Describing settings in fiction is essential to help readers imagine the locations where stories take place.
Setting is a crucial element in fiction, establishing the context and surroundings for the plot in which the characters act.
Setting is a combination of time, place, and environment, enhanced by things like weather and climate, plants and animals, sounds, smells, and more. Setting is what changes a story or novel from a flat tale of actions and dialog to one that gets its inspiration and comes alive.
Setting influences the mood of a story, the way characters interact and develop, and, in many cases, the plot. A romance novel set in the Palace of Versailles is very different from one set in modern-day Chicago. Readers develop their own image of a setting from what they know about real locations, and this is enhanced by what a writer chooses to foreground when describing the setting.
In some cases, the setting becomes a character in its own right; think of The Overlook Hotel, in Stephen King’s The Shining. King uses the first few chapters of the novel to reveal the setting in great detail through a job interview, where Jack Torrance, the protagonist, is told about the hotel and its history, then a later chapter where one character is walking him through the hotel telling him about the hotel’s plumbing, boiler, and more. All this description makes the reader think of the hotel as a living being. And, while the reader gets a lot of information in great detail, but it doesn’t feel like description, since it is explained through dialog.
How to describe setting
When describing a setting, it’s easy to go overboard. There can be so much to say about any setting, about the many elements it contains. Carefully crafted economical sentences give more of a feeling of setting than long descriptions.
In some cases, a long, detailed description of a setting can help set the stage for a novel. In John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, the entire first chapter is a description of the setting of the novel, beginning with:
The Salinas Valley is in Northern California. It is a long narrow swale between two ranges of mountains, and the Salinas River winds and twists up the center until it falls at last into Monterey Bay.
This continues for several pages, and the next couple of chapters relate the history of the area. This is a style that is less common today, where readers expect stories to develop more quickly.
Description of a setting can often be used as an establishing shot to open a scene. Sarah Moss’s A Court of Thorns and Roses opens with the following sentence:
The forest had become a labyrinth of snow and ice.
This plunges the reader immediately into a familiar setting (the forest) that is harsh (snow and ice) and dangerous (a labyrinth). The reader immediately knows that there are risks in this forest, and the snow is shown as a powerful force in the second paragraph:
The gusting wind blew thick flurries to sweep away my tracks, but buried along with them any signs of potential quarry.
A bit later, this is reinforced:
The icy snow crunched under my fraying boots, and I ground my teeth.
And later still:
The howling wind calmed into a soft sighing. The snow fell lazily now, in big, fat clumps that gathered along every nook and bump of the trees.
Anyone reading the beginning of this novel can imagine themselves in this setting, and feel the stress of the weather and the anxiety of the forest.
Moss’s descriptions are essential to creating the setting, but they are also efficient. There’s no info dump, where all the description comes at once. These descriptive sentences appear intermingled with the protagonists’ actions and thoughts, and they feel organic.
What makes up setting?
Setting is made up of many elements. It’s the physical environment of a story, whether it be a hotel or a river valley, a mansion on an island, or an office building in a city. Landscape is a large part of setting, and, while it’s important to know if people are in a desert, a jungle, or a city, it’s the smaller details that create the setting.
Weather can be a key element of setting, especially if it affects character and plot points. Smells are subtle clues to a setting, which aren’t generally noticed the same way visuals are, but can add subtle touches to a description.
The time period and culture are also important, and if a story is set far in the past, or on a different planet, authors need to describe more of the setting to allow the readers to settle in to it.
Small details, such as the types of flowers or birds in a setting, can also add to its description, but only if they have some relationship to the plot or characters.
How much setting description is too much?
Over-description can be fatal, leading readers to zone out and lose contact with a setting. In On Writing, Stephen King recounts a lesson he learned from a newspaper editor in his first job as a sports reporter. "When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story," he was told. "When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story."
The most description a setting needs is what is necessary to paint a picture in the reader’s mind. When rewriting a draft, it can be beneficial to cut as much description as possible, while still retaining enough to give the reader the images they need. Readers can fill in the blanks; one sentence, in a context that is familiar to readers, can lead them to imagine the rest of a setting.
One technique writers can use is to make extensive setting notes – and Scrivener’s Setting Sketches can be used for this – and keep these handy when they need some descriptions. You could write thousands of words describing a setting, and pull out individual sentences to pepper them into your novel or story. Instead of culling your draft, use these sentences to add spice when needed.
Like dialog and character description, setting is essential to move stories forward. Efficient description of setting allows readers to imagine they are inside the story.
Kirk McElhearn is a writer, podcaster, and photographer. He is the author of Take Control of Scrivener, and host of the podcast Write Now with Scrivener.