7 Tiers of Writing Setting – from Easy to Insane

Hi, I'm John Matthew Fox of Book Fox and today we're talking about how to write place and setting in your novels. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to start at sort of the amateur level and then each stage I'm going to escalate up and make it little bit more difficult until finally by the end of this video we're going to be dealing with like super difficult techniques. Hang on until then. Hopefully you can handle those super difficult ones. So let's start off with the sort of the baseline lowest level of writing setting. This is what lot of writers do when they don't quite know yet how to write place or setting and it's number one no place place. Some writers write story where it doesn't seem to be set in any location whatsoever. Sometimes this can be setting like suburbia which just feels sort of anonymous and cookie cutter and doesn't have any sort of individuality. lot of times this is place where the author lives because it's so familiar to them. they don't feel like they need to do all the work of introducing it to the readers because they know it so well already. Or sometimes story starts in very placeless place. Like think about motel room or hotel room or something. It's really difficult to feel sense of place in place like that. It's sort of like the default anonymous place. So one solution if you're stuck at this beginning level is to treat the familiar like frontier and sort of retrain your eye to notice things that you sort of took for granted. And very quick example of how to take placeless place and really transform it into unique place would be film like American Beauty. American Beauty is set in suburbia, which can be difficult place to represent. But always thought that the perfect encapsulation of this place was the wife who apologized for the filthiness of an absolutely spotless house. It says so much about the social pressures in that environment. It says so much about the wrong perceptions. The story also characterizes suburbia as place with repressed desires, not only of Kevin Spacy, but also of his neighbor, the Colonel. So, basically, Suburbia is described as having this surface level of harmony, but this underlying ocean of discontent. And by the way, if you want to up your writing game, would suggest subscribing to Bookfox Academy, which gives you access to all my writing courses, including courses like my writing techniques course, my sentence writing course, my novel writing course, and lots more. I'll give links to those in the description. Check them out. But if you're good on that level, congratulations. Let's escalate one level more up to number two, visual details only. We humans are creatures that tend to over rely upon our sight. And so therefore, it makes sense that when we write novels, there's lot of visuals in there. If we were dogs writing novels, probably 97% of the senses would be smell. The trouble with this setting in place is that it's just really kind of one-dimensional. you really have one sense out of five. So, little test for you here. What want you to do is go through, say, your first chapter and calculate the ratio of visuals to all the other senses. would bet you would bet you like 80 90% of the senses in that first chapter probably are very visual and you missed out on the richness of lot of other senses. Another reason why lot of authors get stuck as sort of this elementary level of place and setting is that they've watched lot of movies. Movies are absolutely wonderful at visuals. They can do stuff with visuals that is very difficult for book to pull off. So if you watch lot of movies and television, which come on, let's be honest, we all have. You are sort of importing that philosophy of the primacy of visuals into your book, but you're not making film, right? You're writing book. What are the senses that books can do really, really well? Think about it. Books are just naturally super, super good at tastes and smells. You can describe scent in such detail that you can really make the reader smell it. You could describe taste in such detail that the reader can really taste it. But maybe you're like, "Okay, John, I'm good at level two. use all five senses. I'm fantastic on that." Okay. Well, let's climb up one level to level number three. Sensory details only. So, this is when you're using all five of the senses to describe place and to describe the setting. But setting cannot be reduced to merely sensory details. place is much much more than just what you're seeing and what you're smelling and what you're hearing. So, for the first 18 years of my life, grew up in Hisperia, which is very small town in California. It's in the high desert, 4,000 ft elevation, so you get snow in the winter time, and then it's often over 100° during the summertime. And if was to describe that place, would be doing the reader disservice if only focused on details. Stuff like the afternoon wind that always kicked up and the feeling of 115° when riding in car. No. to truly get sense of place. It's more about the philosophy of life of the people who live there. Even lot of my high school classmates are still living in Hesperia or Victorville or Apple Valley. It's kind of rootedness to that place. They're not, you know, traveling internationally or something. place is also matter of what people are doing in their free time. lot more people are doing dirt biking than chess tournaments. place is often view of career as well. Do you view your career as just like something to get by so you can go and drink beer in the evenings? So, when you're describing place, want you to expand your notion of how to really represent place to the reader. So, maybe you ace those first three levels of setting, thinking you're pretty great. You're thinking you got this. Well, not so fast. Let's go on to level number four. And yeah, it's starting to get harder now. Overwhelming details. So if you did succeed at those first three levels, there is always danger of going overboard and snowing the reader with so many details that they can't really see the story line. This is when writers give so much information that painter could paint it or film director could film it. do think having an enormous wealth of details is sort of an older style. You know, it hearkens back to the old Dickens and Austin days. For instance, look at the beginning of Blee House by Charles Dickens. He describes the mud and he describes the smoke and he describes the dogs and he describes the fog. mean, we are really getting 360 panoramic of London in this very first opening chapter. In general, and know this is gigantic overgeneralization, but in general, would say that exhaustively descriptive details of place, it's kind of fallen out of favor in modern writing. I'm not saying you can't do it. Like, if that's really your style, there are readers out there who will absolutely love it. So, mean, go for it. just think you're fighting little bit more of an uphill battle. The trend seems to be toward more judiciously selected details. would view the entire purpose of setting is to make the characters journeys seem real. So that establishes characters as being in hierarchy over the setting. think the danger of this level number four is that you end up inverting that and that you end up with the settings being over characters. Another choice if you're at this level of setting is instead of putting all of that information in gigantic chunk, like gigantic couple of paragraphs, what you do is you sort of parcel it out across your entire manuscript. The reader still getting lot of details, but it's not all at once, and that feels lot more manageable to them. Congrats if you're still watching. You have passed those first four levels. We have three levels to go, and they are some of the most difficult ones, especially the last one. So, hang in there. Let's look now at number five. Pitfall of static settings. So, so far you're using all five sentences and you're not giving an overwhelming amount of detail. But at this level, the danger is, is your setting static? These are settings that are remaining unchanged throughout the story rather than adapting and evolving alongside plot and character development. Let's look at non-static scene example. In Cormarmac McCarthy's The Road, there's pretty clear escalation of setting details. We start with very desolate highways. Then we sort of level up to abandoned houses. Then we level up to abandoned settlements. And then finally, we reach what they've been going towards the whole time, which is the sea. The setting not only physically changes, but also deteriorates more as winter approaches. The weather conditions get worse, food gets scarcer, and the danger level increases. Now, if you're not doing road trip type of story, you can still use this advice. You could stay with the exact same setting all along, but throughout the course of your novel, the characters realize new things about it. Charlotte Perkins Gilman has very famous short story. You might have read it. It's called The Yellow Wallpaper. woman is imprisoned inside restroom to sort of help her recover. And over time, the room stays the same, but the yellow wallpaper, her perception of it changes. At first, she just finds it really ugly and irritating. Then she starts to see really weird patterns in it, like eyeballs and necks. Eventually, she sees whole woman trapped behind the wallpaper, struggling to get out. This whole time, she's only been in one room. And yet, the setting has changed pretty drastically over the course of the story. hope you've been hitting home runs on those first five levels, but now we're graduating to level six, setting that's disconnected from your plot. You could have described the most amazing setting in your book using judicious amount of words and really put the reader in that place. But if it is not connected to the narrative, you haven't done your job. Ask yourself this question. Could this story have taken place anywhere else? And the main hinges of the plot would still pretty much work. If so, that's sign that your setting is faulty. It's not integrated well into your story. And let's just talk about three simple ways you can integrate your setting with your story. And for an example of this, we're going to learn from Kurandisai's novel, The Inheritance of Loss, where her story takes place is Kalong, which is in the northeast of India, sort of nestled between Bangladesh and Nepal. And the first way that the setting affects the plot is just physically. There is monsoon rains which cause landslides, and this traps the characters in that place. And so when political violence erupts, they can't escape. The setting also affects the characters decisions. There's character who is cook's son who's really struggling with the remoteness of this place and so he leaves to immigrate to the US because he just doesn't have any economic opportunities. And lastly, the setting affects the story metaphorically. There is this retired judge who's lived in this crumbling mansion and that not only represents his own body but also sort of colonialist hangover. There is no way that this novel could take place anywhere other than northeast India. So would say Kurandisai has done wonderful job with place. So, if you've gotten this far and you're still like, "Hey, I'm good." Congrats. You're at like the 95th percentile of writers writing setting. But do think there is one last step that will vault you up to the upper echelon of writing skills in terms of setting. It is point number seven, lack of feeling. So much of place is sense of place, feeling about certain place. Think of your childhood home. draw floor plan of that place and then mark the places where significant events happen. You probably have huge emotional connection to that particular location. So listen, your characters really must have strong emotional feelings about place. It's not enough for you to merely bring place alive in your novel. No, you need to have characters feel things about it. Think about William Wallace and Braveheart. There is so much love he has for Scotland. There is such strong sense of possession he feels for that land in that setting. Place isn't sort of just this neutral landscape where he goes about doing things. It's intricately connected to his motivations to everything he does in that story. Or think about Annie Pru the shipping news. The main character Coyle feels an enormous amount of peace and rootedness in his home of New Finland. And love how Annie Pru shows this. Poy when he moves to New York develops this habit of covering up his chin because he's embarrassed of his strong native jawline. But when he goes back to New Finland, he sort of he drops that gesture because he's not embarrassed any longer. He feels an enormous amount of acceptance when he's there. Now, those are very positive emotions about place. You could flip it and have the opposite as well. Characters could hate the place where they are. Characters could feel very estranged and homeless in the place where they are. But just make sure your character has very strong emotional feeling about their location. Look in the description below if you want to check out that writing techniques course or you can get all my courses with BookFox Academy. Hey, thanks for watching and hope you have good riding