A Look at Setting

Setting is the when and where your story takes place.
Apart from Character and Plot, Setting is one of the most important elements in your writing.

Setting includes:

• Artifacts or Props (the things characters use)
• Clothes (the things characters wear)
• Time of day, conditions of the weather
• Geography and location
• Trees, animals, and nature
• Inside and outside sounds, smells
• All physical and temporal objects

So that means setting refers to:

• The location (locale) or place the story is set
• The weather (including the season)
• The time
• The time period (historical period)

In short: setting refers to all the places and objects that are important in the work, whether natural or manufactured.

Types of Settings:

1. Natural
Nature shapes action and directs and redirects lives.

2. Manufactured
Manufactured things always reflect the people who made them.
Possessions often enter into character motivation and development.

3. Interior: locales INSIDE. Symbolically often refers to private/domestic issues.

4. Exterior: locales OUTSIDE. Symbolically often refers to societal issues.

What is a regional writer?
• A regional writer chooses to set all of his/her stories in one general place or time period. This place usually reflects how the author grew up.

Regional writers include (just to name a few):
• William Faulkner
• Stephen King
• H.P. Lovecraft
• Flannery O’Connor
• Bharakti Mukerjee
• Eudora Welty

Function of Setting:

1. Setting as Antagonist.

• Settings can cause problems/conflict for characters

2. Setting as reflection of mindset or ideology of one of your characters (often your protagonist)
3. Setting as character portrait

• Settings reflect or contrast character’s wants/desires, goals

4. Setting as quality of narrative vision

• Setting establishes trust between storyteller and audience
• Description of setting helps reader visualize the fictional world

5. Setting as reflection of theme or idea
6. Setting as reflection of conflict
7. Setting as mood or atmosphere
8. Setting as foreshadowing of plot
9. Setting as beginning and ending (establishing and closing shot…or frame)