How Many Jobs Can Your Story’s Setting Do?
Stories play out in all sorts of locations. You might think of those venues for drama as a stage, where characters collide, declare their love or spit their vitriol. The stage itself seems to play little role in those narratives. They’re the unnoticed backdrop to the action.
Occasionally, though, writers draw the location into their stories, using them to accomplish a range of other goals.
In this blog post we’re going to explore, ever so lightly, what you can do with the places in which your story takes place, whether it’s a hospital ward, or the Egyptian pyramids.
I wrote this in Venice, which stands exceptionally high in the pantheon of notable literary locations. Its fading beauty, which combines grandeur and seediness; magnificence and the whiff not just of the some time stagnant seawater sluicing through its canals, but of some much deeper corruption, a decay that eats not just into the bricks and stones of the city, but also the souls of those who have misgoverned her.
So, you might say: you’re on a writing retreat in Venice, it’s easy to use Venice as a backdrop. It’s Venice, for goodness sake! I’m in Dayton, Ohio, or Bedford in the UK, or Nimes in France or Stanford in South Africa. It’s not quite Venice, is it?
Well, there are two things you could do:
- You could pencil in these dates – October 1 to October 15, 2025 – and join us in Venice next year (and see for yourself). Click here to download the brochure.
- Or/and, you can use these Venetian-inspired tips and turn them to good effect on your places, wherever they may be (Dayton, Bedford, etc).
The many jobs that the setting of your story can do
Tip 1: Create instant atmosphere with the weather
You can use the setting of your story to create a mood or atmosphere to enhance the story’s themes. Dickens did this superbly. He opens Bleak House with a description of a London fog:
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city…
It’s at one and the same time a literal description of the city, a metaphor for the opacity and confusion of the legal system; it creates a mood of gloom and claustrophobia; it foreshadows the moral and social obnscurity that the characters will have to navigate; and it immerses the reader in a sensory miasma…
Tip 2: The place can reflect the character
The environment mirrors or contrasts with a character’s internal state. A bleak, winter landscape might reflect a character’s depression, for instance.
In The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt’s character, Theo, is sent to live with his estranged sister in Las Vegas. Tartt describes the landscape as follows:
Desert, empty as the surface of the moon… Apartments and shopping centers and residential neighborhoods wholly indistinguishable from one another… Terero was a treeless place of temperature extremes, where dust devils danced in a constant slow whirl.
This bleak, monotonous environment mirrors Theo’s sense of loss, isolation, and emotional barrenness following his mother’s death. There’s no need to say as much; after all, the landscape in which he is trapped, says it all.
Ask yourself:
What can your setting say about your characters?
Tip 3: Personification
The place itself becomes a character, with its own personality and influence on the plot. Think of The Overlook Hotel in King’s The Shining. It’s much more than a setting – it’s a malevolent character with its own desires and agency.
The Overlook faced it as it had for nearly three-quarters of a century, its darkened windows now bearded with snow, indifferent to the fact that it was now cut off from the world…. Or was it?
The Overlook is depicted as a grand, isolated structure in the Colorado Rockies. King describes it as an imposing presence with a long and troubled history. The hotel is portrayed as more than just a building – it seems to have an evil consciousness of its own. Its corridors are maze-like, its rooms full of dark memories, and its very walls seem to breathe with sinister intent.
In practice:
Whether you’re writing the most frivolous of romances, or something as dark and malignant as King’s Overlook Hotel, you can use your setting to galvanise and animate your story.
Check out the documentary about the locations in the shining here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipBpO2C5LTU
Tip 4: Cultural context
The setting provides essential cultural information that shapes characters’ behaviours and choices.Take this passage from Arnold Bennett’s Anna of the Five Towns, set in the pottery-producing heartland of Staffordshire:
Everywhere the view was bounded by furnaces and chimneys; they were innumerable, of all shapes, heights, and colours, and each had behind it a mountain of earth and slag, its own excretion. The narrow strip of black sky was cut by hundreds of vertical steam-jets and the black silhouettes of pitheads.
Throughout the novel, this industrial setting shapes Anna’s life and choices. It influences her father’s business, her social status, her romantic prospects, and her outlook on life. The oppressive yet familiar environment of the Potteries becomes almost a character in itself, embodying both the opportunities and limitations that define Anna’s world.
Consider:
How the setting of your story – whether it be the kitchen of a large hotel, the working stopes of a gold mine in South Africa, or the workshop of your Venetian mask-maker – will affect your protagonist.
Tip 5: Historical framing
Every setting has an historical context, whether that’s an entirely contemporary one – or Paris during the French Revolution in Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities.
The ministers of Sainte Guillotine are robed and ready. Crash!—A head is held up, and the knitting-women who scarcely lifted their eyes to look at it a moment ago when it could think and speak, count One.
The second tumbril empties and moves on; the third comes up. Crash!—And the knitting-women, never faltering or pausing in their work, count Two.
Ask yourself:
What details can you interweave through your story that establishes its historical context?
Tip 6: Symbolic representation
The setting symbolizes larger themes or ideas. The Valley of Ashes in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gastby is one such setting. This industrial dumping ground between West Egg and New York City represents the moral and social decay beneath the glittering surface of the Roaring Twenties. It symbolizes the forgotten underclass and the corruption of the American Dream.
This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air.
A question for you:
Can you think of a symbolic dimension of a setting in a story you might have written or are contemplating writing?
Tip 7: Plot catalyst
The unique aspects of a place drive the plot forward. Think of the Mississippi River in Huckleberry Finn:
Two or three days and nights went by; I reckon I might say they swum by, they slid along so quiet and smooth and lovely. Here is the way we put in the time. It was a monstrous big river down there—sometimes a mile and a half wide; we run nights, and laid up and hid daytimes; soon as night was most gone we stopped navigating and tied up—nearly always in the dead water under a towhead; and then cut young cottonwoods and willows, and hid the raft with them. Then we set out the lines. Next we slid into the river and had a swim, so as to freshen up and cool off; then we set down on the sandy bottom where the water was about knee deep, and watched the daylight come. Not a sound anywheres—perfectly still—just like the whole world was asleep, only sometimes the bullfrogs a-cluttering, maybe.
The river is the primary means by which Huck and Jim travel, shaping their journey and the events they encounter. It’s both an escape route and a pathway to adventure.
Think about:
In what way might the setting of your story shape the events that take place in it, and the characters that inhabit it?
Tip 8: Character development
Characters grow and change in response to their environment. Think, for instance, of the many ways in which Robinson Crusoe’s character was shaped by the island on which he was stranded:
I learned to look more upon the bright side of my condition, and less upon the dark side, and to consider what I enjoyed rather than what I wanted; and this gave me sometimes such secret comforts, that I cannot express them; and which I take notice of here, to put those discontented people in mind of it, who cannot enjoy comfortably what God has given them, because they see and covet something that He has not given them. All our discontents about what we want appeared to me to spring from the want of thankfulness for what we have.
By the end of his time on the island, Crusoe has been transformed from a restless, ambitious young man into a self-reliant, spiritually grounded individual with a deep appreciation for the simple necessities of life. The physical challenges and isolation of the island setting directly forge these changes in his character.
Consider:
How could the setting of a story you plan to write impact on the protagonist?
Tip 9: Source of conflict
Most directly, the setting can be the story can be the protagonist’s antagonist, presenting him with challenges and obstacles to overcome. Consider the hostile Martian environment in The Martian, or the sea and the sharks in The Old Man and the Sea:
From The Martian:
Mars kept trying to kill me.
From The Old Man and the Sea:
The shark was not an accident. He had come up from deep down in the water as the dark cloud of blood had settled below. He had come up so fast and absolutely without caution that he broke the surface of the blue water and was in the sun.
Question:
What elements of the setting of your story can be judged to be the source of real conflict to your protagonist?
Tip 10: Emotional resonance
Specific places evoke powerful emotions or memories in characters, driving their actions. Think of what the wild, windswept moors surrounding her home mean to Catherine in Wuthering Height. Here’s how the setting resonates emotionally with her:
I’m sure I should be myself were I once among the heather on those hills.
This line encapsulates how deeply Catherine’s identity and emotional state are tied to the moors around Wuthering Heights. The wild landscape represents freedom, passion, and her true self to her, driving her actions and choices throughout the novel.
Ask yourself:
Is there any such emotional connection between your character and any aspect of the setting you’ve created for her? How do you show this?
Tip 11: Social commentary
The depiction of a place can be used to critique society. Elizabeth Gaskell in the mid-nineteenth century drew a sharp contrast between the industrial north of England, and the bucolic south, in her novel, North and South:
For several miles before they reached Milton, they saw a deep lead-coloured cloud hanging over the horizon in the direction in which it lay. It was all the darker from contrast with the pale gray-blue of the wintry sky.
The author’s eye is always alert for observations that draw attention to injustice, or unfairness in society.
Consider:
What might your eye have observed, and your pen described for a story? Can you imagine writing something in which social critique plays a role?
Tip 12: Magical or surreal elements
In fantasy or magical realism, the place itself may have supernatural qualities. Hogwarts in the Harry Potter series is a prime example. But magic of an entirely different kind – magical realism – is invoked in Marquez’s One hundred years of solitude:
…while Fernanda was trying to get them to help her set the table, Remedios the Beauty suddenly stood up, soaked in the sunlight, and without giving anyone time to assist her, she began to rise into the air. Úrsula watched her, stupefied, and started to cry, saying she was all right and that she had not been as happy for a long time as at that moment. Amaranta made a feeble attempt to grab her by the ankle, but she had no strength left. The others, just as in the depths of their hearts they were convinced that it was a trick, stood watching her until they realized that it was not. Remedios the Beauty was flying away, lifted up by the light and the air, much more solitary than she had ever been in the midst of the world’s ordinary lights, and she continued to rise, carried off by the wind, until she was lost from sight.
You’re free, in fiction, to go far beyond the boundaries of the real in the realm of magic.
Question:
Have you ever considered writing something magical? And if not, why not?
Tip 13: Narrative structure
The movement between places can structure the narrative. Joseph Conrad used this technique in Heart of Darkness. The novel is structured around the journey up the Congo River:
Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest. The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish. There was no joy in the brilliance of sunshine. The long stretches of the waterway ran on, deserted, into the gloom of overshadowed distances. On silvery sand-banks hippos and alligators sunned themselves side by side. The broadening waters flowed through a mob of wooded islands; you lost your way on that river as you would in a desert, and butted all day long against shoals, trying to find the channel, till you thought yourself bewitched and cut off for ever from everything you had known once—somewhere—far away—in another existence perhaps.
Try this:
Think of a journey, then structure a story round it. The journey becomes a metaphor, and a convenient structure to support the unfolding story.
Tip 14: Sensory immersion
Detailed descriptions of place engage readers’ senses, making the story more vivid and immersive. Authors like Proust excel at this. Here’s a passage from his magnus opus: In Search of Lost Time:
The Swanns’ drawing-room was a room such as one no longer sees today, lofty and spacious, of the kind which expressed a certain social status, and which must have been kept in repair at a considerable cost. An odour of old furniture, of curtains saturated with dust and perfumes, of tapestry permeated with the emanations of winter fires, brought to mind the tranquil dignity of aristocratic households where life is led in seclusion, amid family relics. Against the walls the large, empty armchairs, covered in silk, upholstered with light green damask and embroidered with multi-coloured flowers, were stationed in front of the fireplace, forming a kind of solemn tribunal. The flames crackled and sent reflections flickering up to the ceiling, where the ceiling-rose cast shadows like the petals of some enormous flower opening slowly to reveal itself.
Detail, remember, is what the living blood of narrative fiction.
In practice:
Engage as many of the reader’s sense and plunge them into your setting, and your story.
Are you ready to transform your own understanding of place in fiction?
Imagine exploring these principles of setting not just on the page, but in one of literature’s most evocative cities. Venice – with its maze of canals, its palazzos bearing the patina of centuries, its secret calle and sparkling lagoon – offers writers an unparalleled opportunity to deep-dive into the art of place in storytelling.
Join me and Jo-Anne from 1 to 15 October 2025, for a transformative writing retreat in this legendary city. Walk in the footsteps of Henry James, Thomas Mann, and countless other writers who found their inspiration in Venice’s mysterious beauty. Book now, by emailing Trish, to secure your place for next year’s adventure.
Your story’s setting awaits – and what better place to discover its power than in Venice?
