Post #135 August 20 2018

‘Where the Hell Are We?  How Details of Setting and Sense of Place Can Help (or Hurt) a Story

Remember when Dorothy, in the Wizard of Oz, mutters to Toto: “Toto, somehow I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore?”  Dorothy was actually identifying one of the most important attributes of a good story…a strong sense of place.

Writer’s Digest lists 12 elements of setting for writers to consider.  To wit:

1. Locale. This relates to broad categories such as a country, state, region, city, and town, as well as to more specific locales, such as a neighborhood, street, house or school. Other locales can include shorelines, islands, farms, rural areas, etc.
2. Time of year. The time of year is richly evocative and influential in fiction. Time of year includes the seasons, but also encompasses holidays, such as Hanukkah, Christmas, New Year’s Eve, and Halloween. Significant dates can also be used, such as the anniversary of a death of a character or real person, or the anniversary of a battle, such as the attack on Pearl Harbor.
3. Time of day. Scenes need to play out during various times or periods during a day or night, such as dawn or dusk. Readers have clear associations with different periods of the day, making an easy way to create a visual orientation in a scene.
4. Elapsed time. The minutes, hours, days, weeks, and months a story encompasses must be somehow accounted for or the reader will feel confused and the story will suffer from a lack of authenticity. While scenes unfold moment by moment, there is also time to account for between scenes, when a flashback is inserted, and when a character travels a long distance.
5. Mood and atmosphere. Characters and events are influenced by weather, temperature, lighting, and other tangible factors, which in turn influence the emotional timbre, mood, and atmosphere of a scene.
6. Climate. Climate is linked to the geography and topography of a place, and, as in our real world, can influence events and people. Ocean currents, prevailing winds and air masses, latitude, altitude, mountains, land masses, and large bodies of water all influence climate. It’s especially important when you write about a real setting to understand climatic influences. Harsh climates can make for grim lives, while tropical climates can create more carefree lifestyles.
7. Geography. This refers to specific aspects of water, landforms, ecosystems, and topography in your setting. Geography also includes climate, soil, plants, trees, rocks and minerals, and soils. Geography can create obvious influences in a story like a mountain a character must climb, a swift-running river he must cross, or a boreal forest he must traverse to reach safety. No matter where a story is set, whether it’s a mountain village in the Swiss Alps or an opulent resort on the Florida coast, the natural world with all its geographic variations and influences must permeate the story.
8. Man-made geography. There are few corners of the planet that have not been influenced by the hand of humankind. It is in our man-made influences that our creativity and the destructiveness of civilization can be seen. Readers want visual evidence in a story world, and man-made geography is easily included to provide it. With this in mind, make certain that your stories contain proof of the many footprints that people have left in its setting. Use the influences of humankind on geography to lend authenticity to stories set in a real or famous locale. These landmarks include dams, bridges, ports, towns and cities, monuments, burial grounds, cemeteries, and famous buildings. Consider too the influences of mankind using the land, and the effects of mines, deforestation, agriculture, irrigation, vineyards, cattle grazing, and coffee plantations.
9. Eras of historical importance. Important events, wars, or historical periods linked to the plot and theme might include the Civil war, World War II, medieval times, the Bubonic Plague, the gold rush in the 1800s, or the era of slavery in the South.
10. Social/political/cultural environment. Cultural, political, and social influences can range widely and affect characters in many ways. The social era of a story often influences characters’ values, social and family roles, and sensibilities.
11. Population. Some places are densely populated, such as Hong Kong, while others are lonely places with only a few hardy souls. Your stories need a specific, yet varied population that accurately reflects the place.
12. Ancestral influences. In many regions of the United States, the ancestral influences of European countries such as Germany, Ireland, Italy, and Poland are prominent. The cities and bayous of Louisiana are populated with distinctive groups influenced by their Native American, French-Canadian, and African American forebears. Ancestral influences can be depicted in cuisine, dialogue, values, attitudes, and general outlook.

Anybody writing science fiction or fantasy has to spend some time thinking about details of setting, since much sf is set in times and places (and planets) other than this one.  For example, my upcoming Time Jumpers series is set largely in a universe where time travel is commonplace, a thousand years in the future.  I’ve had to invent a whole new galactic-scale human civilization with lots of strange worlds, people, customs and technology.  I even decided to change the word ‘human’ to ‘Uman’, to encapsulate all the changes to humanity over the last thousand years.

I also decided in Time Jumpers that there wouldn’t be any aliens in the usual sf sense…just lots of different types of Umans. 

To provide a stable setting for this series, I wrote a short background on what I call the Uman Alliance (UA)…

The Uman Alliance (UA)

1. UA is an outgrowth of the old United Nations of Earth.
2. Story arc for Time Jumpers takes place in late 2700s and early 2800s.  (28^th and 29^th centuries). 
3. The term ‘Uman’ is an outgrowth of the word Human and encompasses both natural human beings and post or transhumans, like cyborgs and androids and other AI entities. The UA hosts no real ‘alien’ races, as none have been discovered as of 2814 AD. All UA member states are human settlements, in one form or another.
4. By this time, human beings and human-machine entities (cyborgs and androids) have created several dozen settlements among the nearer stars. 
5. A few of these settlements are Keaton’s World (star-sun Sturdivant 2180); Gibbons’ Grotto (same sun); Telitor (star-sun Delta Recursa); Poona-Peeona (star-sun Lalande 21185); Hapsh’m (star-sun Epsilon Eridani); Byrd’s Draconis (star-sun Ross 154); and Landfall 4 (star-sun Gliese 876).  There are sixteen human settlements in near-sun space, within about 25 lightyears of the home system. 
6. In the year 2775, fourteen of these settlements formed the Uman Alliance, after a constitutional convention on Keaton’s World.  The founding date was Midtober 5, 2775 (T-001).  The Articles of Alliance are the founding documents.  They read like an updated UN Charter.  Two settlements (Gavrilon and Nanjiang, both of star-sun 40 Omicron 2) both elected to remain outside UA but cooperate closely with the Alliance.
7. UA is organizationally a close analog of the UN.  There is a General Assembly, a Secretariat and a Secretary-General, a Security Council, an Economic Council, a Court of Justice, UA Health Organization and various associated agencies and units. 
8. The Security Council has a War Department known more formally as UNIFORCE (also UmanForce or UA Force).  Time Guard is part of the UA FORCE organization. 

 

Using setting properly (in such a way that the nuts and bolts don’t show) can enhance any story, from atmospherics to provoking the proverbial sense of wonder, something that science fiction writers do all the time.  The key is to keep the setting descriptions embedded in the context of the story and not to dump an encyclopedia of facts and maps on the reader. 

Some writers spend so much time on their setting and world-building that they feel it essential to drop all this into the story.  Sometimes, the setting is the story, like Arthur C. Clarke’s novel Rendezvous with Rama.  But most of the time, a good, believable setting is just one part of the greater story, like plot and character and it should be woven together into a seamless whole. 

Spend time on your setting details but don’t do it at the expense of telling a good story. 

The next post to The Word Shed comes on August 27 2018. 

See you then.

Phil B.