My father used to say, “We carry around the places in which we’ve lived for the rest of our lives.” Seeing as he was from Newark and once abandoned me at the mall because I lost an elementary school spelling bee, I would have to say that’s true.

Setting plays an important part of our lives and it should play an equally important role in your fiction. Imagine how impossible it would be to set King Lear in some place like feudal Japan. Or how No Country For Old Men might be different were it set in Legoland.   

In fact, setting can be the main draw of our fiction. Aside from Hogwarts, an institution that a whole generation of readers would kill to attend, Harry Potter is, when you get down to it, just a rote hero’s journey narrative with a bunch of off-putting racial stereotypes. Aside from the wintry wonderland of Narnia, the C.S. Lewis books are just a horrible conversation you’d have with the Mormons proselytizing on your street after you forgot to pretend you were having a phone conversation to avoid them.

But writing an interesting setting is easier said than done. There are a lot of ways you can screw it up. For example, even though Plastered Bastard had a setting that connected thematically to ideas of loneliness and abandonment, I knew I screwed up when I realized there aren’t any deserts in Ireland. In today’s video, I’ll show you how to avoid some of these problems. Now let’s set sail for gumdrop forests and whore islands.

It’s important that we be clear what we mean when we say setting. For starters, setting is just one component of your worldbuilding. You can see more about worldbuilding in this video here. But for the sake of this video, we’ll look at three components of setting: the temporal setting, the environmental setting and the individual setting.

The temporal setting is when your story is happening. Each scene will have an individual one and there is also the larger time period in which the story is located. Think about how crucial the temporal setting is to To Kill A Mockingbird. If it were set today, everyone in the town would get Atticus Finch disbarred for being too woke.

The environmental setting is the larger environment in which the story takes place. Usually, this is consistent throughout your entire novel and is important in establishing your book’s themes and tone. Sci-fi novel Tek War, for example, takes place in the futuristic world of 2044 Los Angeles, which lets us know that this is not going to be a good book.

The individual setting are smaller rooms, houses and vehicles the characters inhabit at different times through the story, and these are less important for your themes, but more crucial for the action and dialogue. The boat in the Life of Pi, for example, is a good setting to create tension but that has no thematic or symbolic meaning at all.  

Hopefully that gives you just a glimpse of why setting is so important to your writing. Let’s look at five tips that will make our settings more memorable.

Step 1: Think carefully about how the setting influences your characters

Setting should affect your characters’ behaviors just like it does in real life. I mean, I currently keep a gun safe next to my desk in the closet in which I record these videos because last year I moved into an apartment in a less well-off part of town.

You can use setting to test your character and create conflict. If your main character is a priest, a visit to the aforementioned Whore Island may prove an interesting test of his faith. If your character is bad with directions, you can have them drive through Boston and the conflict may write itself.

But a setting can be an asset as well. In The Remains of the Day, Darlington Hall provides the butler Stevens a chance to fulfill his life’s duty of being the best possible butler he can be. In my novel, Destination: Earth, the titular planet offers the aliens a great place to commit their sex crimes outside the jurisdiction of the intergalactic federation.  

Step 2: Visit the real world location in which your story is set

“Write what you know” is an overused piece of writing advice, and also the reason my first 60 novels had way too many obscure baseball statistics. But a setting you’re familiar with will most likely be more vividly rendered.

The simplest cheat would just be to write a story set where you live. For people from New York or London or an underwater sea laboratory, that’s a piece of cake, but if you live in a place like Delaware, it will be hard to get your reader to suspend their disbelief and convince them something interesting might’ve actually happened there.

If that’s the case, you can consider visiting or living in a place you think might make an interesting setting. Besides certain tax issues, the reason I’m living where I am now is because there have been a lot of interesting murders here that will translate to great fiction.

Step 3: Use all the senses in your description

Too many authors focus on sight and neglect the great sensory experience literature can provide. And they forget how much we rely on our other senses. For example, the first thing I noticed when I first viewed my new apartment wasn’t the faded bloodstain on the floorboards, but rather the acrid smell of moth balls and Vaseline. And every time I hear Bryan Adams’s “I Do it For You,” I’m reminded of losing my virginity on a friend’s trampoline.

Here’s a few more quick tips:

Use An Emotional Filter – Your character needs to experience the setting through emotions. So if they’re in a place like Scottsdale, they should think that death can’t come soon enough.

Sketch a map of your setting – Don’t worry if you’re not an artist. Here’s my map of the spaceship in Gauge Symmetries.