Throughout my writing tenure I’ve focused more on characters than places. Often that’s to the benefit of the stories I write but some stories call for an in-depth, sensical universe. Rarely a universe but at least a lived-in town. Invariably with my chosen focus what brainpower I expend on settings hit a cookie cutter problem. Town size: small, medium, large, city. Geography: rivers, lake, ocean, mountains, desert, plains. Main export: wheat, coffee, apples, cattle. I fast fatigue and that’s a red flag. If I don’t care, you won’t care. My solution was to shape the setting through the lens of something I care about, the narrative.
This tact may work best once you’re on the second draft or perhaps when you settle on the story’s narrative. Obviously you can’t match the setting before you have a narrative. That doesn’t exclude developing the setting in the outlining stage but the specific tailoring comes later. However long you typically take to find your story’s meaning is a good barometer of how useful you’ll find this on a story-by-story basis. A portion will be unintentional but if you focus in you can craft a superior setting.
I wrote a story set on a lawless island in an archipelago. A lot was obvious. Illegal imports/exports. Condensed city planning. Grid roads. Visible urban decay. Easy. But in time, I grasped the island as an entity, a character itself. It was vengeful for the criminals who stole its once vibrant landscape. Gone were the beehives that produced honey and candlewax. Gone were the small fishing boats that hugged the coastline. Pavement over greenery sweltered the air. Polluted seawater carried a foul odor. The very causeway that connected it to the other islands formed a high arch, dissuading others from entering or those inside from leaving. If it could tumble and drag its inhabitants into the sea there’d be no hesitation. Nothing was overtly stated but in every description of the setting there’s a sense it doesn’t want the characters to be there. They perspire in the heat. They get sick from the water. They are claustrophobic from the overbuilt infrastructure. It wants them to suffer and perish. Once you have a direction to base your decisions on the setting can be fun.
One of my favorite examples of a setting that compliments the narrative is Arrakis in Frank Herbert’s Dune series: a desert planet that hosts a reclusive native populous, giant sandworms, and the near-magical spice mélange. Over thousands of years the changes in Arrakis’s ecology are juxtaposed against the changes in those living there. It starts a hazardous world that consumes its overconfident visitors. Then as the new populous settles the land with atmosphere altering satellites, plant life, and abundant water, the desert shrinks along with the sandworms’ numbers. Eventually the desert is so small it serves as a sort of nature preserve to a people who keep their old desert survival equipment in museums. Then the planet slowly reverts and unrestrained sandworms kill the unwitting natives as if they were the visitors from long ago. Those who survive Arrakis integrate themselves amongst the natives or keep the memories of their ancestors who did. A narrative about how using technology to protect oneself from nature weakens you through dependence till you’re more vulnerable than in the first place. In our world we build giant cities square in a desert but if the average person was airdropped ten miles out onto the sands there’s little odds of them returning.
The mix of these two story components is difficult because you’ll create the setting first, because the story needs to take place somewhere, but the narrative only forms once you firmly grasp the underlying message you’re communicating. You might pose an early thesis of “X is good/bad” but the story can change as you go. Even if you keep your original concept, you’ll (hopefully) expand to “X is good/bad because such and so.” That because and the reasons why form the finer details of your setting. Start with “Friendship is good.” Further on you expand to “Good friends keep you from inadvertently hurting others in your time of greatest adversity.” Flank the protagonist’s home with trees. Lighting strikes and a tree falls toward their house. However, the other trees catch their fallen compatriot, them all tangled up in their branches. Maybe when there was only one tree by the protagonist’s house but even amidst the first draft adding more trees is a simple change in the house’s introduction.
The details can be large and small. If you want to talk about the alienating dehumanization of modern communication have two characters bemoan that felling over texts while they ignore potentially looking at each other through their bedroom windows. If you want to decry segregation show two halves of a city or town breaking down, going dormant, or losing their luster from the practice. “Generational divide can make it difficult for a parent and child to understand one another.” Make the family home feel wide with plenty of negative space between where the parent and child inhabit.
Ultimately how you connect the setting to the narrative depends on the story you’re telling. I can tell you it will involve first creating your setting, then finding the narrative, then refining the setting to match that narrative. I’ve given these examples and hypotheticals because the bullet point list is as simple as the last sentence. The only reminder I can give is ask yourself, “How does this setting detail reinforce the narrative’s argument?” The philosophy is the setting can be another tool to be used to tell the story. Your overarching point is made with your characters, conflict, narration, story structure, etc. Why not use the setting as another brick in that wall? The more the merrier.
Colin Klawans 