Fourteen Questions About Setting

If writing fiction is all about answering questions, then there are fourteen questions about setting you better have the answers for. Thirteen of them will help audit your novel; that’s a quick win. But the fourteenth? That’s the most important of all…

Be it contemporary, literary or genre fiction, the setting grounds the story, puts it into a believable place and time. While good stories rise above their setting, there’s nothing like a bad setting to take readers out of that story. Period detail for historical settings is an obvious focus. But adventure, crime, romance, sci-fi and fantasy? All of these can plunge into a pit of distraction, disbelief and derision when the setting goes wrong.

Pulled from an old English syllabus, my re-jigged version of thirteen questions about setting are:

• Where does the story take place?
• When does the story take place?
• If the story were in another time, would it change? How?
• Could it take place anywhere else? If so, where?
• Could the story take place in this world?
• How did the author describe the place?
• What could you see, feel, hear, smell, as you read?
• How did the authored describe the time?
• How much time passes in the story?
• How did the author make the reader aware of the passing of time?
• Does the time or place affect the characters or plot of the story?
• Does the setting feel like a place that you know?
• Would you want to visit the place the character lives?

These are all valuable as an author checklist for setting. But they won’t answer the all-important fourteenth question.

Without answering every question, let’s look at the fundamentals of setting.

How much is enough?

Many of these questions might drive a writer to include more and more setting. Robert Harris, Hilary Mantel, Kate Moss; all authors who pour vast amounts of research into their novels. The question is how much of that research goes into the setting before it ceases to be a novel and becomes lecture? How much do you need to describe to make the setting come alive? How much is too much? When describing every button, belt buckle and kitchen implement slows the pace of the story and cripples the narrative drive, that’s probably too much. A handful of readers will love it, many thousands will abandon the book for something with a little more drive.

Much as I love The Lord of the Rings and the glorious setting of Middle Earth, boy, does Tolkein go on. The trek through the Dead Marshes feels like it’s in real time.

Highland Fling

Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander is a time-travel romance split between 1940’s England and 1740’s Scotland. The fantasy element and the time periods are clearly sign-posted. It’s a fish-out-of-water, portal-fantasy, historical romance that relies on two sets of period detail, social mores and genre conventions.

Remove the time-travel element, is there enough in the core story to carry the reader? As a love triangle romance, I suppose Gabaldon could have set this in any contemporary trouble-spot where there is an authoritarian government fighting a rebellion. The protagonist doesn’t have to fall through a rift in time to find her Jacobite romeo, he could be a Syrian, a Kurd, a Sudanese or many other rebels.

Part of Gabaldon’s set-up is the idea of a strong professional woman with skills defying the social conventions of the society in which she finds herself. You could drop her into a Mafia romance, sports romance, or military romance. You could pick Ancient Rome or the European colonisation of Africa. Gabaldon chose two favourite time periods but could have excelled in any one. She applies her historical research to create enough of a setting to ground the story.

When now was then and then is now

Pride and Prejudice (yes, collect a sticker) is surprisingly light on detailed setting. For Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice is a contemporary romance. She saves much of the detail for the grand houses of Netherfield and Pemberley, describing the aristocratic bling that few of her readers would ever experience. But unlike E.L. James, Austen doesn’t spend much time on branded clothes, watches, or carriages, even though she probably could. The aristocratic upper class competed for conspicuous consumption, but in a closed social strata. Much of it would have been meaningless to most readers.

There’s just enough setting to put us in a physical place with the characters. The army is present, but the Napoleonic wars are never mentioned; not relevant to the story. This is escapist romance.

Much of Pride and Prejudice is told through letters. Everything takes much longer to unfold in Regency England. The story proceeds at the pace of the fastest horse, coach and mail courier. There’s a major acceleration with the steam engine, again with the motor car, the landline telephone and ultimately the mobile phone and Internet.

Can you shift Austen’s stories to a new setting? How about Bride and Prejudice or Clueless? What does that tell us?

Question Fourteen

The quality of the story is not about the setting; is the core of the story strong enough to carry it through any setting?

Book One of my fantasy series is actually a pursuit Western. Six-guns could replace swords. I could move it to the Wars of the Roses. It could be any Wilbur Smith adventure in central Africa. It could play out in the Japanese Shogunate. I could re-paint it as Minority Report, or picture it as a space-faring, sci-fi Space Opera.

I don’t strictly need magic or Jovanka’s Second Sight, the core conflict remains intact. Everything else is, essentially window-dressing. The setting may influence genre and a target market, it may even shape a new genre, like Harry Potter, Twilight or Fifty Shades. It may create a new sub-genre like Romantasy.

Those thirteen questions will iron-clad your setting, but it’s the fourteenth question that counts.