Setting That Works
How Memorable Setting Can Advance Plot, Reveal Character, Echo Theme, and More
How do you know how much setting to include? What do you mean by “setting that works?”
Two elderly couples are taking a walk, the women in front, the men closely behind. One man says to the other, “We went out to dinner last night and had the best grilled fish ever —”
The second man says, “What restaurant?”
The first man slaps his forehead. “Damn. Senior moment. Help me out here. You know that flower, the fragrant one with the thorns?”
The second man says, “Rose?”
“Yeah, Rose,” the first man says, then shouts to his wife, “Rose, what was the name of that restaurant we went to last night?”
Notice anything about that story? No setting. None needed. Readers can picture the setting in their own way.
This is not to say that setting isn’t important as much as that if all it does is its primary role — immersing readers in the scene, so they can visualize it, feel it, smell it — it’s a missed opportunity. Even the most elegantly written setting can slow your story down.
The best and most memorable setting is lean and strong because it’s working multiple jobs. It advances the story, or sets the mood, or echoes the theme.
One of the most powerful jobs setting can do is propel the story. For example, in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, the setting is central to the plot. The Joads, a family of farmers, are so poor they have to leave drought-stricken Dust Bowl Oklahoma (the first setting). They drive to sunny California, seeking new opportunities only to find low wages, an oversupply of labor, and exploited workers (the second setting).
The most common side gig for setting is defining or revealing character. In many novels, the camera sits on the character’s shoulder. The reader sees what the character sees. If I’m walking in my neighborhood in Tam Valley, I might notice how flowers are bursting out all over. Someone else might notice the Teslas and Mercedes. What the character sees shows the reader who he or she is. I notice the expensive cars too, not because I care about cars, but because they remind me I live in a community where many people have more money than I do. That’s revealing my character too.
What books, and which authors, would you say provide good examples of setting done well?
Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day comes to mind because the setting there is so much about describing a culture and tradition more than a place. The story follows Stevens, a middle-aged butler in 1950s England, who takes a motoring trip to the West Country, where a former housekeeper lives. He’s hoping he might rekindle a connection with her.
But most of the novel is his reminiscence of the time between the wars, when he presides over a large staff at Darlington Hall, a Downton Abbey–like estate and strives to be the best butler ever. He’s so obsessed with loyalty to a stuffy and antiquated tradition that he doesn’t allow himself an emotional life. He leaves the bedside of his dying father to take care of “critical matters” in the household, like polishing the silver.
The setting reveals Stevens’ character — not Darlington Hall as much as the devotion to “dignity” that sadly limits his life.
Then there’s Prodigal Summer, by Barbara Kingsolver, set in the fecund forests of Appalachia. Deanna, a wildlife biologist, is studying a den of coyotes that recently migrated into the region, and she falls in love with a young man who’s come to the mountains to hunt the coyotes.
The setting here is the opposite of The Remains of the Day — it’s humid and lush and bursting with procreating plants and animals. I read it long ago, and still remember the rowdy, sexy natural environment, the birds and bees writ large, and how that seeps into Deanna’s complicated relationship with the hunter.
How important is setting to a story? What about books where setting is like a character? Is that possible?
Consider The Perfect Storm, a true story about the crew of a fishing boat caught in a vicious Atlantic storm, which escalates the way a character might, and is described with adjectives you might use with people — angry, fierce, relentless. Severe weather, because it changes, can be like a character. In The Perfect Storm, the setting is the story.
There are plenty of books where cities are like characters. Think 1980s New York City in Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities, with its go-go greed-is-good bond traders and its polarizing racial tensions. Or Dickens’ London, with its prisons, workhouses, and “misanthropic ice.”
How else can setting strengthen your story?
Setting can also convey mood and tone. If you were to describe a committee of vultures perching on a tree branch, studying the ground, that certainly communicates an ominous feeling. Or it’s a metaphor for what’s happening in the story.
In The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje’s desert setting and the hot winds evoke mood, character, tension, theme, story.
“The desert could not be claimed or owned—it was a piece of cloth carried by winds, never held down by stones, and given a hundred shifting names long before Canterbury existed, long before battles and treaties quilted Europe and the East.”
One of my favorite uses of setting is in All the King’s Men, where Robert Penn Warren echoes his main theme — how the past impacts the present — on the very first page. He describes driving fast down a heat-dazzled white slab of Louisiana highway that hypnotizes drivers to sleep and how the highway department marks the location of accidents with a cross along the side of the road with a skull and crossbones, to warn drivers, but then the kudzu vines cover up the crosses. We don’t learn from the past.
John Byrne Barry is a writer, actor, designer, director, and crossing guard. Also a former board member of California Writers Club Marin. He is the author of three plays and four novels. Find out more at johnbyrnebarry.com.
He is available to present “Setting That Works” to CWC branches.
