What creates setting, both physical and emotional?
And what goes into creating a setting that stimulates a reader to feel?
What is the challenge of creating a formative and transformative setting?
What needs to remain static and constant in a setting?
And what needs to cry out for change?
These questions point out the importance of setting and the challenge of meeting the needs that setting addresses in a story or novel.
John Truby, author of The Anatomy of Story: 22 Steps to Becoming a Masterful Storyteller, advises that the setting of a novel needs to include 2-3 separate and distinct places.
His belief debunks the idea that a good story needs to have a list of settings in order to sustain interest and hold the reader’s attention.
While stories require action, the nature of that action, whether emotional or physical, determines the choice of setting.
Thrillers of course, traverse what seems the universe regarding setting.
While a story of this genre may begin in Butte, Montana and criss-cross the globe stopping in Osaka, Japan, then onto Edinburgh, Scotland before ending up in New York City.
Yet again, thrillers consist of a particular type of dramatic action.
And while the personalities and development of character in thrillers is always important as with other genres of writing, plot drives and orders the events of thriller type stories.
The nature of a thriller is to keep the action going, to present a constant set of changes, one of the major obstacles that fall in the way of the protagonist achieving her or his goal.
In this way the constancy of new settings works along with the plot, offering a string of new changes.
This type of change—a string of new settings—does not work in other genres where the external goal of protagonist is more deeply tied to the internal workings and desires of the central character.
Crafting stories of these situations and dilemmas reveal the importance of Truby’s advisement, to centralize the drama in 2-3 physical areas.
The change that occurs in the majority of literary genres centers on the nature of interaction and reaction between the protagonist and her or his supporting characters, not unlike those of thrillers but unlike as with thrillers these transformations are tied to an internal response.
When this is the case setting becomes less of an obstacle and more or a canvas against which the personality and more of the character development, specifically the transformation in beliefs and perspective, occurs.
Setting then becomes a crucible, the holder of the alchemical process where external and inner life meet each other and the choices a protagonist makes renders her or him anew.
The best settings work to reflect this change, the central character’s mode and steps toward adaptation along with her or his feelings and thoughts as they emerge and change in the midst of her or him making choice after choice, decision after decision, action after reaction, etc.
How do you work with setting to show and highlight the personalities of your protagonist and characters?
How adept are you at recognizing the symbols that setting offers?
How much attention do you give in creating setting particularly during re-writes and various revisions?
What has setting meant to you?
What do you think of its role now?