Edit like an Editor: A Wattpad Featured Guide ✔

Part v. Creating the Setting

In great fiction, the setting lives from the very first pages. Such places not only feel extremely real, they are dynamic. They change. They affect the characters in the story. They become metaphors, possibly even actors in the drama.

In fiction, the setting includes both the time and geographic location in which the story takes place. A literary element, the setting helps initiate the main backdrop and mood for a story.

It includes the surroundings of a scene from the weather to the minute details such as the curtains in the room. The point of a setting is to put your characters in a certain time and place to let a scene play out. Not only that, but a setting helps your reader imagine exactly what is going on while they read your novel.

You'll need to think about creating a worthy setting to support your plot and your protagonist. In novels, the setting (time, place, context) is like another main character.

Physical Locations

Your novel will be set in many locations, both interiors and exteriors. Perhaps your novel begins in an open marketplace in Algiers, or in the attic of a Victorian house, or in the cockpit of a jet fighter, or in your protagonist's home office. You'll have many other interiors and exteriors to create, and some of them may be so rich and intriguing that they reach what authors call a "virtual character."

Some settings will be particularly important to your plot: the bar where your romantic couple meets, where they later break up, and at the end of the novel where he asks her hand in marriage. Or the cliff where your protagonist nearly falls to her death.

Other settings are opportunities to further define your characters. For instance, the details of your protagonist's office, or her boyfriend's bedroom, or her mother's kitchen are extended ways of showing the reader those characters.

Renowned author, Hallie Ephron, states, "Your novel needs a variety of settings unless you want to deliberately create a feeling of claustrophobia" for your reader. This is a valid point.

It's a good idea to start an inventory of all the places where you'll set scenes in your novel, listing the details of each place. As you write, update the inventory so you can keep track of all the details you've added and make the place consistent each time you repeat it.

Geographic Locations

Readers enjoy novels that are set in real places, but if you use a real location you'd better get the details right. Utilize Google maps or images if you have to.

Developing a location requires more than getting the landscape, streets, and buildings correct. The weather, the sounds, the smell, the color of the sky—get these details right and your reader will be transported.

Let the geographic locale shape your characters' behavior. For example, pedestrians on the busy streets of New York or in the subway avoid eye contact with strangers; Texans tip their hats and say "howdy" to everyone. A Milwaukee police officer might have a passion for bratwurst; one of Chicago's finest might be an aficionado of Red Hots (another type of hot dog/sausage).

Below, Stephenie Meyer talks (on her website) about how she used Google to find the setting for her vampire-infested blockbuster novel, "Twilight."

For my setting, I knew I needed someplace ridiculously rainy. I turned to Google, as I do for all my research needs, and looked for the place with the most rainfall in the U.S. This turned out to be the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State. I pulled up maps of the area and studied them, looking for something small, out of the way, surrounded by forest...And there, right where I wanted it to be, was a tiny town called "Forks." It couldn't have been more perfect if I had named it myself.