Photo by OC Gonzalez on Unsplash
Disclaimer: Hey there! It’s safe to assume that links in this article are affiliate links for which I may get paid a commission should you make a purchase (but there is never any extra cost to you!). For example, as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. There may be other affiliate links, too, but you can be sure that they are for products I use and love myself! It’s not about the money. It’s about sharing my favorite things!
Setting the Scene – The Importance of Setting to Characterization
Regardless of where your novel takes place, setting the scene is a vital part of painting the picture for your reader. Whether it’s set in a lush rainforest, a barren desert, a mansion in Beverly Hills, or a shed deep in the woods, your setting gives your character something to interact with. And that interaction between a character and their surroundings tells you as much about the character as it does about where the scene is taking place.
What is Setting?
It’s often misunderstood that setting is just what a place looks like. It’s actually so much more!
In an article by Mary Buckham, award-winning author and writing instructor, she calls it “Active Setting.” She says, “Active Setting involves using narrative description of a place to do so much more than simply describe an environment. Active Setting means, instead of describing a room, or town, or landscape, we use that specific setting to show characterization of the POV character or another story character, add sensory detail to the page, show emotion, or create complications.”
I love this description. By thinking of your setting as “active” rather than “passive” (sitting there looking pretty), you can begin to explore how your character interacts with the setting. And those interactions will help the reader get to know the character better. Setting also involves all the senses, not just sight. It helps firmly anchor readers in the scene, and setting can be used to reveal everything from location to characterization to backstory or to show emotion or tension.
I highly recommend Mary Buckham’s A Writer’s Guide to Active Setting: How to Enhance Your Fiction with More Descriptive, Dynamic Settings, but I’ll get into some basics here in this article, with a focus on the importance of setting and characterization.
The Importance of Setting
If you don’t think setting is important, try reading a book where there is no setting. It’s difficult, I can tell you from an editorial standpoint. Setting is important in so many ways.
Setting provides the reader with an anchor. Something that pulls them into the scene. A book without setting is a bit like watching a movie with your eyes closed. You can hear the dialogue, but you lack the ability to place yourself in the scene with the character.
Setting makes a scene feel real. I’ve worked on books where characters were in a restaurant, but no servers ever came to take orders or offer more water. None of the characters ate or noticed anyone else in the restaurant. Other than the name of the restaurant they were in, I had no clue what was happening around them. They could have just as easily met on a park bench.
Settings can reveal the tone or mood of a scene. A dark and gloomy setting is going to have a far different mood than somewhere bright and sunny.
Finally, setting reveals character. What a character notices (with any of their senses), what they focus on, what catches their eye…all of those details help the reader get to know that character.
Leaving out setting risks the reader drawing their own conclusions, which can later cause a problem if what they pictured doesn’t match what’s going on there during the subsequent visit.
Today, I want to focus on using setting to reveal more about your novel’s characters.
Setting to Reveal Character
We use a variety of techniques to help readers get to know our characters. But it’s not often that we think of setting as one of those techniques.
Setting can become a character in itself. Take Hogwarts, for instance. What should just have been a building, actually had its own personality. The characters in the book interacted with it. By thinking of setting as a character, you give your point-of-view characters opportunities to interact with the setting, just as they would other characters in the book.
As an example, if your character goes out to eat and is feeling good, high on life, happy with their dinner companions, they will be enjoying their meal, laughing, and showing interest in their surroundings. They’ll rave about the artwork on the walls, observe the people around them, soak up the ambience, the scents, the sounds.
But if they are unhappy, they’ll likely pick at their food, even if this is their favorite restaurant. The artwork they enjoyed while in a good mood, now seems ugly or dated. Other patrons are annoying, or too loud, since our character is in a foul mood.
How your character or characters interact with their surroundings can give the reader important clues about their mood.
A character’s home setting is another way to reveal character. Do they love their home? Do they enjoy the comfort and security they feel there? Or do they only see what’s wrong with things, a reflection of the inner turmoil they’re feeling about other things in their life? A happy character may see their home as beautiful, despite its flaws. Whereas an unhappy character might not see anything but flaws, even in the most picture-perfect surroundings.
What a character surrounds themselves with also reveals who they are. A character choosing to live in a cold and sterile home, all chrome and glass and bare walls, is a different kind of person than one who lives surrounded by knick-knacks and collectibles and hundreds of photos of loved ones.
Use setting to help your readers get to know your characters.
Setting to Balance Telling and Showing
Setting can also help with telling versus showing. While nothing is inherently wrong with telling in a story, it can get monotonous. This can be especially true in first person point of view, where the character may tell us what’s going on around them more often than when in third person. One way to avoid this is to get out of the character’s head and into the scene.
Here’s a short illustration of what I mean. Let’s say my character, Beth, is having marital problems, and she visits her mother’s grave in the cemetery.
Before:
I found my mom’s headstone. Being here really made me sad. “Hi, Mom. I miss you. Mason and I are doing great even though we sometimes fight, but it’ll be alright. It’s not like we’re getting a divorce or anything. At least I don’t think so. What if he falls out of love with me? I don’t know what I’d do. I mean, I’d never quit my job or give up trying to get my degree, but you know. What would I do outside all that?”
I call this being locked in the character’s head. There’s no setting, there’s no interaction with her surroundings to help us understand how she’s feeling. The only emotion involves her telling us she’s sad, but the reader isn’t really able to feel like they’re there in the scene with Beth.
Instead, by using setting, we can bring the scene alive, setting the tone, and revealing how Beth views the world around her at this particular moment in her life. The reader is, essentially, let out of the cage of the character’s mind and into the scene itself.
Rewrite:
I walked from the car, over the little grassy hill, and straight to Mom’s burial plot. I’d been there a thousand times, so I could practically get here with my eyes shut.
I tossed my jacket to the ground in front of her headstone and sank down onto it with a sigh. Across the cemetery, I noticed a graveside service was in progress, and my nose prickled. I’d gotten used to Mom being gone, but every time I saw a funeral, it brought all that sharp pain back again.
Clearing my throat, I turned back to the headstone. I reached out to trace the grooves of the letters. Mary Keating. “Hi, Mom. I miss you.”
Out on the street, a car revved its engine and raced past faster than it should have been going, and I longed to be in it, racing away from having to tell my mom what was going on.
“Mason and I are doing great,” I told her with false brightness. “We sometimes fight, but it’ll be alright. It’s not like we’re getting a divorce or anything.” My gaze drifted back to the funeral across the way, where they seemed to be finished. Mourners were slowly drifting back toward their vehicles, probably hoping to leave their pain behind them. “At least I don’t think so.”
My nose prickling advanced to eye watering. Overhead, a crow cawed a warning. Impending emotional breakdown!
“What if he falls out of love with me? I don’t know what I’d do.” I swiped at my tears with the back of my hand and dried it on my jeans. The dampness of the ground seeped through my jacket onto my butt, so what was a little more wet? “I mean, I’d never quit my job or give up trying to get my degree, but you know. What would I do outside of all that?”
I let myself fall back onto the damp lawn, staring up at the gray clouds above, and contemplated the feeling of doom that filled me.
While essentially the same scene, in the second example, setting is used to reflect Beth’s emotions. The cawing crow seems to herald what’s brewing inside Beth, and the wet ground and gray clouds give a feel of chill in the air that the reader can feel matches Beth’s mood.
It’s also, again, about so much more than just what a location looks like. The scene above uses things that Beth sees and what she hears, along with physical sensation, to bring the setting alive.
When to Inject a Shot of Setting
Note that Beth doesn’t present the reader with a list of attributes of the cemetery. She could have described the cemetery as she walked to her mother’s grave. She could have stated that it was a cloudy day and that the grass looked wet. She could have described the trees and that she could see a crow sitting on a nearby branch. She could have described the hill and the graveside service across the way and mentioned that the cemetery was on a busy street.
Instead, we get all of that in a lot fewer words and in a much more interesting way. By having Beth notice her surroundings through the filter of who she is, what she’s feeling, and what’s going on in her life, the setting comes to life. It becomes more than just a passive description of where Beth is. It becomes an active part of the story.
Setting is much more accessible if it’s part of the overall scene, particularly in commercial fiction, dribbled in and around dialogue, narrative, or internal reflections of the characters when the setting is relevant, and at the appropriate time.
Some writers hesitate to interrupt dialogue or internal narration to include setting. But books aren’t really in real-time, so interrupting to notice something about the setting that’s relevant at that moment in time is a perfect way to include setting without ramming paragraphs of dry description down a reader’s throat.
In the “before” sample, Beth started talking to her mom, and her speech was uninterrupted. This stream of consciousness often sounds rambling to the reader. By breaking it up with actions, feelings, reactions, and setting, the reader is much more present and active in the scene, as if they are actually with the character, getting to know her better. A few well-placed sentences is all it takes!
How to Describe a Setting
This is where a lot of writers go wrong—they describe a setting from the author’s point of view. This usually includes a laundry list of things they want to reader to notice when they enter this particular setting. The problem is, what the author describes may not be what the point of view character would notice about the setting.
In real life, if two people walk into a room, they would each notice and gravitate to different things. So, how you describe the setting depends on which of the two people is the point of view character.
For example, if one character loves cemeteries (we’re sticking to a theme here), loves the history in the names on the headstones, they may spend hours wandering around, reading epitaphs, making up stories about the people laid to rest there. They might notice the different stones used for the markers, or think about the lovely, manicured lawns or the view from a particular plot.
If the other character, though, hates cemeteries, is terrified of ghosts, and completely creeped out by the place, they aren’t going to get immersed in the details. They may notice things only in passing, as their eyes dart around, half expecting zombies to start clawing their way out of the ground.
Depending on which of these characters is the scene’s point-of-view character, the language used is going to be different too. The one who loves the place may describe the markers as “rough and rich with life history,” while the other character describes them as “cold and morbid reminders of death.”
As you can see, setting serves a greater purpose than just telling a reader what a place looks like. It also helps readers connect with characters by showing them interacting with their setting in ways that are unique to that character, their mood, and the filter through which they see the world.
Take a look at the setting in your current work in progress. Are you using setting to its full potential? How is your setting helping your reader get to know your characters? Look for ways to use setting in more creative ways.
Work with me!
Whether preparing to self-publish or to start the submission process, I’m here to help! You can Request a Quote today. If I think we might be a good fit, I’ll provide a 3- to 5-page sample edit of your manuscript to show you what I can do for you!