Is setting an afterthought?

Often it seems like setting is sort of an afterthought. Am I wrong about that? What is happening (plot) and who things are happening to (character) often seem like they're more important too many writers. And therefore setting is just sort of there or can be almost anywhere, really.

I was recently thinking about the impact setting can have on a story. I'm working on a short story set in the suburbs of an affluent town. I realized the setting did nothing or very little for the story. Sure, it's an appropriate setting for the story, but I started to think about how the same story would play out in different settings. As a result, the story has moved its location. And with this move the sad story is now more of a dark comedy. Overall, it's a improvement thanks to the shift in setting.

How often do you think about settings and what sort of roles they play in your stories. Have you ever switched up the setting in a story? Why or why not? I think setting is often a more powerful tool writers can play with than we realize.

 

I agree that setting can be an afterthought but it is integral to some stories. A story that takes place in late 19th century London could be told in 2022 Los Angeles and maintain a similar plot and characterization, but only if the plot and characterization doesn't intertwine with late 19th century London specifics, for instance, the plot could be directly interwoven with the English monarchy and that would difficult to move to 2022 Los Angeles.

Plot and characters are inherently more important because stories can't really be told without characters and plot, whereas the setting, in a lot of instances, can basically be anywhere. I agree that setting is a powerful tool that some writers may overlook a bit, but personally, a story idea usually manifests with some internal setting already built in, like I've never had a story idea pop into my head as a nebulous collection of characters and plots unattached to a setting.

 

I think a setting can matter as much as the author wants it to.

At base it's for framing context; we usually want to know what the status quo is so that a disruption stands out. As with @Potato , I've never had characters come into my head separate from a setting that partly defines them. Though if you generalize enough, pretty much all character arcs and plots are transposable.

Then there are the themes and tone aided by the environment, via reflection, contrast, so on. The narrator can do a lot of that heavy lifting, though, via his own interpretation of said environment.

 

I'm a big settings guy, which might be why I read and write mostly Fantasy and Sci-Fi. Real-world settings can be plenty interesting, of course, but in writing especially I lean towards the weird.

I think setting is a hugely important part of any story, especially in those aforementioned genres I spend most of my time in. It's probably no accident that many of my favorite novels and series have vibrant and very well fleshed out settings (Discworld, Gormenghast, Books of Babel). To my mind, setting affects characters and character actions to a very high degree (or at least I think it should) and might well have huge impact on plot. A great and unique setting is probably the number one thing that draws me into any given work of fiction, even moreso than characters.

In my own writing, particularly the project I'm working on now, the setting is a big deal. I've done a lot of work in fleshing it out and breathing life into it. The characters I have couldn't exist anywhere else, I feel. They are all molded by the setting to an extent, and have to operate within its admittedly flexible limits. It's all part of the same package.

I think about setting quite a lot, probably more than I do characters and plot. Referencing my current project, the role of the setting is largely to 1) help define my characters and 2) importune them at every turn. I think of the setting almost as a character in its own right, with quirks and secrets to be revealed over time. In one particular instance, my setting is alive in an extremely literal sense. It's fun.
I can't recall ever having switched up my setting, no. Setting usually forms the bedrock of my stories. Characters are incidental and quite expendable; they get switched out or altered quite frequently. There's just something about place that intrigues me. It endures, while the people cavorting on it and the plots unfolding thereon are transient.

It varies from story to story, of course. I do do character-centric pieces as well.

 

I've definitely been guilty of "white room syndrome." My first drafts sometimes read more like scrips than real prose, since I focus so much on the characters' actions and dialogue that I forget to set the stage for them. The setting then becomes a literal afterthought, since I think about it afterwards and then have to jam it into the scene, which usually requires more surgery than I'd prefer. I'm trying to get better about thinking through the setting before I invest a lot of time into writing a scene.

 

I find it helps to treat the setting like a character.

The office of a threatening father is dark, the furniture looks bigger than it should, the chairs in front of his desk are small. The son pushes the chairs aside and pulls two larger chairs over to the desk to be eye level with the father.

Returning to the village after several nights alone in the forest she describes the uphill climbs up the river canyon as fighting you, the heat on the upper trail is oppressive, broken by the coolness when the trail dips down to the river. Almost to the village she is stopped in her tracks at the sight of her best friend sitting with her worst enemy. Now she is all too aware of the sweat and dirt she is covered in from the hike up the river canyon.

She reached the top of the cliff with only enough energy to throw her pack off and sit with her feet over the edge. The heat and stillness broken only by a single raptor making short high pitched calls as it soared overhead. Nothing stirred below that she could see.


Anyway, like that, treat the setting like a character. It can be about the whole world or small bits of it your character interacts with. It most definitely should not be an afterthought or a chore that is required to fill out dialogue and character interactions.

 

Settings matter a lot to me as a writer, and I spend a fair amount of time making sure setting, character, and plot are appropriate. My books and stories are set in places I've spent time or that I make up out of bits and pieces of experience and imagination. Should I suddenly take a notion to set a story in some alien exotic place like Hoboken, I doubt I could do it justice. Even with studious attention to research and detail, I'd miss something essential, and Hobokeners would drown me in uproarious guffaws, or what ever the Hoboken equivalent might be.

 

To me, setting has always come first, events the second and characters are there because they are necessary to make the story happen. It wasn't until I started visiting English-language writers' forums that I first learned about the character fetish. I'm still baffled to see people suggest that stories are primarily about characters rather than events. As hard as I try to relate to that kind of thinking, I can't.

 

I think setting is essential. Everything relates to setting--the behavior of the characters, how they talk, etc. all define setting just as much as its physical qualities. There's no evocation of a reader's broader associations if the setting is too vague.

Well, yeah, stories are about people. Would you prefer to write a geological history?

 

I don't want to hijack this thread but it's a pretty well understood literary idea that stories can be centered around characters, especially when taken into consideration that most, if not all plots are recycled/rehashed. If all plots are essentially unoriginal/rehashed, what else besides the characters would be interesting about the story?

 

This is another claim I've always found extremely weird. I keep seeing plots that seem very original to me when I read, and I couldn't care less if some academics are able to classify "all" plots into certain categories. Besides, there are so many brilliant settings that are unlike anything anyone has ever thought of.

Come to think of it, the characters are usually not very original, but when the setting and plot are interesting enough, then I don't mind.

 

There's nothing wrong with preferring plot and setting over characters. The first Dune book is a good example of a story where the plot is completely unoriginal but by transposing the unoriginal plot onto an epic sci-fi world Herbert manages to generate some intrigue. The characters are also quite unoriginal Paul, the quintessential "chosen one", Harkonnen, the typical ruthless villain, and Dune is widely regarded as one of the best sci-fi series ever written. So, I agree that characters don't have to be the central focus of a story.

But now lets look at Star Wars, which has striking similarities to Dune, but where Dune's success lies in epic world building and deep philosophical intrigue related to religion, ecology and politics, Star Wars takes a much more simple approach and just creates good relatable characters, and then follows up on these characters with meaningful arcs that produce clear cut development. Again, Star Wars is widely regarded as a ground breaking piece of sci-fi. So, there's definitely more than one way to skin a cat.

 

It isn't even logically sound, if you give it a deeper thought. What was unoriginal in cold war era post-nuclear-apocalypse stories? The idea of a nuclear apocalypse with radiation and fallout didn't really exist before 1945.

My main gripe with the "nothing original!" trope is that it diminishes the value of originality and tries to hide the fact that the occasional unique works that are picked up by fame tend to have drastic effects on the industry influencing books / narratives for a decade. Poe pretty much invented Whodunit? in his short stories, Agatha Christie took it up and we had a golden age of Whodunit? fiction.

Now on to the actual topic...

I've a term I use when describing RPG characters; "floating". Imagine you are writing a grimdark dieselpunk rendition of a WW1 that never ends; there your character is a seasoned veteran that lost all his friends to the war and is now in charge of a group of young conscripts; instead of pushing to win the war the man's real intention is simply to keep the conscripts alive until he can find a reason to return them home. Sounds fine?

Not quite. Because you can take the character and make him a commissar in the Warhammer 40k universe. Or make them a military leader in Adventure Time's Candy Kingdom. Or a rebel leader in Star Wars. Or a unique take on Odysseus.

A floating character has nothing to "anchor" them to a specific world, no background interwoven with the setting and no commitments. Now, this is only a disconnect between the setting and the characters - but what if the setting is also disconnected from the narrative? I don't think it'll result in good writing...

I believe setting, characters and narrative must support one another. Each of them should be clear during the writing, and each should be refined during editing. Sure there are exceptions where the characters and the narrative could pull a story, but most of all the best examples are where the setting contributed greatly to both. It's what I feel "modern re-imaginations" and "re-runs" don't quite grasp yet, you can't take the characters and the plot, put it in new shoes and expect it to work the same. Same's with the characters; can't just throw them out for a new cast and expect it to work just the same.

The golden question; yes. Both in short stories and in my big-big project. For the former, it's just part of editing. You have the draft of a short story, read through it, one question I ask is "does the setting fit?". Moved things from city to suburb, from a party into a forest, from a royal court to a corporate office. For the latter, I realised the kind of narrative I prefer (intrigue, politics, generational conflict, ideological conflicts) fits an early modern setting much better than the medieval fantasy I clung to. In hindsight, only reason I kept holding to medieval was because I thought you "cannot write" fantasy that's not medieval or contemporary.

 

I think there's a huge difference between saying "nothing's original!" and using criteria to identify commonalities in plots. The key factor in determining the originality of a plot is simply how wide or narrow the criteria is. Let's take your example, if we use a broad stroke, certainly the "apocalypse plot" is not a post-1945 originality, however if we use a more narrow stroke, sure, there weren't stories involving nuclear radiation before nuclear bombs were invented. The problem is if the criteria is too broad nothing is original, if the criteria is too narrow, everything is original. So, classic writers devised 36 dramatic situations to generally understand most plots. Nobody is trying to diminish the originators of whodunit, and also, whodunit is a genre, which is completely unrelated from plot anyway. And given that every single whodunit has the exact same plot, someone's murdered, detective investigates, mystery solved, it's a pretty bad example of plot originality. I see your Edgar Allen Poe and raise you a Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, who was one of the original proponents of the 36 dramatic situations. In conclusion, Goethe>Poe

 

For me, I build the setting first. Always. I'm not saying that it is the right way to do it, but that is how I prefer to make it. The setting for me, then dictates how the characters behave to the world around them.

 

Couldn't 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?' have been set in Shakespeare's perception of the 18th-Century?

Ye play is sette in a pessimistic future Venice of 1719, in which alchymickal simulacra of menne & women are given life, contrary to the clear and manifest wille of God, by the powerful Prospero Corporation to crew attacke ships & witnesse sea-beams in the West Indies.

 

It's always a different number. Seen 7 and 12 before - now it's 36?

That's the core issue with this topic; it all relies on the subjective judgement on what's original, which is impossible.

The more utilitarian approach is to weigh the outcome of assuming there is nothing original anymore vs assuming you can still create originality.

Therefore I refuse to acknowledge "No more originality"

Issue #2 - You have broadened the category, but it's still a modern phenomenon. If your topic is "apocalyptic literature" you only broadened the category to include certain pre-war works from the late 19th century. There is some vague argument to make that the Vedic destruction hymns were "apocalyptic" but that's already stretching the boundaries and /still/ creates an original.

It's a genre that was novel after the A-bomb, and EXPLODED in popularity. Compared to the scarce works preceding WW2, you have them flood the market in the 1950s.

I believe you didn't mean that statement wholly; if yes, I advise reading some Whodunit? or early detective fiction. The formula works with robbery, betrayal, failed murder - any mystery. Specifically, the climax of The Murder on the Orient Express is /not/ the murder, neither the investigation - but the moral choice on Poirot's shoulders. Even the murder in that book has a spectacular twist on it that immediately defined the book as a classic. To say "All Whodunit? is the same because it's a mystery and investigation" is like saying "All races are the same because there's a start and laps".

"Although this has been taken as definitive by some and Polti initially said there was 'exactly 36 dramatic situations ... and therein we have all the savour of existence', he later admitted that there could be more or less than this (it all depends on your criteria for division)." First thing I dug up with a google search. Again, subjectivity. I wonder which of the 36 Faust fits into... without tearing apart Part I, II and the ending.

Settings you can categorise the same way, but what's the point? Perhaps if someone's mind is wired the way they like drawers & folders it's some benefit - I never found so, I more so found it limiting - once you pluck your story into a folder, you'll feel some inherent need to adhere to that folder's vague ideas.

 

In my experience, I usually create a basic idea of setting before getting wrapped up in characters and plot development. One of my current projects actually started out as a futuristic sci-fi utopia before I switched it over to a post-apocalyptic fantasy world. That was before I had a solid plot, though, and it was just a few characters (who transferred across settings well) and a one-line story idea.

Generally, if I'm having to create a world from scratch, the characters and plot come first and their traits contribute to the setting. If the story is set on Earth, with however many alterations in the story's universe, then characters and plot will likely tie into the setting. That doesn't really apply to the mood that a setting has, though, it's more about the physical world the characters are in.

 

It always pings me off when people go in search of absolutes.

Some stories hang on the fictional setting of the story and motivates the characters. Example - "The Man In The High Tower" by Phillip K Dick, in which Germany and Japan won WWII, dividing the USA between them. Some stories - as has been mentioned - can be transplanted to almost any setting; hero's journey, love story, war story, etc.

The story will decide how it should be told.

 

This is such an interesting thought. Obviously it depends on the writer and the story you want to tell, but as a geographer, I do think that setting is so much more important than people seem to think. Everything that happens in a story happens in some sort of space or place, and that totally impacts how the characters move through the story, what they gain from the things that happen, and what even has the potential of happening. Based on the setting, an event might make sense, or it could be something totally asynchronous to the area and propel the plot. Setting doesn't always come first in my writing, but the one book manuscript I finished and am trying to publish was built on the idea of this mountain city housing survivors of the apocalypse. From there I developed a story and was able to explore ideas and themes that were interesting to me and made sense in the context of the setting. There's nothing like a post-apocalyptic tale to push characters to discover new ways of living and learn about the past at the same time. But again, it's different for every writer. I think the creators of Avatar the Last Airbender originally had sketches of Aang, Appa, and Momo before they thought about the setting and the story.

 

Settings are so important to many of my stories that they almost amount to being one of the characters. If I changed the setting on any such stories, I'd have to rewrite the darn things to reflect the new location.

 

Characters without the right setting are like a bunch of teeth without a mouth (or in the wrong kind of mouth—imagine nothing but tiny baby molars in a shark's mouth). They need something to be rooted in, and it needs to be appropriate for their story.

 

Unless it's in the woods. Things happen in the woods that happen no-where else.

 

Probably depends on the writer and story, but ai imagine it’s actually large the other way around. I have a feeling a lot of detail about the environment gets written and then stripped out during editing.

In some stories, setting just isn’t terribly important. In stories where it’s important, it gets a bigger part. Notable settings to me include: the overlook hotel, town of dairy, town of amity, Mordor…