Posted: November 1, 2024

Location, Location, Location

Barchester, Yoknapatawpha, Middle Earth, Lake Wobegon.

Most of the time, a setting is just a setting, a convenient place for the action to happen. If you pay attention to unique, telling details, you can push your settings to something fresh and authentic, even something that can influence the mood of your characters and shape the scene. Then there are locations that are so memorable that they stick in the mind afterwards as much as the people who live there. The settings become characters in their own right.

How? What makes a setting more than just a place?

Details for one. For settings that are just background for a scene or two, you can get away with a few key details to jumpstart your readers' imaginations. Settings that become characters have deep roots, a history and a story arc about how they got where they are. Regular readers of Garrison Keillor's work know when the first Norwegian bachelor farmers moved into Lake Wobegon, how it missed having the railroad run through town, and the surveying mistake that led to its not appearing on maps. They've got enough granular detail that readers can imagine themselves moving through them, walking from the Chatterbox Cafe to the Sidetrack Tap.

Then there's the way the location interacts with the other characters. I'm not just talking about the way a place can shape who a character is. I'm thinking of a real relationship between characters and their settings, one that flows both ways. I've written before about how one way to bring your characters to life by how other characters see and react to them. Locations become characters when other characters treat them like characters -- when they love or hate them enough that it changes the direction of their lives.

Places seem to come to life more easily in more gentle books -- Barchester or Thrush Green. When your characters are fighting for their lives, they don't really have time to react to their surroundings. I've read that Alexandre Dumas's stories don't actually take place in France. They take place in generic places that are good settings for swordfights.

Finally, places that become characters can have their own story arcs. I'm currently working on a novel about a family living on a small holding in India that's been in their family for generations. The father works hard and takes risks, but he manages to earn enough from this little plot of land to launch his children successfully into the world -- careers, good marriages, a chance to follow their dreams. Along the way, we hear a lot about the land and what it produces -- the stream that feeds it, the rubber and coconut trees, the tapioca plants, the chickens and cow. It's clear the land nourishes the family, even if it enables the next generation to move away.

It also provides a plot arc that ties the story together. The stories of the children, while sometimes dramatic, are largely isolated from one another -- more like a series of short stories. What ties them together is the relationship of the family to the land. And when some of the children move back to it at the end, it feels almost like the final scene of a romance -- the couple getting back together after a near breakup.

So look at your settings, particularly the ones that thread through the entire book. Can you push them into being something more than just places? Can you tie them more tightly into your characters' lives, create a relationship there that goes both ways? If you find yourself dwelling on your locations, imagining yourself there, filling in the details, then you may already be turning them into something more than just background.