![]() The individual settings are where you get to have a lot of fun with sensory detail. ![]() Some stories will have only one individual setting, but others will have many. ![]() This could be in a library, in a shopping mall, on a bench in Central Park, or on the deck of a pirate ship. These are more specific and nuanced than environmental settings. Individual settings are the specific places where your story is happening: where the action takes place. Many children’s short stories do this, so that the story feels like it could take place at any time. Some stories use what’s known as a “backdrop setting,” which leaves the story’s environment as a blank slate. Others, like Mordor and Mount Doom, impart a completely different feeling of darkness and despair. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings does this very well: certain environmental settings like the Shire are deeply associated with all the comforts of home, family, and stability. These types of settings in a story are also excellent tools for communicating mood, theme, and tone with the reader. Whether your story’s setting is real or imaginary, it’s important to know how these societal and cultural surroundings have shaped the lives of the people and what kind of obstacles it might put in their way. It might be a barren alien planet with an experimental new political system, or a shadowy winter wonderland just beyond the doors of an old wardrobe. ![]() This type of setting might be in a glittering city by the sea, or high in the mountains in a little ski resort town. A character’s values, biases, and expectations can be a result of their natural world or their cultural one. EnvironmentalĮnvironmental setting is the wider world of our story, not just naturally but also socially and politically. Temporal setting can tell us a lot about the world your character lives in, their place in it, and can even give us hints as to what sort of conflicts they might be facing later on. Temporal setting refers to the historical period and the cultural and political struggles that were prevalent in that time period-for instance, the war of the 1940s, or the Irish ethno-nationalist conflict of the 1990s-as well as the chapter of your character’s life, the season of the year, and the time of day-for example, a blustery autumn night at 11:57pm, three minutes before your protagonist’s sixteenth birthday. Let’s look at what is setting and some of the elements of setting you’ll have in your story. Once you have the basic foundation of this relationship between setting and character you can begin building your world from the ground up. When done well, each layer of the setting you create brings you deeper and deeper into your story.Īs you’ll see in the examples farther down, the setting of a story directly affects everything in your story world: from the themes that you communicate in your work, to the tone and voice that your readers hear, to the people your characters begin as and who they grow into.Įven in the same broad setting, different characters can have different relationships with the world around them, and that will inform the choices they make that power the events of the plot. It is the world and all its messy cultural impact. Setting in a story is your characters’ immediate surroundings, their geographic location, natural environment, time of day, season of the year, era in history, social perspective, and dialect. Whether you’re looking at a short story setting or the setting of a novel, the characters who populate your writing will be largely formed and informed by setting-the influences and mechanics of their everyday world. Setting in real life-the places we grew up, the societal cultures we’re exposed to, the global events taking place as we do our best to navigate the struggles of day-to-day living-has a huge impact on who we are as people and the choices that we make. What new writers often don’t realize is that your setting, when crafted with passion and attention to detail, informs all of these things. Many authors will begin writing with a general idea of the time and place from which they want to present their story, scratch out some quick and dirty exposition on setting early on so that their readers know where they are, and then power on to the good stuff-resonant characters, breakneck plots, and powerful themes. The setting of a story is something that tends to get shuffled around during the writing process.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |