Transcript:

What if your setting wasn’t just a backdrop—but a character that shapes emotions, conflict, and meaning?

There are so many great examples of settings that have come to life on the page:

• Hogwarts, which was a magical mixture of a safe home and mysterious danger to Harry and his friends;
• Panem’s districts and The Capitol, which clearly laid out the inequality and hostility that Katniss fights against throughout the series;
• The Halls of Moria, which gives a ton of direct and indirect history of the dwarves and what happened to some of the characters between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Ring.

For the next series on this channel, we will be exploring all the bits and pieces that come with worldbuilding and how to weave those details effectively into your story. So today, we are going to dive into setting as a storytelling tool, not just a visual you’re obliged to describe to avoid the white room syndrome. Setting should influence your story, not just decorate it.

Hi, I’m C. Sloan Lewis, your virtual writing coach, and my goal is to help you not just improve your writing, but to support you as a writer. Welcome to my channel!

Setting’s Impact on Storytelling

Most new writers don’t understand the power and weight setting has on your plot and characters. They often treat it like wallpaper, just descriptions and aesthetics that don’t hold any meaning. But look around your house… doesn’t nearly everything around you tell some sort of story and hold some significance?

For example, I have my English degrees behind me as well as most of my home book collection (I have a lot more in my classroom), which shows that I mean business about the subjects of English, reading, and writing. On the desk next to me, I have a picture of my husband and me at my brother’s wedding, just a few months before we got married. In the closet, there’s a whole collection of Nancy Drew books my friend gave me to read to my daughter one day. Just in this room alone, there are so many clues to who I am, where I’ve been, and where I’m going.

The same is true for the rooms your characters are in.

But the biggest struggle writers have, even those who have been at the writing game for a while, is throwing way too much information at the reader at once. When I first published The Soul Child, the entire first page was a description of the library. It was a cool library, and it was significant to the character, but the description didn’t really add anything to the upcoming scene and delayed the actual story from getting started.

With the revised edition I’m putting the finishing touches on, it jumps straight into the action, and I weave the wonder of the library throughout the first chapter. I also had a whole thing about the geography of the world, shown through various globes scattered throughout the library, but since the characters don’t travel more than 50 miles, I scrapped it entirely because the world as a whole would never come up again.

But even though you don’t want to make the scene all about the setting, you also don’t want to make the setting so bland or generic that the scene could happen literally anywhere else. Like, my opening scene HAD to happen in a library, so it needed to be clear she was in a library, and a library of the most powerful wizard in all the land to boot.

But if you have a story set in a random room, say someone’s home office, and nothing at all comes up about why they’re in that setting… then why are they in that setting? Are they trying to get away from the other people at a party, so they ducked into the office? Is one of the characters wanting to show the other his research? If you can’t figure out a reason for them being there, you might need to rethink the setting.

With those ideas in mind, let’s explore how setting can be most effectively used as a storytelling tool.

Setting needs to impact the story on multiple levels:

• Shaping character motivation and behavior — is there something they need to find? A heist they need to make? A person they need to rescue?
• Creating conflict and limits — Physical obstacles and boundaries, the society the character’s a part of, or a crime scene that needs solving
• Conveying theme and tone through symbolism and connotation — this is where the classic “the curtains are blue, which symbolizes the character’s sadness” comes from. But it’s an effective tool when you avoid the cliches.
• Reflecting emotional states — having a character throw an object, punch a wall, stare longingly at a picture, or hide in a closet.
• Forshadowing events — the Chekhov’s gun principle, which states that every element mentioned must be important to the story at some point. If there’s a gun in Act 1, it must be shot by the end of Act 3.

The Four Layers of Story-Driven Setting

To understand how to develop your setting for each scene, you need to know the four layers of a story-driven setting:

Layer 1: The Physical Setting

This is going to be the obvious stuff: the geography, weather, environment, and architecture. You can use these physical details to create obstacles, dangers, and/or opportunities.

Example: Traveling across Middle Earth was so significant for Bilbo and Frodo because they were so small and unskilled at fighting, and the world was so big and dangerous.

Layer 2: The Cultural and Social Setting

This layer is all about the beliefs, traditions, laws, class systems, religion, and language — it’s also the place I find writers spending the most of their time with worldbuilding, and also what they info dump the most about. But these are really important because they help you to design the society so it creates tension, conflict, and character growth. It can be tricky to find the balance, which is why I’ll be making a whole video about this next month.

Example: In The Handmaid’s Tale, the entire setting is the conflict. Offred wouldn’t have had to endure what she did if it weren’t for the beliefs and religion of the people in charge of Gilead, who made the laws based on their beliefs, which created the class system that forced her to be a handmaid.

Layer 3: The Emotional/Atmospheric Setting

This is when I start to get all English teacher-y on you because layer three is all about mood and tone, or how the setting feels, not just how it looks. This can be shown through weather, light, colors, sound, and even empty vs. crowded spaces.

Example: If you have a descriptive line about your setting that says, “The room smelled like dust and forgotten hope,” it shows not just an aspect of the room but gives an emotional cue.

Layer 4: The Symbolic Setting

This is where the setting becomes a metaphor, or reflection, of the character’s state, the theme, or the overall transformation in the story.

Example: The frozen palace Elsa creates is not just a crazy cool animation, it’s a symbol for her isolation and the hidden beauty in the powers she fears.

How Setting Drives Plot and Character

Setting doesn’t just sit there looking pretty. It actually has a lot to do with what drives your plot and characters. Setting often forces characters to make decisions, whether that’s deciding to trek through a blizzard to save their son, rebelling against unjust laws, going against cultural norms, or facing the dangers in the wilderness to find treasure or save the day.

It’s also a big tool for helping characters grow through learning to adapt or overcoming struggles. It could also inadvertently provide the characters with clues to a mystery, like when the staircases in Hogwarts changed, causing Harry, Ron, and Hermione to happen upon Fluffy, the three-headed dog.

Setting should ultimately cause characters to reveal who they are. For instance, I’m working on a story about a young woman who moves into a house left to her by her late mother. Moving into the house forces the character to not just confront her grief and learn about her family’s history, but also figure out what she’s truly capable of, living on her own for the first time.

Let’s put these new ideas into practice with a quick writing exercise:

Take one of your story’s key scenes. Then, try to write the same scene in a different location. Does the scene change or stay the same? If nothing changes, the setting isn’t part of the story; it’s just scenery, so go back through the scene and make sure all four layers are there.

Remember: setting is not just where the story happens; it’s part of why the story happens.

But that’s all from me today. Next week, we’ll be diving into how to keep your worldbuilding believable, even in the most fantastical of settings, so be sure to subscribe and hit the bell to be notified about my new videos. And please give a thumbs up if you got something out of this oner; it supports my channel and helps other writers find it.

You’ve got some writing to do, so I’ll see you in the next video. Ta-ta!