Skip to content
How to Write a Novelby Stewart Ferris

Lesson 03 of 08

Setting — a place that does work

Make setting a pressure, not a postcard. Rooms, weather and era should change what a character can do.

In this lesson

  • Time and place as constraints, not wallpaper
  • Sensory detail through the character’s attention, not a catalogue
  • Settings that create obstacles and opportunities
  • Research lightly first; dump nothing on page one

Setting is not the paragraph after the character walks in. It is what the room will not allow. A locked door, a climate, a class of street, a year when a telephone call was an event — these are plot.

Describe through the person looking. A surveyor and a thief do not see the same hallway. Smell, sound and temperature beat a list of furniture. If you can lift the description into another book without changing a word, it is not yet this book.

Let place argue with the character. Rain that strands them. A house that still belongs to someone else. A city that rewards a kind of person they are trying not to be. Theme likes to hide in geography.

Research is a servant. Take enough notes to stop you writing a howler; do not postpone the draft until you have a PhD in gas lamps. You can check the train timetable when you know the scene needs a train.

Exercises

  1. 01

    Same room, two weathers

    Describe a key location twice from the protagonist’s point of view: once hopeful, once afraid. Keep the furniture; change the attention.

  2. 02

    Five pressures

    List five ways the setting creates conflict or opportunity — a tide, a neighbour, a law, a distance, a smell that gives someone away.

Common pitfall

Opening with three pages of landscape before a human being wants anything. Weave the world into action.

Milestone

A place that could not be swapped for a generic ‘city’ without the plot tearing.