Lesson On Settings
Setting is an essential element in fiction, inseparable from character and plot. Think about the influence of your own real-life setting. How much does the weather affect your choice of daily activities? Do you live in a rural or urban area? What are the streets like? Are they safe?
Are computers part of your daily environment? Do you live in an area of ethnic diversity? Do you live in a house or an apartment? Is it quiet or noisy where you live?
Get the picture? The list of influences goes on. In a sense, you are your setting. The same is true for your main character.
In some cases, the setting is central to the plot, creating the action. Take this excerpt from Jack London's classic short story, "To Build a Fire."
The man flung a look back along the way he had come. The Yukon lay a mile wide and hidden under three feet of ice. On top of this ice were as many feet of snow. It was all pure white, rolling in gentle undulations where the ice-jams of the freeze-up had formed.
Brrr! Clearly, the cold will play an important part in the man's journey.
Now, whether or not the setting is the primary focus, the key is to keep it in the story. Don't let the reader forget where and when the story is taking place. A careful writer will always weave the setting into the plot, embellishing the story with description. Remember, stories go stale when they are limited solely to plot and character.
Let's see firsthand how setting affects description. Study this description:
-The waitress delivered our drinks. As the sun angled in the late-afternoon sky, we made a toast to the future. It felt good to be barefoot, sand on our feet, enjoying a vacation.
We can feel the couple's leisure and happiness. The setting sun and bare feet are linked to the mood of the scene. Compare it to the same scene with less attention to setting:
-The waitress delivered our drinks. We made a toast to the future. We were enjoying our vacation.
Although we still feel the couple's happiness, the scene has little richness or depth. In fact, we don't know where the scene takes place. It could be anywhere.
Finally, setting often matches the emotion of the scene. How many movies have you seen when lightning and thunder begin just as the hero steps into the graveyard? How about lovers reuniting on the beach during sunset?
—Gabriel
Writing Exercise Prompt 1.
With a small group, brainstorm a list of the influences of setting in your life. Remember that setting includes time as well as place! Include everything that comes to mind about your environment: population, air quality, temperature, wildlife, urban life, and so forth.
Now, create an original setting for your story, addressing the influences on your list. If you want your story to take place in your environment, continue with a more detailed description of the setting.
Weaving Setting Into An Episode Writing Exercise Prompt 2.
Once you've established your setting, it's time to practice incorporating it into your writing. Ask a classmate to volunteer a situation for your main character. The episode has to take place in the setting you created.
Write a one-page account of what happens, embellishing the action with descriptions of setting. Try to keep the action and the setting related.
Tip: Your genre of your book typically helps narrow down the consistent setting for example
Mysteries or a thrillers might be in a crowded city street, at a museum, at a conscious secret lab. Haunted woods, haunted mansion or haunted garage etc. (remember these are some of the most common popular writings.
Crime stories: the setting is either out on the field or working within government agencies behind the scenes.
Adventure: Anywhere in the woods, in a city, town, at a beach, under the ocean or even in the sky or completely out of this world or in the mountainous heights of our world. Adventure can have a ton of action depending on where you are in your story. And also depends on how many rules your characters are bound by too. Only those two things the amount of action you can describe within your sentence.
Romance book genres: occurs wherever the author deems a place worthy of the Romantic Atmosphere he pictures within his own brain.
My point of Temporal Distance not being a setting or a point of a view it either depicts a character moving from one small scene to the next. Or it tells us a character has adjusted his actions in the same scene. It is really no different than the italicized director notes in a screen-wright or playwright, Skylights. —Lumna10.