setting

I recently read Noah Lukeman's The First Five Pages, and the penultimate chapter is about setting. He begins by saying:

It is amazing how often setting is neglected, employed only as necessary. This is such a mistake because, when brought to life, good settings can add a whole new dimension to a text, a richness nothing else can.

Immediately, I realized that setting was a vital part of all of the stories I've written in the past few years. And that realization astonished me.

I've never thought of myself as a writer who was all about setting. I would have said that I was all about character or that it was the "what if" of the plot that drew me into the narrative.

Except that my "what if's" always have to do with setting. In the book I'm writing now, the dual setting of a television production camp (so busy! so modern!) that's filming in the Sierra Nevada mountains (so eternal, so grand) is the spur to much of the action.

In the novella I wrote for my husband's birthday, the action begins in the slightly claustrophobic atmosphere of a space station - an atmosphere that becomes more claustrophobic when traffic between the station and Mars is suspended - and that then spirals down (literally) to Earth, and out into the vastness of the Mojave desert, which is not vast enough for our heroes to avoid the dénouement that awaits them.

Before that? a  novel that follows the heroes across the French countryside in wartime, then over the Channel and into a sleepy English village. Before that? A story that starts in Vienna and ends in a country house party. Before that? a story where the heroine travels from the shores of Troy to Mount Olympus, and then ends up on a planet halfway across the galaxy.

Yes. I like settings. I like what interesting settings do to characters: so often putting an interesting person in an interesting situation is all you need in order to get a story going. Plot is the result of, "what happens if I put this person in this situation?" And so often "this situation" is not just an event, it's a setting.

Geography is, as they say, the mother of strategy. And that's nowhere more true than in fiction.

What's your favorite fictional setting? Which is the one you'd love to visit? (Austen's England? Middle Earth?) Which is the one you'd do anything to avoid being thrown into? (Jackson's Whole? Azkaban?)

Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell