Novel Setting: Where’s It Gonna Be?
Your novel has to be somewhere. It can be anywhere. Maybe you dreamed up your plot and characters and now you have to decide where to put them. Maybe not. Maybe the setting came first and you have to inserted people and what’s going on with them.
Whatever the case, setting is not an arbitrary detail. It should be given as much deliberation as every other aspect of your story, because it can make all the difference in determining its trajectory.
“Places are never just places in a piece of writing. If they are, the author has failed. Setting is not inert. It is activated by point of view.” – Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House
Deciding on your novel setting(s) is more than just where (and when) your stuff happens.
I read once that setting can be either integral or backdrop. I encourage you to choose the former. Make your setting speak out to your readers in all of its gloom or brilliance, let them shiver in its peril or snuggle into its safety. Click the link to help you avoid clichés when doing this.
“The house smelled musty and damp, and a little sweet, as if it were haunted by the ghosts of long-dead cookies.”
– Neil Gaiman, American Gods
Your Novel’s Setting is an almost character.
It can support everything going on, in and around the narrative. It can advance your characters’ best laid plans, or hamper them, an obstacle creating problems that no one would encounter any place else.
Setting can speak about who your characters are without uttering a word.
“If I carried Catherine to the top of Mount Corcovado and placed her before the statue of Christ the Redeemer, Jesus would close his eyes and turn his back on her. If she touched his feet, the six million stone tiles that covered the religious figure would catch fire and fall like fiery rain.”
– Eric Jerome Dickey, Finding Gideon
If you allow it to, setting can be why, how, and even if things will happen. Setting is geographical location and physical landscape, it’s climate and weather. What happens when people are unexpectedly snowed in at home? What if they get stranded in a snowstorm in a vehicle? What if they are out hiking when the blizzard happens? Everything changes when setting changes.
Setting can, and should, determine the societal structure and culture of your characters. Setting affects the kinds of structures people build, the type of food they eat, and certain occupational opportunities.
“Many of our tribe went to the cliff each night to count the number killed during the day. They counted the dead otter and thought of the beads and other things that each pelt meant. But I never went to the cove and whenever I saw the hunters with their long spears skimming over the water, I was angry, for these animals were my friends. It was fun to see them playing or sunning themselves among the kelp. It more fun than the thought of beads to wear around my neck.”
– Scott O'Dell, Island of the Blue Dolphins
Researching your setting helps you prescribe character choices and interactions authentically.
Even if your world is completely made up, you can look for similar real-life settings that give you clues that might persuade your details. For an article on how to write descriptions once you have the details down, click here.
Research puts you in the position to insert enhancing details that you may not have thought of. It’s more strategic than just searching for the place and reading everything you can find about it. It also means reading stories by people who wrote about settings like yours successfully, not to plagiarize them, but to be mentored by them.
Research can also involve scoping out your landscape by walking or driving the places your characters will, if that place is within your reach. Even if it’s a place you are intimately familiar with, try to visit through the eyes of someone going there for the very first time.
You want your readers to remember, long after they’ve read your final sentence, the places you’ve written as much as the people you’ve put there. I leave you with Toni Morrison, Beloved:
“Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But it’s not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it’s gone, but the place—the picture of it—stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world.”
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