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Setting: The Essential Character
by Linda Adams and Emory Hackman

You may be forgetting an important character in your book.  It's not the protagonist.  It's not the antagonist.  It's the setting.  This is one of the most commonly missed elements of writing.  You can have a great plot and well-developed characters, but your story will lack richness and depth without the right setting.

What feeling, mood, and vision do you get when you hear the place name of Needmore, West Virginia?  Visualize a place called "Need-more" for a moment.   Peeling paint and ramshackle houses?  Or neighbors helping neighbors?  Just the name itself conjures up an immediate image.  Setting can be anything from Paris to Los Angeles to Neenah, Wisconsin.  It can be an airplane, a jet, or a submarine. It can even be a single room, or a rowboat.  But how do you pick an appropriate setting?  Just make up a name?  Or ignore it?  Many writers ignore the setting, never taking advantage of the topography, local color, culture, and the reader's feelings to enhance the story.  Choose the setting by looking at your plot and character requirements, and then use a place that helps you develop your story.

THE PLACE

What kind of place does it need?  For a murder mystery in Los Angeles, the murderer dumps a body into the deep brush in Griffith Park.  Some say that body could be hidden in the park where no one will ever find it.  As the murderer will assume. The protagonist discovers the body ten years after the crime, and there is something different about this body that makes him want to investigate further.  But his boss, overwhelmed by his caseload, wants the criminal report off his desk.  After all, the victim's been dead for years, and the crime trail is non-existent.  Until someone tries to shoot the protagonist on Ventura Boulevard while he's talking with his informant.  A unique aspect about a setting in Los Angeles creates a unique crime almost impossible to solve.

MOOD

Simply choosing the right setting can evoke a mood.  Imagine a small town where there is extreme violence in a bar fight. Suddenly a murder rocks the town, leaving everyone shocked and in denial.  They are convinced that it must be a stranger who killed their friend, relative, and neighbor. After all, they know every one, and no one is capable of murder.  But, as the story unfolds, evidence is discovered, suggesting that it may be someone they know.  Distrust begins to contaminate the town.  People start locking their doors and looking warily at each other. The distrust poisons friendships, and your protagonist loses a friend he's had since childhood.  Then, as the investigation continues, he discovers that the murderer is from the next town.  But the town itself has been changed; the innocence is gone.  You end the book on the protagonist reaching for his door, expecting it to be unlocked, and it isn't.  Suddenly a simple mystery has become a poignant story because of the setting you chose.

PLOT COMPLICATION

You can use unique things that only happen in your city to cause complications for your character. Suppose the character is eight months pregnant. She is driving through downtown Washington, DC, at the peak bloom of the cherry blossoms. Tourists and residents pack the streets. It will take an hour to go one block, even on an alternate route. Suddenly she goes into labor. And something's wrong.  She's in a panic because she knows there's no way that an ambulance can get through the traffic in time. Now what?  You've just used something that happens one week a year in Washington, DC, to create a compelling complication in your story.

FEELING

Use the setting to evoke a feeling in your reader. All of us remember what it's like to return to our childhood home. Looking at his hometown twenty years later, your protagonist expects to see it the way he remembered it. But it isn't. He stops at his family's house, and it seems shabbier, more worn, as if life has aged it.  Then he sees his parents, whom he hasn't seen for twenty years either, and they have that same shabby, worn look.  Perhaps things are the same as they were years ago and his memories have changed what he remembers.  Or maybe things have changed in his hometown and not for the better. Or has he changed?  Simple concepts, but they can evoke powerful feelings in the reader.

CHARACTERS

Every place influences us. There may be some things that you can do in Paris that would shock people here. Or you can make an unintentional faux par out of ignorance, simply because of the setting. Your character is used to living in Hollywood, where it's commonplace to see people with blue and pink hair and eighteen earrings in one ear. She has a friend who lives out on the East Coast, in one of the more conservative areas, and immediately earns the distrust of the people around her because of the way she looks. Your character is a nice person, but she finds herself in a situation she cannot handle because people make assumptions about her because of the way she looks. Normally, she doesn't even get angry with anyone, but these people upset her so much that she publicly blows up and gets herself into trouble.

TIME

Time itself can be a setting and can affect the characters, the feeling, and the place. Things that are so commonplace as to be taken for granted today may be very important to a story set in the past.  Your character lives in San Francisco, during World War II.  Since all the men are off to war, she's working in a factory, doing her part for the war effect. Things are tough for her. Things she'd gotten used to--everyday things--she no longer can find because of rationing.  Rationing can create quirks. For instance, they stopped pre-slicing bread, but everyone threw their bread knives away years or decades before, and now steel is rationed and bread knives are unavailable.  She also does duty on the beach, watching for submarines. And, in the midst of all this, she finds love with a severely wounded soldier. If you tried to put this story in a more modern setting, the time would force it to be something very different.

RESEARCH

After you've decided on your setting, it's important that you do some research if you aren't familiar with the area. One popular writer described a car chase scene in Washington, DC, and it was obvious he wasn't familiar with the area. With the traffic, parked cars, and tourists, such a chase was impossible!  Or he forgot to add the details of trying! You don't want your readers pointing out to you that a particular street actually runs east and west, not north and south; one way west instead of one way east.  However, a common pitfall is doing too much research to the detriment of your writing time.

ESTABLISH THE SETTING

To help establish the location, mention something that readers would immediately associate with that area.  For instance, if your story is set in Morro Bay, your character can park near Morro Rock to look at the ocean. You can even use significant landmarks to "bookmark" your story. That is, while the character is at this landmark in the beginning of the story, a major turning point happens. Then, near the end, when the character is again at this place, another major turning point happens.

Your setting has at least as much influence as a secondary character, and frequently as much as any character. Have a reason to choose a setting. Use the personality of your setting to create a unique voice for your work and stand out from the competition. Use the unique voice to lead your audience to the important message of your story.  Don't squander the opportunity to use the best setting for your story.

Copyright 2001 Linda Adams and Emory Hackman

More by Linda and Emory: More Than Just a Name

Linda Adams is an internationally published writer with over 30 writing credits, including The Toastmaster (June 2001), Vampire Dan's Story Emporium, and Gauntlet.

Emory Hackman is a business and estate planning attorney who is a prior contributor to WritersManual.com, and who is published in the Virginia State Bar Journal, the Arlington Journal, and the Fairfax Journal.  They are currently co-writing a Women's Civil War thriller set in Luray, Virgnia.

For more information about Linda and Emory, visit http://www.hackman-adams.com