For me setting is integral for getting the story right as it ties all the links together and brings depth to your work. The 1987 movie Overboard completely utilizes setting to help develop character. Tacky brat Joanna is first seen on a docked yacht - giving her the air of empty luxury and aimlessness - no roots and going no where. Dean is given a dumpy shack and despite being an excellent carpenter has made no attempts to fix it up; he's in denial and stagnating. Both of them are emotionally and physically 'homeless'. By the end the dump is transformed into a home and the yacht is 'grungified' when Joanna smacks her beer caps off on the tables. One film that utilizes setting in a superb way but kinda drops the ball in tying it all together is Kalifornia where the yuppie couple on a road trip decides to make a coffee table book about serial murder sites, not yet understanding their tag-along ride-share is about to make them literally part of the project. The reason I say drop the ball is - that the movie doesn't lead the viewer in any direction. Given that Brian & Carrie are exploiting, and capitalizing on murder in such a kitsch way - they are never 'punished' on those levels. The movie is too busy with obvious touches like a smile pillow used as a silencer. The build up only takes them to a bomb test site - as if to suggest that rather over-worked nugget, we're all serial killers. I choose setting to help me explain deeper thing -there's a contrast between reality and manufactured reality in my book, so there's a contrast between set and home, and in everything being something else. Even the sets have been repurposed from past projects.
I certainly wouldn't call it an afterthought, even if it's not your first concern when formulating your story concept. The setting determines the conditions for how the story can be told, which is a pretty vital thing to consider. I'm not even sure how to tell a story that doesn't depend on the setting in some way.
To me? No. Its not an after thought. Setting is a character of its own. For my WIP, i spent a lot of time on the setting... Creating maps, keys, etc. Not necessarily worldbuilding.... But in order to have my characters interact in that world, i needed a visual. I can be more detailed in my characters actions if i have a detailed setting to go off of. Example, i can say my character traveled 250miles from point A to point B (because of the map key), and i can say that, given the terrain, he encounters robbers/farmers/abandoned mills, etc. If i have a visual for my WIP, i know where to put my character and how they will react. For short stories, i dont do as much "world building" but i do pay attention to my setting. Short stories are short. I want to create the tone with my setting (and, tbh, the setting comes to me first, when writing short stories, and the characters second). Even if its a character driven story... The setting still matters to me.
I think this is another of those "it depends" answers. There are definitely stories wholly focused on the interaction of characters and they can be transposed pretty easily to other settings. The amount of work to accommodate them is little to none. Setting doesn't really matter too much there. Of course lit-fic loves to focus on characters, so you might be able to make a sweeping statement that a lit-fic story is easier to move to a new setting than genre fiction is. And I would think the second easiest genre to move would be Romance because it's also character centered. Think of Jane Austen's "Emma" which was shifted to '90s in the movie "Clueless," among countless other examples. The setting shift isn't that hard to do. I think a lot of us here write genre fiction and so we take the setting into account. My personal theory is this. . . You have three basic elements in story: character, plot, setting. Everything you write should be pushing one of these three. It's possible to push two at a time and sometimes all three. They're related like so: Character/Plot: The plot is the character's journey. It is literally the path (a plot on a map) the MC chooses through the story world. They are inseparable. * Plot/Setting: The setting proves the feasibility of the plot and determines the possibilities for the MC. Character/Setting: The setting proves the existence of the MC. He/she can't be an anachronism. They need to exist realistically in the setting. (well, unless they're transplanted from afar, you understand) So setting gives us verisimilitude. It makes the MC real and proves their journey (plot). That's its main purpose in a story, IMO. * I say this, but of course there are ways to remove all MCs. Think of grand histories told from afar.
I write historical fiction so my setting has to be relatable to the actual events. Where I struggle is in the timeline as when a young man was supposed to be fifteen, but only ten years had passed.
I believe character is conceptually prior to setting. But that doesn't mean setting is an afterthought in the sense that it's something to be ignored and disparaged. One of the worst ways we can ignore the setting is to forget that it's supposed to be revealing characters, not hiding the author. There is a fantasy-trap: endlessly embellishing the story-world and avoiding writing the characters. I think everything about the setting should reveal something about the characters in it. I've been writing New-Weird: which the market thinks is about biomech body horror but is really about settings that discomfit and disturb and mock the reader. In traditional fantasy, pastoral description of woods and mountains (or even volcanoes) is often used to ground the reader in the familiar, so that the props and actors can be more fantastical. Even magical/fantastical scenery still often works this way: the Fire Swamp in the Princess Bride is still, fundamentally-structurally, a swamp. For New-Weird, I might take 'The Teddy Bear's Party' (Enid Blyton, 1945) and reverse it so it's about a human girl pretending to be inanimate in case the toys notice I might try to re-frame the familiar playroom and its furniture as being simultaneously the toys' territories and the child's hiding-places But that's just the setting having an interpretative hinge - a weird element might be that this one leaks: whenever the toys discover a hiding place, it becomes what the toys think it is for the child also And if there must be body horror: maybe she defeats them by sewing patches of faux fur into herself and becoming the apex predator So, if I have a spare 8 years...
While I do believe that often settings get put on the backburner and are afterthoughts in writing, they shouldn't be. Even if you use a contemporary setting, I think it's worth the effort descrribe and flesh out the setting to make it more tangible. I think that settings should be like characters themselves and treated with the same amount of care and dedication.
Setting is critical, I think it's the first thing you have to decide about a story is where it is located.
I wrote a short story last night. The setting was Huntington Beach, California, though I did not name it. It had a pier and a barbeque. It could be any beach in the United States, I suppose.
Add me as a supporter of this. I'd say that setting is very important as I've discovered that different settings can support different stories very differently. A story that works wonders in Classical Athens may not work very well in 1920s Florida. The American Civil War can carry stories that can feel very out of place in the Napoleonic Wars and so on. These were historical examples but it also goes for sci fi and fantasy and other genres in my opinion. The setting and hence the context for characters and their actions matters, in my opinion, very much to the degree that they can be a significent aspect if the reader will feel that the characters and story fit in or if they stand out like a sore tumb of obvious lack of knowledge by the author or blatant anachronisms.
As a writer and a reader, the setting is paramount. If I read a synopsis and the story is set in a small town high school or backwood farm, I know it's not for me. I like to read and write about sophisticated characters in urban settings. If it started on a yacht that would be a good start. I look for settings where diverse people can intermingle. A high-priced charity event, a conference, a dinner party or a cruise. And work settings are particularly of interest to me. I also avoid settings that are geared to stereotype by echlon, like the whole 'upstairs downstairs' thing. Sorry Downton Abbey . . . I like my classes undefinable and inter-mixed. The setting is like the framework the story is built on. I can't even imagine a story without imagining the setting first.
A setting familiar to you is best. I set my stories in places I've lived, the place I live now, or places I've created as part of a science fiction or fantasy setting.
Setting is just as important to me as plot and characters, when I'm creating and working on a story. Sometimes, the setting is what fuels the idea for the plot, as it informs the climate which can impact culture, religion, technology, etc. And those things can then affect what kind of plot the story will focus on.
It also helps develop characters and explain them. It serves as a baseline to what you're character is supposed to do.
Exactly! Setting helps "build character" in stories. Someone living on a harsh, stormy island may have a very different perspective on the world than someone growing up in luxury in a comfortable climate with no scarcity of food. Plus, a desert culture may develop different religious beliefs than an ocean-faring one, and so on and so forth. I find that taking inspirations from our own real human history is a good basis for considering possibilities, but the real magic happens when you consider a setting and imagine other evolutionary paths for culture, religion, cuisine, etc, and go from there to determine how that might shape your story's characters.
As for setting being an afterthought, I confess to behaving in a very contradictory way about that. On a macro level, setting is crucial for my romantic suspense series. The one and only time I pitched the first novel to a New York editor, she asked could I maybe reset the story in the 2010s instead of in the 1980s. I thought about it and told her no, I couldn't. If the basic setting weren't a midwestern US city before cellphones, before the Internet, before a lot of developments altered the practice of architecture, the whole story would be different and my plot wouldn't work. The sequel is taking me forever to write because the second part takes place in 1983 West Germany and it's taking a lot to get everything about it as accurate as I can. But when it gets down to individual scenes, I might as well be white-rooming it. Oh, yeah, I'll tell the reader the action takes place in the POV character's apartment, or a hotel room, or a car on a city street, but after dropping that bit of info, I get my characters talking, talking, and they could be anywhere. I tell myself they need to interact with their environment and I go back and make it happen, but it's definitely an afterthought. And damn! it adds to the word count, which is the last thing I want.
For me setting is everything I think it speaks to the characters and who they are as well as the plot. I’m also a huge believer that a story should transport the reader so if the setting doesn’t do that or doesn’t fit with the story then it doesn’t work. This is just my opinion
I like what Brandon Sanderson says about setting: For me, as a fantasy writer, I'm always trying to find ways to make the setting another character in the story. I have no interest in writing stories where the setting doesn't matter.
I never noticed before how similar Sanderson is in his mannerisms and voice to Tarantino. And he knows his way around story as well as Tarantino does around movies. It's a major gift that his lectures are available free on YouTube. I was already aware of the importance of making a promise at the beginning and keeping it, but I haven't seen it broken down into Tone, Character Arc and Plot like that before. Very enlightening. Also, I've read that Inferno story by Niven and Pournelle he was talking about. I really dug it.
