless.  It’s followed closely by “in the desert,” because although there are actually many different kinds of desert on our planet (and many kinds of seas or oceans actually, but I’m no expert), we all get more or less the same mental image when someone says that it’s where the story is taking place: sun, sand, scrub, cactus.  

Then there’s “In a forest,” which is getting more towards the specific end of the spectrum, as most of us have been in enough different forests (I assume) for a little bit of additional descriptive language to be helpful in nailing down the actual feel of the place (sunny or gloomy, dense or open, evergreen or leaved, etc.).  

Finally we have the two most deceptively not-generic locations; In the City and Small Town, USA.  The former is actually a great deal more generic than the latter, believe it or not; when I imagine a city, I get a more or less clear picture in my head which could stand in for any number of places I’ve been.  Small Town USA, on the other hand, although they might feel like they’re all the same, are actually usually pretty different, once you start looking around.  Maybe.  I’m not sure.  All I know is they’re usually glossed over in almost any story that features one; the characters all want to get out because they feel like it’s nowhere.  But like it or not, it’s where most of us live, and it’s as unique a place as we choose to see it to be.

First and foremost, these settings are ideal for simple stories where the specific historical or real-world context of the story’s action plays very little part in the actual meaning.  

The danger here is making things too generic, because unless the characters and their problem are so overwhelmingly sympathetic and engrossing respectively that we forget to pay attention altogether to the background, it will probably get boring pretty fast that there are no distinguishing features to their environment whatsoever.

I would think of these as a starting point for developing a more complete fictional location as the story develops, if of course it stays in just one place.  One good thing about stories is that there’s no real limit to the number of different places you can try to incorporate into your narrative; the only real limit is your audience’s patience and their sense of probability.  So find yourself a forgiving audience and go nuts, see what happens.  Jetpacks to Jupiter, anyone?

Invention

Finally there are locations which you get to make up yourself.  The opposite of writing your own place, this relies entirely on your abilities as a imaginative, selective, and believable describer of surroundings and on the audience’s capacity to suspend their disbelief.  

While this category can be easily the most fun, because you can set stories in ball pits for instance and no one can stop you, it’s also the most potentially dangerous for writers to get trapped in, because in the end, the setting has to be the background of the story, and can never really be the story itself (with very few exceptions).  

The temptation here is to get so lost in the wonder and novelty of your details that you lose sight of the other two key aspects of building the story: the characters and their problem.

If you’re going to go this route, I can give one or two fast tips to help keep things in focus.  First, give things a reason for being what they are, even if it never comes up in the story proper.  You want your world to make sense, and not to just things be the way they are because they can be.  The more reason, logic, and internal consistency are at work in your imaginative setting, the easier time you’ll have persuading the audience to come along with you and explore.

Always keep in mind that your story will wind up being a team effort between the words you choose to put down and the imagination of your reader.  Try and develop a sense for the probable in the things you come up with and describe, and remember that stories are largely about balancing things that aren’t likely to happen (if the characters or problems are ordinary ones, where’s the story?) with details that are so likely that we’ve experienced them ourselves, or believe we have.

Remember also that good design is often it’s own excuse for being in a story, but is almost never an excuse for dominating the action of the narrative.  If something is particularly striking in the eye of the characters, confine yourself to saying so only when it’s relevant to what’s actually happening at that moment in the character’s efforts to solve their problem.  If you find yourself twisting your character’s actions or thoughts to get a better look at something rad you thought of, but which has no larger part in the actual course of events, then cut the rad thing, it’s taking away from your story and not adding to it, no matter how badly you want to show it off.  Either find a way to make it relevant or save it for later.

This leads us more or less into the penultimate topic of setting discussion: Impact of setting, but that’s another post.