The link between setting and character
Sometimes you will build your setting around your characters; other
times you will discover your characters by exploring the setting of your story.
Everywhere you have ever been and every moment in time you have heard
about or experienced contains the possibilities for a limitless amount of
stories. Let us look at a popular setting for a wide range of storytelling
mediums: New York City. Even people who have never been to New York can
come up with a good idea of what it looks like.
Now go deeper. You could take a few different roads here, but let us go to
New York City in the 1920s: where everything shines like the stars have
fallen and are dancing debaucherously down the middle of Broadway. What
kind of characters do you see in this world? Go deeper. More roads are
opening up to you. Who is your protagonist, and where do they spend their
time? What sort of setting feels like home to them? Imagine that they are a
bright young thing in a jet rhinestone dress with a soft spot in the knees for
boys who drive fast cars. Where is your story taking shape?
Now imagine instead that your protagonist is a thirteen-year-old kid with
holes in his shoes. Unlike the golden dame with the Clara Bow lips who might
as well be a million miles away, he is black.
Suddenly our story is coming from a very, very different place.
You’ll notice that we didn’t say anything about where these two
characters eat, sleep, or spend their time, but simply by describing who they
are you’re probably getting an image of their respective settings in your
head. Your story’s settings and characters are inextricably entwined. Even in
the same general setting, different characters can have very different
relationships with their time and place. The world in which your story is set
will help shape the person your character was, is, and will become, and it is
through their eyes that the reader gets the chance to live in it.
The three layers of setting
Once you have the foundation of this relationship between setting and
character you can begin building your world from the ground up. Let us look
at what is setting and some of the elements of setting you will have in your
story.
1. Temporal
Time is a multi-faceted thing. Temporal setting refers to the historical
period and the cultural and political struggles that were prevalent in that
time period—for instance, the world war of the 1940s, or the Irish ethno-
nationalist conflict of the 1990s—as well as the chapter of your character’s
life, the season of the year, and the time of day—for example, a blustery
autumn night at 11:57pm, three minutes before your protagonist’s sixteenth
birthday.
Temporal setting can tell us a lot about the world your character lives in,
their place in it, and can even give us hints as to what sort of conflicts they
might be facing later on.
2. Environmental
Environmental setting is the wider world of our story, not just naturally
but also socially and politically. A character’s values, biases, and
expectations can be a result of their natural world or their cultural one.
This type of setting might be in a glittering city by the sea, or high in the
mountains in a little ski resort town. It might be a barren alien planet with an
experimental new political system, or a shadowy winter wonderland just
beyond the doors of an old wardrobe. Whether your story setting is real or
imaginary, it is important to know how this place has shaped the lives of its
people and what kind of obstacles it might put in their way.
These types of settings in a story are also excellent tools
for communicating mood, theme, and tone with the reader. J. R. R.
Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings does this very well: certain environmental settings
like the Shire are deeply associated with all the comforts of home, family,
and stability. Other settings, like Mordor and Mount Doom, impart a
completely different feeling of darkness and despair.
3. Individual
Individual settings are the specific places where your story is happening:
the settings where the reader will see much of the action-taking place.
Individual settings in a story could be in a library, in a shopping mall, on a
bench in Central Park, or on the deck of a pirate ship. Some stories will have
only one individual setting, but others will have many.
The individual settings are where you get to have a lot of fun with
sensory detail. The way a room glows in the dying twilight, the way it smells
after being abandoned for many years, the creaks in the old floorboards, and
the feel of once-luxurious velvet worn down to bare threading all contribute
to the intimacy with which your reader experiences your world.
Like the environmental setting, your individual settings can be used to
create a sense of danger or safety, hope or despair, often in contrast and
juxtaposition with one another.
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