Setting in Writing | Creative writing

Creative Writing Tip

Never start a story describing the immediate setting. Your reader is here for your characters, let your descriptions of setting assist that.

In creative writing and fiction writing, the term ‘setting’ is often stumbled across. The common misconception is that the setting only involves the immediate surroundings of the story or quite simply the place where the story is ‘set in’. It should be noted that setting is much more than a physical, immediate surrounding.

The setting includes the time, location, and everything in which a story takes place; it dictates the main backdrop, mood for a story and experience for the reader. Setting has been referred to as story world or milieu to include a context (especially society) beyond the immediate surroundings of the story. The different elements of setting may include culture, historical period, geographic location and to minutes and hours. Teamed with plot, character, theme, and style, setting is considered and widely recognized to be one of the fundamental components of fiction.

Setting is a critical component in creative writing designed to assist the plot by describing what the protagonist can see, touch, feel, hear and smell. Essentially, this is a strategy used to entice the reader to visualize, empathize and cognitively enter the world of the story. It can set the tone of the story, and assist the character development through places that they go. In some stories such as ‘City of Glass’ by Paul Auster, the setting reflects a character itself.