This type of setting might be in a glittering city by the sea, or high in the mountains in a little ski resort town. A character’s values, biases, and expectations can be a result of their natural world or their cultural one. EnvironmentalĮnvironmental setting is the wider world of our story, not just naturally but also socially and politically. 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. Temporal setting refers to the historical period and the cultural and political struggles that were prevalent in that time period-for instance, the 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. Let’s look at what is setting and some of the elements of setting you’ll have in your story. Once you have the basic foundation of this relationship between setting and character you can begin building your world from the ground up. When done well, each layer of the setting you create brings you deeper and deeper into your story.Īs you’ll see in the examples farther down, the setting of a story directly affects everything in your story world: from the themes that you communicate in your work, to the tone and voice that your readers hear, to the people your characters begin as and who they grow into.Įven in the same broad setting, different characters can have different relationships with the world around them, and that will inform the choices they make that power the events of the plot. It is the world and all its messy cultural impact. Setting in a story is your characters’ immediate surroundings, their geographic location, natural environment, time of day, season of the year, era in history, social perspective, and dialect. Whether you’re looking at a short story setting or the setting of a novel, the characters who populate your writing will be largely formed and informed by setting-the influences and mechanics of their everyday world. Setting in real life-the places we grew up, the societal cultures we’re exposed to, the global events taking place as we do our best to navigate the struggles of day-to-day living-has a huge impact on who we are as people and the choices that we make. What new writers often don’t realize is that your setting, when crafted with passion and attention to detail, informs all of these things. Many authors will begin writing with a general idea of the time and place from which they want to present their story, scratch out some quick and dirty exposition on setting early on so that their readers know where they are, and then power on to the good stuff-resonant characters, breakneck plots, and powerful themes. In some stories, the setting can strongly affect the plot, functioning almost like another character.Ħ More commonly, though, the setting is always there as a foundation for the story-illuminating character aspects, influencing actions, and helping to set the mood.The setting of a story is something that tends to get shuffled around during the writing process. Setting can often help reveal character traits, and it is one of the primary ways an author establishes the story’s mood. Setting is often developed with narrative description, but it may also be shown with action, dialogue, or a character’s thoughts.ĥ Importance of Setting Characters in a story all have to interact in one way or another with its setting. However, readers should become sensitive to subtle shifts in setting. Novels may involve many different settings in widely varying landscapes. mood: The underlying feeling or atmosphere produced by a story While setting includes simple attributes such as climate or wall décor, it can also include complex dimensions such as the historical moment the story occupies or its social context.ģ Mood Because particular places and times have their own personality or emotional essence, setting is also one of the primary ways that a fiction writer establishes mood. Presentation on theme: "Elements of Fiction: Setting"- Presentation transcript:Ģ Definition Setting, quite simply, is the story’s time and place.
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