About a year ago, I formed a small writing group that meets every month to discuss each other’s works-in-progress. One of the group members reliably asks, for nearly every piece, questions about the setting. Oftentimes, even if the piece is fairly clear about where the action is taking place, there is missing context or grounding detail about the environment.
Hearing those questions frequently has, of course, sparked me to ask them pre-emptively when crafting my own work—to take the setting more seriously as a character in and of itself.
I was reminded of this recently when reading Marian Crotty’s piece for Glimmer Train, Committing to Place. She writes:
For beginning fiction writers, focusing on place is one of the easiest ways to improve stories that aren’t quite working. Doing so requires almost no imagination—simply looking closely, paying attention, mining your memory and/or conducting research. Paying attention to place, though, often addresses many of the common problems that plague the early stories of beginning writers—lack of detail and specificity, unrealistic characters and situations, and reliance on factual information that taxes readers instead of creating a sharp, sensory world that can simply be experienced.
Also this month in Glimmer Train:
- Notes on Writing by Laura Furman
Jane Friedman has spent nearly 25 years working in the book publishing industry, with a focus on author education and trend reporting. She is the editor of The Hot Sheet, the essential publishing industry newsletter for authors, and was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World in 2023. Her latest book is The Business of Being a Writer (University of Chicago Press), which received a starred review from Library Journal. In addition to serving on grant panels for the National Endowment for the Arts and the Creative Work Fund, she works with organizations such as The Authors Guild to bring transparency to the business of publishing.
The setting should be treated as a character as it has a lot of the same characteristics: distinct smell, mood or atmosphere, temperature/temperament, and flavor (?). Leaving Hannibal Lechter out of this, flavor could be interpreted as sweet/sour, mild or spicy. Just sayin’.
Thanks Jane for calling attention to story setting and Marian Crotty’s post on Glimmer Train. I couldn’t agree more. Though my mystery thrillers are based in familiar New England, I love sending characters–and readers–to exotic locations: an ancient souk in Morocco, the twisting cobblestone streets of Prague, an archaeological dig in Egypt. Setting can add suspense before the story begins and answers that first question, Where am I?
[…] not quite right with your story? Jane Friedman suggests fixing your story by focusing on place, and Ellen Tanner Marsh clarifies the 5 most common mistakes that bog down your […]