Writing Blog Number 2

20240211 Setting – A Final Word

Setting – A Final Word

I hope this is going to answer three questions:
1) Is setting important?
2) What makes up setting; what goes into it?
3) How much is too much? (aka: Does the colour of the curtains actually matter?)

Look, I think over the course of a series of posts, I’ve established that setting is vital to giving a story of decent length a grounding. You’re not going to have the word count in a drabble or flash fiction to do it, and even some short story lengths are not conducive to establishing setting beyond the bare bones. But if you have the word count, it is very important.

It is said by some academics that “a story needs three things – a protagonist, stakes and a place where it happens” (a setting). (This is a direct quote from the lecture notes from my Creative Writing degree.) Without that setting, a story does not feel quite real; it “floats there” (same lecture). If a reader has to ask themselves where the characters are, then they are lost.

So, is setting important. Yes.

Now, as to what goes into setting, that same lecture (that I am going to keep referring to for this) indicated there are 4 components:
Location – the physical place where it occurs. This is what I have been talking about up till now. The house, in the town, in the region, in the country. Geography in all its myriad forms. Don’t forget weather in that (or climate if talking longer term).
Time – not only time of day, but time of year, and year itself; a story set in 1980 will be very different to one set in 2020.
Politics & Culture – this was something I talked about in World Building. While it might not be included explicitly, a story set in Australia and the USA are going to be different because the cultures vary a lot; a story set in Russia and the UK are going to be different based on politics alone.
History – this was also mentioned in World Building, but it can also be very specific. Not just big history, but the history of the haunted house – who built it, who died there, how did it fall into disrepute, etc. – is important. Not the personal history of characters; that is not setting, that is character.

As to how much detail should be included varies, realistically, across genre. A story set here and now needs much less than something set 40, 60, 100, 1000 years ago. Science fiction and fantasy will need more detail given than a contemporary romance. What is needed to build the world in the mind of the reader is what is needed. However, a lot of writers do go overboard, especially in fantasy. No, we really didn’t need to know the seventeen different colours of flowers around the tree in the back yard of the Hobbit-stand-in’s hovel-cave, no matter how pretty you think it looks, if he’s going to leave said hovel-cave and never go back and the flowers mean nothing to the story.

Of course, greater word count does mean greater detail. A novel will have more than a novella, will have more than a short story. That doesn’t mean you can add extraneous and irrelevant information, just that you have more room to expand on the things that matter.

If done well, a setting can be a character all its own, one that feels as alive and vibrant as the actual flesh-and-blood characters. Think Pratchett’s Discworld for a magnificent example.

So we come to the final question, and what makes too much detail?

Some readers like the less is more approach; other readers love family trees, maps, lists of characters that read like the white pages of a decent sized town (does that analogy still fly nowadays?) and descriptions of the mountains, plains, rivers and forests.

However, the issue comes when info-dumps occur. You’ve done your research for your story set in 18th century Oxford, but the reader does not need a list of every shop on the main street. You know all about manufacture in the 1600s, but the reader does not need a treatise on smithing in the middle of their historical war novel.

This is back-story. We don’t need to know the life story of the infantryman in World War I who is hit in the face by a bullet next to the hero; likewise, we don’t need every little object in a room described and listed and everything else in a bedroom if they are never going to be used. (Okay, yes, Mario Puzo did tell us about every insignificant character’s life story in the book The Godfather… and that is why this is a rare case where the film is better than the book.)

Quote again: “Setting is very important to every story. However, the two things that matter most are what the characters are doing and what is going to happen to them next.”