Think about a few of the exceptional settings in fiction: the gritty, corrupt city of broken dreams in James Ellroy’s L.A. Confidential. The physical, psychological, and spiritual contrast between inflamed, revolutionary Paris and stifling, conservative London in Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. The detailed magical worldbuilding of Hogwarts Castle, Diagon Alley, and Gringott’s Bank in Harry Potter. These settings are so vibrant and alive that they’re almost characters in their own rights. They interact with the human characters and serve as powerful allies, enablers, and antagonists.

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Or consider Room by Emma Donoghue. A mother and son are held captive for seven years in a small shed that serves as both home and prison, constraining and shaping their every thought and action (until they finally escape). In Room, the setting is the story.

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“Places are never just places in a piece of writing. If they are, the author has failed.” - Carmen Maria Machado

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In short, your story’s setting can be much more than background scenery. It can provide context for the actions and motivations of your characters and establish a mood that enhances the plot. Many famous books in history have leaned heavily on setting to add emotional heft and pull readers into a story.

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Take Charlotte Bronte’s Gothic masterpiece of 1847, Jayne Eyre. Jayne works as a governess in Thornfield Hall, a foreboding, isolated estate with antique halls, menacing nooks and crannies, and mysteries seemingly hidden in every room. There’s a locked attic from which cackling laughter emerges now and then, holding a terrible secret that haunts the hall and its inhabitants. Without the unsettling estate and its spooky attic, there could be no Jayne Eyre; the setting imbues the story with its tension and energy. In great books, settings resonate emotionally with readers.

 

The setting doesn’t have to be real to be powerful

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Some fictional stories are set in real times and places. Tolstoy’s War and Peace is set in the Napoleonic invasion of Russia in 1812. Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities is set in the racial tensions of New York City in the 1980s. But J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth, George R. R. Martin’s Westerlands, and the gnarled underground warrens of the Morlocks in H. G. Well’s The Time Machine don’t exist.

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War and Peace and Game of Thrones are very different novels in different genres. Still, they have something in common: vivid, evocative settings that draw the reader into the story.

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So how do you develop a vivid setting?

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Start with the basics: “show, don’t tell”

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“Show, don’t tell” is standard advice in writing workshops. It’s the idea that telling readers things is boring, but showing them the same things can be interesting. This concept is credited to Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), the playwright and undisputed maestro of short-story writing. Here’s a simple example of “show, don’t tell” applied to a character:

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He was angry.

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That tells the reader about the character’s mood. It isn’t interesting at all. But how about this instead?

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His face flushed beet-red. “I’m so done with all of you,” he said, stomping out of the room.

 

That shows the character’s anger and is more likely to engage the reader.

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The “show, don’t tell” concept is usually applied to characters and actions. That is a good use of it, because emotional states, motivations, and actions can all be shown more powerfully than they can be told. But Checkhov’s famous advice wasn’t about characters at all. In fact, it was about setting.

 

“Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.” - Anton Chekhov

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You’re not going to create powerful, vivid images in readers’ minds by telling them about the scenery. You have to show them the world that your characters inhabit.

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Tap into all five senses

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Weak settings tend to over-rely on visual imagery, focusing on what the characters and the reader can see, but it’s usually more powerful to include all five senses: what the characters (and readers) can see, hear, taste, touch, and smell.

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So don’t just describe a condemned house that looks run-down and dirty. Sure, start with visual cues: the piles of trash in the corners of the rooms and the peeling paint on the walls. But also describe the sound of mice scurrying around the attic, the musty smell of an ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts, and the beer-stained linoleum floor that makes the home inspector’s shoes stick as he walks from the kitchen to the bathroom.

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Sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch: each is powerful in its own right, but they can work together to give the reader a strong feeling, a gut sense about the story world, that’s more than the sum of its parts.

 

Here’s an excerpt from Charles Dickens’ novel Hard Times that packs a powerful punch of sensory description. He’s describing Coketown, his fictional hellscape of a town in the early industrial revolution:

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“It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and tomorrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next.”

 

You have to admit: that is powerful writing. The foul-smelling river is one sensory element, the elephantine steam engine another, and the nameless factory workers another, but when they’re all put together, you get a feeling about Coketown: a depressing, soul-dead place of machines and productivity. And that’s just one paragraph! That is the power of tapping into multiple senses.

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Details matter. Make your setting accurate and precise.

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Have you ever found yourself irritated at an inaccurate detail in a novel? Some readers are more bothered by this than others, but inaccuracies are distracting and can ruin a book’s credibility in one sentence. It’s essential to get your facts right, especially in historical or military fiction or other genres where readers take details seriously.

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Of course, if you’re a famous, big-time author, you can get away with some things. Here’s Shakespeare in Julius Caesar:

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“Brutus: Peace! Count the clock!

Cassuis: The clock hath stricken three.”

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There were no clocks in ancient Rome. Oops.

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Shakespeare used a lot of anachronisms—details that don’t fit in the time period of a story—but he was Shakespeare, and we are not.

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Anachronisms go back much further than Shakespeare. The Bible put camels in the Holy Land at the time of Abraham, but camels weren’t anywhere near the Holy Land until around 1,000 B.C., hundreds of years after the time of Abraham.

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Not every anachronism is as blatant as a clock in ancient Rome. There’s a German Shepherd in the movie Gladiator, a breed that didn’t exist until the 19th century—a small detail that would probably only be noticed by dog lovers, but there are a lot of dog lovers.

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Then there are the little brothers of anachronisms, known as parachronisms: things that aren’t entirely impossible but aren’t quite right: a teenager in 2022 calling his friend on a rotary phone or going to a store to rent a movie.

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Doing your research to get the little things right isn’t glamorous work but can make a big difference in your story’s credibility.

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A powerful setting is about emotional connection.

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A setting won’t have much resonance or meaning until your characters react to it. Readers take their emotional cues from a story’s characters.

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A haunted house won’t hit home for the reader until the clueless teenagers spending their summer vacation in it react to its groans, ghostly whistles, and apparitions. Terrified characters make for terrified readers.

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No matter how much you describe a restaurant—the red walls that match the roses on the fireplace mantle, the low, romantic lighting, the wait staff in old-world uniforms with thick Italian accents—it won’t be all that interesting. But put an old couple in that restaurant, visiting on their sixtieth anniversary and asking for the same spaghetti and meatballs they ordered on their first date, when they were just getting to know each other. Now your restaurant has meaning. The characters’ emotional bond with the restaurant and each other will pull in the reader and give the restaurant power in your story.

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In most cases, showing characters’ emotional responses to their surroundings is much more potent than just describing the surroundings.

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Final thoughts

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A story’s setting can be lush and detailed, or stark and minimalist. It can be real or fictional, complex or simple. No matter what form it takes, it can be made more powerful by describing it with all five senses and showing how your characters respond to it emotionally. When your setting gets to a point where it starts to seem like a character in its own right, then you’ve got something genuinely compelling.