Repost: How to write setting that pops

setting as character

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Hello friends and neighbors. I wanted to rerun this slightly edited older post because 1) I have more followers now and 2) to set up a post about non-real world setting that I want to do next week. This post is applicable to both real world settings and SFF ones, but the one next week will be more for SFF.

If you think about the continuum of setting in fiction running from 1 (worst) to 10 (best), a 1 would be where the author doesn’t bother to include setting but just sort of has their characters floating in space. They might be interacting with each other, or with objects, but in your mind’s eye, you’re not really seeing them anywhere. A 10 is when the setting is so realized that it feels like an extra main character in the books. Books that are kind of about setting have to be like this: say, the hotel in A Gentleman in Moscow. Not every book has to be a 10 on setting, but I think every book should at least be a 7. Setting isn’t just the place where characters happen to be standing, but it imbues mood and atmosphere, it creates obstacles, it helps shape how characters can and will solve problems, and its history can also be part of the story.

Think of building setting as the way film makers have to design sets—in many cases they are not filming on locations, but building the insides of buildings and “dressing” them. The thumbnail for this post, which I’ll also put below, is a still from the movie Crimson Peak.

Is Crimson Peak a good movie..? Well, I don’t know, but it’s a movie I’ve seen many times, mainly because I AM IN LOVE with this creepy house. It is both opulent and falling apart, fantastic and creepy. The very very top of the house is damaged, so it’s actually open and snow can be seen falling inside the house in later parts of the movie. It’s a gothic horror—so for the house they dialed the gothic up to an 11. Every single painting and hallway is designed to evoke a feeling of former wealth and now decay and rot and a feeling of being haunted.

So how do you go about designing a set?

I would say first, you pull back the camera as far as you can. For most people this means starting with a city. For people writing science fiction or fantasy, this could mean pulling back as far as a country, planet, or galaxy. (When I was working on my space opera, I had made a map of the entire universe.) But for the same of simplicity, let’s deal with the city or town that our characters are dwelling in. How do we write a town or city so that it feels real? A town that is a 10 to me is one that I believe continues to exist and live and breathe even after I close the book. I feel that way about Middle Earth or the world(s) The Expanse exists in. As someone who has written everything from hyperrealistic literary fiction to the aforementioned space opera science fiction, regardless of whether or not the place you are writing about actually exists, what you are doing is layering the true with the strange.

The True is the easy part. If your book takes place in Brooklyn, it needs to look, smell, taste, and feel like Brooklyn. If you have never stepped foot in Brooklyn, this will be obvious to many readers in the tristate area. And this happens a lot. Certain cities—New York, LA, London, Paris—often get picked as settings for books and often feel really hollowly rendered. There are references to bodegas (NYC), palm trees (LA), and the tube (London) but I don’t even believe the author has even been there on a layover. (I once read a book—I won’t name names, unless you buy me a drink at a conference—that took place in San Francisco and not a single Asian person was in the entire book. Not even as a background character. What.) If you’re writing about a place, you should at least visit it and look around. My first novel (unpublished) had a professor at MIT in it, and I just sort of assumed that MIT looks like Harvard. (This is laughable to anyone who has actually seen MIT. Let’s just say that if Harvard is a museum of classical art, MIT is a museum of modern art). So I went to visit some friends in Boston and we took tons of pictures. Occasionally I will text them with random questions. The streets are lined with what kind of trees? What does it smell like? Where do the chic people go for drinks? Are there weird quirks about that city? (eg, My Bostonian friends are always excited to go to happy hour when they visit me, because they do not have happy hour in Boston for archaic legal reasons).

As someone who has lived in DC, NYC, and LA, I’m quite familiar with my hometown being a slap-dash setting for TV shows, movies, books, etc. If you ever want to see a Washingtonian laugh, mention the starting to the Jack Ryan TV show where he commutes to work with the most insane, nonsensical route solely for the purpose of showing you the standard landmarks. No movie set in DC is complete without drone shots of the Washington Monument, the White House, and maybe the Reflecting Pool. But that’s not all DC is.

The easy part is just getting the facts right. Our subway is called the Metro. {Uh, this original post was written in 2024. What is currently happening is that a Congressman from Florida just introduced a bill that would halt funding to Metro unless we rename it “the Trump Train.” You know, because there’s no real issues for Congress to be working on right now..). Our city is arranged in a grid with tons of one way streets. It’s actually a very violent city and you get desensitized to this living here. We exist in a strange political limbo where we can vote on things but any member of Congress from any state can nix our newly passed laws. [oh yeah, i just proved my point!} There are microneighborhoods, as in everyone who lives near H street NE thinks they are cooler than everyone else, but we can all agree that Capitol Hill is insufferable. (Case in point, one time a good friend and I were having brunch in Capitol Hill, trying to articulate what it is exactly about the Hill that we don’t like, and this woman sitting one table over said to her friend, “You’ve never had celery foam??”) What are the realities of living/being in that place? For example, it’s practically impossible to live in LA without driving everywhere. (It’s routine to offer to drive your friend to their car when its parked one or two blocks away). It was very common, being on UCLA’s campus, for them to be shooting a movie (that takes place at Harvard..) There’s a lot of new money-conspicuous consumption.

Getting the facts right of a real place is the bare minimum of what you should be doing. But wait, I can’t afford to go to Paris! So I’m just going to set my novel in a made up suburb of Paris.. To that person—and to the people writing science fiction or fantasy—even if your setting is made up, I need to believe that you know everything about it even if you’re not going to tell me all the cross streets.

My first book takes place in Washington DC at a fictional university that is vaguely similar to GWU. At the planning stages of writing, I drew a map of the campus. (Sorry it is a little water damaged.) I don’t go into long details in the book about how the psychology department is opposite the math department, but I do know where these things are, and as my characters move about these spaces, you never get the disembodied feeling of not knowing where you are because I know where you are. If you mention that it’s a couple blocks south from campus to get to Charles house, but then 50 pages later, mention that it’s a 20 minute walk, the “realness” of the place gets taken down a notch: the reader can’t draw a realistic map in their head if the facts aren’t straight. Understanding the layout of where things are is even more important if location is tied to things like clues: what happened where, etc.

I also wanted the setting to have this duality that exists for GWU: GW feels both like a college campus (a bubble) while simultaneously existing within a city. This gives you that college-y feeling that will evoke nostalgia for people who miss college, but also while taking advantage of what the city has to offer. I am very proud to collect the compliments of people who live here who said I got the city right, because I very much wanted to write a DC book that wasn’t focused on politics and drone shots of the White House. Here’s a small example from this part where the main character is recounting how she is stalking this boy Will: (annotations mine)

I would guess Will shops at the Giant in Shaw (there is in fact a Giant in Shaw), because that’s where his car was dinged and he also reported that the closest Safeway (Giant and Safeway are the two largest, regular grocery stores) to 1530 Marion Street (this is a real street) was “filled with cunts who never get the line moving.” (Will is an asshole) I know he frequents Buttercream Bakery (real bakery, which, alas, recently closed) because he posted about getting his tenth coffee for free (they did have punchcards). He once lost his cell phone between P and S Street on 14th Street, stumbling home drunk so it was probable he often hung out in that vicinity (this is an area where many young people go out to get drunk.) He did not like to go east of 7th street because of “the locals.” (This is a nod to Will being racist and an oblique note about the density of where the gentrification is) There was a muffin shop with a direct line of sight of Will’s front door (there was—it also closed during COVID, sadly). The sort of place where you could camp out with a cup of coffee for a few hours and no one would notice that you were staring at the house across the street, scheming. 

In my second book, I really wanted setting to be a 10 out of 10—one of those books where the setting is like a character in and of itself and you get to “live” there for the duration of the book. I started with a map, but this includes not just thinking about what would typically be written on a map, but what various things would mean on that map. The rich kids live on the east side of town—that’s where The Good Park is. The abandoned apple orchard needs to be walking distance to the Sheriff’s office because of an event which happens in both places. Main Street, the center of town, is often referenced as having a C shape. I know which kids walk to school and which don’t. I know what the view outside Kelly’s bedroom window is, and that it is angled so that she can’t see the front of James’s trailer. I know which way the Neskaseet River flows. These are all things I can see clearly in my head because I’ve layered over and over them with more paint like a watercolor artist until things are clear enough. I don’t have to describe absolutely everything to the reader, but when you know a place with confidence it shows. I don’t tell you the inside layout of the Blockbuster, but if you read the book, you know that I know the layout of the Blockbuster.

In my post last week, I showed you the first two paragraphs of this book to demonstrate my signaling “this is a slower paced book than my last one” but also one that highlights setting. This is the third paragraph of the book, which is trying to signal what kind of town this is, and to do this early on:

Unlike its unfortunate neighbor, Wesley Falls had avoided the mine fire and transitioned from a coal mining town to something not unlike Pennsylvania suburbia. It was the sort of town where one of the billboards outside the Golden Praise megachurch proclaimed, “Wesley Falls: the BEST place to raise a family!” and most adults agreed with that assessment. The sort of place where the City Council had voted against a bid to allow a McDonalds to open, arguing that it would “lead to the deterioration of the character of Wesley Falls.” This had less to do with concerns about childhood obesity or dense traffic than it did a desire to keep the town trapped in amber. The sort of town where the sheriff was the son of the previous sheriff.

I’ve brought up the megachurch on page one, paragraph 3—you know you’re going to see it again, and maybe it’s not that nice of a megachurch. What makes them say Wesley Falls is the Best? What have they done to create that image? “Most adults” agreeing means: this is THAT kind of town, where conformity is key. They’re afraid of a McDonalds. Wanting the town to be trapped in amber means the people who run the town want it to always stay the same. And because the town and the history of the town is pivotal to the mystery in the story, I actually had to go back and create a history of the town that went back to the 1800s. How was the town founded and why? What sort of people built it? Why and how was the sister city beyond the mountain destroyed? How did power transfer from powerful people in the 1800s to the power families now? Why?

Write about the things that are true of the setting: this might mean inventing them first, but those need to be layered in like watercolors.

Next comes the strange. Generally speaking, things feel real when there is something about them that is both true and strange. There’s a quote, I think from Neil Gaiman, where he says, “Any view of things that is not strange is false.” {this original post was from a point in time when I wouldn’t have thought twice about quoting Gaiman. Sad.) I often think about this with respect to writing when it comes to both place and characters. That doesn’t mean that characters or places have to have weird quirks to make the wacky or memorable. What I mean is specificity. If I told you “this man who became a Supreme Court justice was educated at Harvard.” Okay. I mean, aren’t most of them? But if I told you former Supreme Court justice David Souter was known for eating apples in their entirety—core and stem and all—doesn’t he feel a bit more real to you than if i I just said he went to Harvard? Fine if you say he went to Harvard, but that only helps at a superficial level. (and many… many writers who want to indicate that someone is smart will just say that they went to Harvard.) What are the small, specific details about your place that make them seem real? Wesley Falls has a diner where the guy working there is known as Lunch Dan. This is never explained. Nobody in town except for our main characters swims in the lake because it is fed by the Neskaseet River, which is where the local chicken factory dumps its waste—but the river runs in the opposite direction, so the lake is perfectly clean. But it’s the sort of place where people don’t think about that for more than two seconds, so they don’t get to enjoy the lake. In DC, we have all these beautiful ginko trees, except they drop what locals call jizz berries (because they smell of.. well.. jizz). If you live here, and do not even live a political life, you know that the State of the Union address means that traffic will be an absolute clusterfuck.

One of the things you’ll notice a lot when you see people critique queries is they want more of something—and that specific something is specificity. “Wide-eyed hero who wants to make the world a better place” is an archetype, not a character. It’s the specificity of that character that would make the query more interesting. Try picking a place, a place you know well, and filling out both the true and the strange. Here is a particular street corner where my dog collapsed and started to die. Across the street is a hair salon that used to be a coffee shop that while unsanitary, had really really good egg sandwiches. Across that street is a grocery store where there have been multiple shootings. There is a weird old house around there, probably a historically designated one, and one time I was walking by and there were men in tuxedos singing Auld Lang Syne. (it was not New Years Eve—which made this profoundly creepy.) Next go back to what you’ve written and think about the thematic content of the book. If you’re trying to create a setting like Virgin River or the town where Gilmore Girls takes place, you want those details to feel cozy and small townish. In the case of A Step Past Darkness I wanted it to feel like Pennsylvania suburbia, to feel small minded, everyone knows each other, but to also have a historical air that had a bit of creepiness. So the true or strange details that you include are carefully selected.