How to create dynamic, compelling settings for your story and
examples of Powerful settings in literature
Now you have seen the three layers of setting in a story: temporal
setting, environmental setting, and individual settings. You have also learned
about some of the most distinctive settings in literature and what it is about
them that makes them work so well. Now it is time to apply all of that to
setting in your own work.
1. Look at times, seasons, and stages of life
First, decide what time your story is set in. This is super important
because your temporal setting informs every other influence in your
character’s world. A young woman living in contemporary times will have a
very different relationship with the people around her, with her finances, with
her aspirations, and with the way she presents herself than a young woman
living, say, at the turn of the 19th century.
Likewise, a child growing up in the great depression of the 1930s will
grow to see the world in a different way than a child growing up in the
technological boom of the late 1990s.
Sometimes your story might pass through different periods. This might
be because you follow your characters throughout an entire lifetime,
spanning several decades, or it might be that you follow two or more
different characters living in different periods of history. This technique is
marvellously effective when done well, but it is essential to thoroughly
explore the unique benefits, challenges, and stigmas of each time period
since these will all affect your characters in different ways. Write them down
and think about how each character might respond to each challenge.
2. Look at your story’s environmental landscape
Once you know when your story is set, look at how the environment of
your story world is going to shape your characters. As we saw when we
looked at New York, above, the same broad space occupying the same time
can still have many different faces.
Look at the natural landscape of your story. As we explored in Wuthering
Heights, the natural world is something that is integral to your characters,
sinking into their bones until it becomes a part of them.
This can be practical as well as thematic; for instance, a character living
at the seaside in a thoroughfare for tropical storms will have a very different
relationship with the world around them than someone living out of a
cardboard box in a deserted alleyway—although both of these circumstances
present their own unique set of challenges.
Conversely, someone living in a comfortable country manor house will
see the world around them in their own unique way. It is your job as a writer
to intimately know the landscape of your story, the relationship it has with
your characters, and how that relationship may change over time.
3. Create unique individual locations
Now that you have explored your character’s relationship with their
wider world, you can look at the role more intimate spaces play in your story.
These can be things like a favorite café, a modern office with a picture
window looking out over the skyline, or a dusty old wine cellar humming with
barely-concealed family secrets.
This is where precise details become your lifeblood, as they contribute to
the tone of the story, its mood, theme, and even plot. They can help you tell
the external events of your story, as well as explore the internal workings of
your characters’ memories, fears, and hopes.
A well placed setting detail can be an excellent tool for foreshadowing,
and very often the characters’ perceptions of the individual settings will
inform their choices in the story. For example, if your protagonist avoids a
certain room of the house because it reminds them of a deceased family
member, that relationship may affect their behaviour and the choices they
make moving forward into the story. If your character goes up to their attic
looking for an old toy from their childhood, only to stumble upon a box of old
letters that launches them into the events of the plot, the entire story will
unfurl because of the character’s experience with one particular individual
setting.
In thrillers and mystery novels, settings often play a major role in the
choices made by the characters. If you have a scene where a character is in
danger, have them explore their immediate surroundings. Anything can be a
weapon, a means of protection, a way out, a way to turn the scene towards a
new direction. In martial arts, students are taught to use their surroundings
and look at them in new ways. It is the same in storytelling.
In your own work, make a list of the specific individual settings that are
going to play an important role in your story. Then write down as many
details as you can that make the setting feel alive, and—most importantly—
what these details mean to the characters who live in their world. You would
be surprised how much you can learn about your characters from something
as simple as an empty room.
Setting sharpens the world of your story
The three layers of our story’s setting are what brings the story to life.
Well-crafted setting details can give you clarity on who your characters are
and why they do the things they do, what direction they need to go in, and
how they may change over time. By creating a vivid world for your
characters to live in—whether that’s their wider world or a smaller, more
intimate space—you give your reader a way to live in that story world with
them.
Powerful settings in literature
Some story settings are so distinctive and iconic that they are just as
memorable, if not more so, than the characters or the story itself. Sometimes
these settings even play an essential role in the way the story unfolds—for
example, the intriguing, treacherous, gas lighting castle in the story of
Bluebeard and his wives.
On this settings examples list, you’ll probably be able to look at each
one and know exactly which story it came from (although two of them do
double duty as both setting and title, showing exactly how integral the
setting is to the story). This is because they have been tightly woven
alongside their characters within our story consciousness, and now we
cannot imagine one without the other. Let us look at some of literature’s
more powerful, memorable settings:
1. Hogwarts
A sprawling, shifting, faerie tale castle turned boarding school with its
very own railroad line is a pretty good place to begin building a story. This
magical marvel is said to be somewhere in Scotland, though its exact
location is a secret hidden from modern technology.
In the opening chapters of the Harry Potter series, the protagonist shifts
from the very safe, mundane, right-angled world of his aunt and uncle’s
pristine and boring house on an equally pristine and boring street, to an
extraordinary castle of dreams. This clever use of juxtaposition shows us that
we’re in for something very special. Hogwarts as a setting and as a plot
device clearly and succinctly slices the protagonist’s world into a “before”
and an “after.” This contrast is a good thing to remember when crafting
settings in your own work.
In addition to its use as a thematic device, this setting plays a major role
in the plot on several occasions. Secret rooms, hidden doors, and shifting
passageways all bring new elements to the story. Without this setting the
story couldn’t exist.
2. Treasure Island
Treasure Island is a setting so integral to the story that it beat out the
book’s original title, The Sea Cook, and soared to the literary classics hall of
fame. Although historians know that piracy wasn’t nearly as romantic as
contemporary audiences would like to think, it’s undeniable that this novel
cemented the image of the high stakes treasure hunt into our literary
archetypal archive. The setting of the novel played an enormous part in that.
Aside from being a wonderful coming-of-age tale that follows the young
protagonist as he navigates an adventure of mutiny and morality, Treasure
Island introduced many of the setting-specific tropes that would go on to
become mainstays of the genre, like ferocious black-sailed ships, peg-legged
pirates, and maps detailing the location of buried treasure.
Although the novel visits a few different settings from start to finish, it’s
the titular Treasure Island that’s captured the imaginations of readers for
decades. Much like a certain distinctive city apartment (which we’ll look at
next), Treasure Island blurs the lines between fact and fantasy, between
what had been real and what could be real if you peered closely enough.
3. 221B Baker Street
Very few street addresses have achieved such universal status as an
unassuming London flat near a busy tube station. At the time of the original
publication of Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous detective series, Baker Street in
London only went up to number 85; 221B was entirely fictional.
The apartment itself was never meant to be anything very extraordinary:
a suite of rented rooms in a lodging house. Very little of the original text was
given to the actual description of the flat—“cheerfully furnished, and
illuminated by two broad windows.” And, in fact, Sherlock Holmes’
adventures didn’t actually take place there; most of the time he and his loyal
housemate were out scouring the mean London streets for baddies. So why
did this one Georgian door become such a distinctive part of our cultural
imagination?
Very likely for two reasons. The first, much as we saw when we looked at
Hogwarts, above, comes from juxtaposition. Holmes and Watson go on wild
chases and apprehend dastardly people doing dastardly things before
coming home to a small, comfortable, welcoming apartment with a kettle
and a sofa and a beaten up violin—not entirely different from what Doyle’s
contemporary readers would have come home to at the end of their days.
Often, 221B Baker Street was where the stories’ denouements would take
place; a moment of reflection on the events of the plot. This allows the iconic
setting to welcome both the characters and the readers to a sense of
homecoming before the story ends.
The second reason is a clever one, and difficult to imitate: 221B Baker
Street hovers just at the very knife edge of reality. It is a fictional place that
did not, in any shape or form, exist… but it was so, so close to being real.
So close that scholars have torn their hair out trying to tease out clues from
Doyle’s work as to whether or not the address could have existed, and
certain businesses have come to fifteen-year legal blows for the right to
accept mail sent to 221B. You can see how, when creating fantastical
settings in your own work, much of their emotional resonance comes from a
place of truth and familiarity for your readers.
4. The Daily Planet
In today’s digital age, the romanticized chaos of a busy newspaper office
seems like something left over from our grandparents’ age or an episode
of Mad Men. But in 1940, when Action Comics #23 first gave us an inside
glimpse of the world occupied by Clark Kent, Lois Lane, and their story-
scooping colleagues, it represented a world of possibility.
The Daily Planet has become one of the most iconic architectural
designs in comic book history, despite its revolving teams of ownership and
editors-in-chief. It began with Superman and then spilled over into other
comic book storylines as well, at one point being bought by Bruce Wayne
of Batman fame. Showing our larger-than-life hero in a very human setting
with very human limitations was a great way to explore character and
relationships between characters. This is another example of effective
juxtaposition between the magic and the mundane.
In addition to being a distinctive visual within the DC Comics world, it
was a setting where many of the story world’s characters came together. It
was a place where new characters were introduced, new relationships were
formed, broken, and reformed in new ways. Being that it was also a
controlled environment much like a 1940s version of the internet, it was also
used to convey information both to other characters and to the reader. This
is an example of how a well-chosen setting can serve the plot in practical,
functional ways.
5. Wuthering Heights
Read any study on Wuthering Heights and you’ll see scholars adulating
the gothic, windswept beauty that this iconic setting contributes to Emily
Brontë’s famous novel. While Wuthering Heights is actually the name of a
house within the story, the setting encapsulated by the title is so much
more:
the misty moors, the sparse hills, the shadows run through with hard edges
and thorns, the rotting foundations of the house and its land that serve as an
undercurrent to the untamed passions that carry the plot.
Rather than being a direct plot device like the Daily Planet, the
enigmatic beauty of Brontë’s setting seeps into every moment of the
story. Wuthering Heights shows the raw power of the natural landscape
as a direct parallel to the ragged, stripped-down power of barely contained
love— both much darker and more dangerous than some other stories
would have us think, and all the more beautiful and awe-inspiring because
of it.
The setting in this classic novel is a wonderful study in how a well-
crafted setting can completely change the tone of a story, and may even
lead your characters down roads you did not expect.
