Creating Your Story’s Stage

1. Creating Your Story’s Stage Setting

2. The Importance of Setting • Setting is an important element in all of your fiction, whether you are writing a short story, a novella, or a novel. • In some instances, the setting serves as a supporting player in your narrative, but in other stories, it can assume center stage. • In fact, setting can become so important that it functions as a character in a narrative.

3. Would you like to visit the following setting? Why or why not? “One day that Tom Walker had been to a distant part of the neighborhood, he took what he considered a short cut homeward, through the swamp. Like most short cuts, it was an ill chosen route. The swamp was thickly grown with great gloomy pines and hemlocks, some of them ninety feet high, which made it dark at noonday and a retreat for all the owls of the neighborhood. It was full of pits and quagmires, partly covered with weeds and mosses, where the green surface often betrayed the traveler into a gulf of black, smothering mud; there were also dark and stagnant pools, the abodes of the tadpole, the bullfrog, and the water-snake, where the trunks of pines and hemlocks lay half-drowned, half-rotting, looking like alligators sleeping in the mire. The Devil and Tom Walker by Washington Irving Location, Location, Location!

4. Continued… From this description, Irving establishes a feeling of foreboding and impending doom. You know that something eerie is going to happen in this isolated place, and you eagerly read on to see what it is. As you can see, an effective setting drives the plot, just as a dramatic conflict does.

5. The setting is the time and place where the events in a story take place. In addition to factual details such as geographical location, place names, and historical references, setting also includes the following: Date, Week, Month, Year Time of day Season Weather conditions Sensory details about the place Physical buildings, rooms, and objects Names of people Social environment Character’s dress, manners, and customs Setting

6. You can use the story’s setting to: • Make a story more realistic. • Act as a force against which the protagonist struggles, even the source of the central conflict. • Symbolize ideas you wish to convey. • Reinforce other story elements, such as theme. • Contrast other story elements, such as character emotions. • Help establish the story’s mood…

7. Sometimes you will state the setting outright: Ex: “It was a dark and stormy night.” The description of the setting introduces the story’s location. It helps readers to infer important information about character’s background and social class: Ex: The “river view” implies an affluent community. Often creative writers use sensory details to paint a vivid setting. This helps readers to visualize a setting and make it come alive in their minds. The details appeal to the sense of: Sight Smell Taste Touch Sound Sometimes you will not describe the setting in great detail. Instead, you will have readers infer the setting from details in the story. This is an effective technique for creating suspense and compelling your reader to read on. Ways to Create a Story’s Setting

8. The setting will be a major player if the main character is: • Challenging the elements • Attempting to conquer the environment • Escaping from a specific place • Staying alive in a dangerous place

9. Mood • Even when setting doesn’t play a lead role, setting can be used to create mood. • The mood (or atmosphere) is the strong feeling we get from a piece of writing. • The mood is created by characterization, description, images, and dialogue. • Some possible moods include: • Terror • Horror • Cheerfulness • Elation • Calm • Suspense