Setting in Fiction
Setting = place and time, where and when. Character and action should be grounded in setting. Otherwise, your characters will seem to float around in the air, and your story will feel unreal. Good attention to setting gives your reader the sense of “being there.”
The question is, how much description of setting—how many details—to use, and which ones, and how they should be worked into the story. “When descriptions of places drag, the problem usually lies not in the setting, but in presenting the setting too slowly. Make your descriptions dynamic and quick; give bits of setting concurrently with characters and action” (Novakovich, Fiction Writer’s Workshop).
Use sensory details. Be specific and concrete.
Use unexpected details, or telling (significant) ones. Stay away from the generic, the expected, the usual. You reader will pass right over those without registering anything at all.
Setting can be real or imaginary. Or based on a real place, but fictionalized.
Setting creates mood and atmosphere, and can sometimes determine plot. It can also foreshadow.
You can tell a lot about people by their surrounding environments—the things they surround themselves with, and how they arrange those things.
Brief Samples
He crouched by the burned man. He made a skin cup with the soles of his feet and leaned back to pluck, without even looking, certain bottles. With the uncorking of each tiny bottle the perfumes fell out. There was an odour of the sea. The smell of rust. Indigo. Ink. River-mud-arrow-wood formaldehyde paraffin ether. The tide of airs chaotic. There were screams of camels in the distance as they picked up the scents. He began to rub green-black paste onto the rib cage. (Ondaantje, The English Patient)
One may guess the power of the north wind, blowing over the edge, by the excessive slant of a few stunted firs at the end of the house; and by a range of gaunt thorns all stretching their limbs one way, as if craving alms of the sun. . . . The narrow windows are deeply set in the wall, and the corners defended with large jutting stones. . . . Above the chimney were sundry villainous old guns, and a couple of horse-pistols, and, by way of ornament, three gaudily painted canisters disposed along its ledge. The floor was smooth, white stone: the chairs, high-backed, primitive structures, painted green: one or two heavy black ones lurking in the shade. In an arch, under the dresser, reposed a huge, liver-colored bitch pointer surrounded by a swarm of squealing puppies; and other dogs haunted other recesses. (Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights)
In front of the saloon an indomitable red light was burning, and the snowflakes were made blood-colour as they flew through the circumscribed territory of the lamp’s shining. (Stephen Crane, “The Blue Hotel”)
I’d been working in the emergency room for about three weeks, I guess. This was in 1973, before the summer ended. (Denis Johnson, “Emergency”)
With the line still doubled around the rope, one of the tellers stuck a “POSITION CLOSED” sign in her window and walked to the back of the bank, where she leaned against a desk and began to pass the time with a man shuffling papers. . . .
This is what he remembered. Heat. A baseball field. Yellow grass, the whirr of insects, himself leaning against a tree as the boys of the neighborhood gather for a pickup game. He looks on as the others argue the relative genius of Mantle and Mays. They have been worrying this subject all summer, and it has become tedious to Anders: an oppression, like the heat. (Tobias Wolff, “Bullet in the Brain”)
Then I was on stage, standing in a pool of hot light. I held a microphone in my fist and something was feeding back through the PA. Anders fiddled with some knobs and the room grew silent except for the creaking of my leather trousers. …By the second chorus, they were going totally berserk. So many heads of hair were banging in front of me that the skirt of the stage looked like a field of wheat in a wind storm. (Stacey Richter, “Goal 666”)
The dog was a mixture of god-knows-how-many breeds, but the vet had told them he had at least some rottweiler blood. You could see it in his shoulders, and you could hear it when he barked, which he was doing that night when they pulled up beside the gate and Chuckie cut the engine. (Steve Yarbrough, “The Rest of Her Life”)
“This here is my name, to begin with,” he said. ARNOLD FRIEND was written in tarlike black letters on the side [of the car], with a drawing of a round grinning face that reminded Connie of a pumpkin, except it wore sunglasses. . . . “Now these numbers are a secret code, honey,” Arnold Friend explained. He read off the numbers 33, 19, 17 and raised his eyebrows at her to see what she thought of that, but she didn’t think much of it. The left rear fender had been smashed and around it was written, on the gleaming gold background: DONE BY CRAZY WOMAN DRIVER. (Joyce Carol Oates, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”)