Settings and how writers can create and use them. Lindsay Townsend

Function of setting.

1.  A well-drawn setting stops any story from taking place in a void. It gives a place, a view, a time.

2. Setting throws more light on characters by showing how a particular character reacts to a particular setting.

3. Setting can inform and illuminate a story’s character. An African may react differently or see different things in a setting, landscape or situation than an alien from out of space. Keep in mind your characters’ age, sex and culture when they react in a setting or are brought up in that setting.

4. Setting can suggest or heighten mood and atmosphere. It can add a contrast to your character’s inner or outer conflict or mood. It can symbolise a state of mind—so, for example, a man wrung out with guilt plodding through a stormy, bleak landscape. It can add poignancy to a moment by either addition or contrast. (Your hero/heroine feels like death and a butterfly has just landed on their hand and then fluttered off. A mother who has just lost a child watches other toddlers and mothers playing happily in a park.)

5. Setting can drive the action, adding conflict. A character can be stuck on a hillside with an avalanche underway or a lightning storm brewing or a big snow coming. Your hero/heroine may be being chased and the landscape itself is a problem— there is no clear track, it’s dark, dank and slippery underfoot, the terrain is relentlessly flat or severely  steep, while moonlight helps to show your people up like Christmas trees. The setting can add to their difficulties and at times become almost a character in its own right.

Use all senses to evoke setting and spirit of place, that is sight, sounds, smells and taste. Remember always to describe a setting through the viewpoint of one of your characters and to describe it in the way that your person would view it. For example, a wildlife photographer will notice the different creatures and plants in a setting and know their names. A small child may not understand the potential dangers in a landscape. A man who has already dragged himself through scrub and thorns may be vividly aware of his thirst and pain and little else. Keeping in mind your character’s interaction with the setting  will make the scene more alive to your reader and your character either more sympathetic or hateful. (If you have a noble watching a thin, ragged child tiredly washing clothes in a stream or tub and the noble is obsessed with how clean his lace is going to be when the child is finished.) 

Don’t have too many changes of setting or scene in a short novella or you run the risk of confusing your reader. Think about setting in stages. It might be useful to jot a few images down first and then feed these through the story as your viewpoint character feels and hears and reacts within the setting in which you’ve placed them. 

Points to think about when drawing up a setting.

1. What can your character see on the skyline? What’s in the distance? What are the distant sounds? Is there any wind? Do sounds or smells float on the wind? 

2. What time of day is it? If at night is there a moon or stars? What kind of weather is it? What season of the year? Are there any seasonal animals or flowers or any seasonal activities evident? 

3. What can character detect from middle-distance? Are there sounds? Sights? Both should be more distinct, firmer, perhaps more of a threat if the setting is adding to conflict.

4. Close-up sights, particularly colour and movement. Blaring sounds - or soft but thrilling sounds. Taste. Scent. Cold. Rain. Wind. Scorching sun. Frost.  Remember, as I’ve mentioned before, it’s people and living things that make a setting, not buildings. Go easy on the socio-political comment even in a political short story. Comment by symbolism and suggestion - show how characters are deprived or empowered. How they speak and react and dress will all show and add to setting. They too are part of a landscape.

When describing a setting, it’s not usually a good idea to blurt it all out in a big spill on the first page. (In ‘The Return of the Native,’ Thomas Hardy does it with Egdon Heath, where that landscape is a symbol and character in its own right, so a writer can do so, but it’s unusual in genre fiction.)  Thread it through the story, odd touches and gleams here and there, like a carving in a wood panel. Use adjectives and verbs that heighten the scene and mood and unless it’s a deliberate device, be consistent. So if you’re describing a tranquil setting, keep it tranquil till you want to grab the reader with a shock. 

Have your character doing something within that setting, something pertinent and interesting. Readers are charmed by ‘insider’ knowledge and by skill, so if your character can weave or smithy or line-dance or flower arrange or stargaze or gut fish or carve or shovel or knead and plait bread - any task that’s a bit different to filling a kettle and settling down for a cuppa or crossing a room for that ubiquitous sherry or whisky - will grab their attention and keep them engaged. Once ‘hooked’ you can guide them through the setting via your viewpoint character, pointing out whatever is relevant by way of plot or contrast or mood.

In this excerpt from my "The Snow Bride" I have my main female character, Elfrida, trying to use her witch-craft to recover her missing sister Christina. In this setting the harsh winter echoes Elfrida's bleak and desperate mood.

She is Beauty, but is he the Beast?

THE SNOW BRIDE (THE KNIGHT AND THE WITCH 1) https://amzn.to/2MZZan0

UK  https://amzn.to/2H1tYzY 

EXCERPT https://bit.ly/2yV95Cb 

REVIEW https://bit.ly/38ynFzh

Excerpt.

“She is the third!” Walter had cried out, beating his fists against the walls of their empty hut. “The third in her wedding garb, and the most beautiful: one black-haired, one brown, and my Christina!”

He had refused to say more, even when Elfrida had threatened to curse him, but his outburst told her what he and the elders had been hiding from the village women. The brute who had carried off Christina had kidnapped other pretty young girls, also dressed in their wedding gowns. He stole brides.

I will dress myself as a bride and return here with my own wedding feast, with food and drink in abundance. Let him think me a bridal sacrifice, his red-haired bride, left for him by the village. And, by Christ and all his saints, this time I will be ready for him!

It is a blessing I am a healer and have so many potions ready prepared. If I put sleeping draughts in the wine, food, and sweets, surely I can tempt the beast to take some? I can smear tinctures of poppy on my skin and clothes, so any taste will induce sleep.

Sleep, not death, for she had to know where he had taken Christina.

I will coax the truth from the groggy monster, and then the village men can have him.

Part of her knew she was being wild, unreasonable, that she should talk to Walter, tell the villagers, but she did not care. Talk would waste more precious hours, and they might even try to stop her. For her sister she would do anything, risk anything. But she must hurry, she must do something, and she had little time.

It was full dark before Elfrida was finished, midnight on the day after the start of Advent, two days after Christina should have been married. She shivered in the glinting snow, her breath suspended between the frosted, white ground and the black, star-clad sky.

She glanced over the long boulder she had used as an offering table for her wine and food, not allowing herself to think too closely about what she had done. She had lit a small fire and banked it so that it would burn until morning, to stop her freezing and to keep wolves at bay, and now by its tumbling flames she saw her own small, tethered shadow writhing on the forest floor.

She would not dwell on what could go wrong, and she fought down her night terrors over Christina, lest they become real through her thoughts. She lifted up her head and stared above the webbing of treetops to the bright stars beyond, reciting a praise chant to herself. She was a warrior of magic, ready to ensnare and defeat the beast.

“I have loosened my hair as a virgin. I am dressed in a green gown, unworn before today. My shoes are made of the softest fur, my veil and sleeves are edged with gold, and my waist is belted in silver. There is mutton for my feast, and dates and ginger, wine and mead and honey. I am a willing sacrifice. I am the forest bride, waiting for my lord—” 

Her voice broke. Advent was meant to be a time of fasting, and she had no lord. None of the menfolk of Yarr would dare to take Elfrida the wisewoman and witch to be his wife. She knew the rumors—men always gossiped more than women—and all were depressing in their petty spitefulness. They called her a scold because she answered back.

“I need no man,” she said aloud, but the hurt remained. Was she not young enough, fertile enough, pretty enough?

Keep to your task, Elfrida reminded herself. You are the forest bride, a willing virgin sacrifice.

She had tied herself between two tall lime trees, sometimes struggling against her loose bonds as if she could not break free. She could, of course, but any approaching monster would not know that, and she wanted to bait the creature to come close—close enough to drink her drugged flask of wine and eat her drugged “wedding” cakes. Let him come near so she could prick him with her knife and tell him, in exquisite detail, how she could bewitch him. He would fear her, oh yes, he would...

She heard a blackbird caroling alarms and knew that something was coming, closing steadily, with the stealth of a hunter. She strained on her false bonds, peering into the semidarkness, aware that the fire would keep wild creatures away. Her back chilled as she sensed an approach from downwind, behind her, and as she listened to a tumble of snow from a nearby birch tree, she heard a second fall of snow from a pine closer by. Whoever, whatever, was creeping up was somehow shaking the trees, using the snowfalls as cover to disguise its own movement.

A cunning brute, then, but she was bold. In one hand she clutched her small dagger, ready. In her other, she had the tiny packet of inflammables that she now hurled into the fire.

“Come, husband!” she challenged, as the fire erupted into white-hot dragon tongues of leaping flame, illuminating half the clearing like a noonday sun. “Come now!” 

She thrust her breasts and then her hips forward, aping the actions that wives had sometimes described to her when they visited her to ask for a love philter. She shook her long, red hair and kissed the sooty, icy air. “Come to me!”

She saw it at the very edge of her sight—black, huge, a shadow against the flames, off to her side, and now a real form, swooping around from the tree line to her left to face her directly. She stared across the crackling fire at the shape and bit down on the shriek rising up her throat.

The beast stepped through the fire, and she saw its claw reaching for her. She heard a click, off to her right, but still kept watching the claw, even as the fire was suddenly gutted and dead, all light extinguished.

Darkness, absolute and terrifying, smothered her, and she was lost.

Lindsay Townsend