In a post on DIY MFA, Catherine Drake says that your setting can help define your character’s identity and illuminate their goals.
“Simply put: the emotions that someone attaches to an area based on their experience is known as a sense of place,” Drake writes. “In writing, a character’s relationship with the setting can be used as a mirror for the character’s values, perceptions, and emotions. A strong sense of place can be a lens through which a character is known.”
Drake suggests some elements to consider as you create and delve into your setting:
- Natives, Newbies, and Visitors. “When setting a character in their hometown, the character will have years of history with that area and interact in a much different way than a character who has been dropped into the same place and experienced it for the first time,” Drake writes. “Places can become invisible to characters who have lived there all of their lives, while visitors can become enchanted with a place without knowing its true soul.”
- The Weather. The weather will impact your character’s actions, plans, emotions, and memories.
- Transportation. How do your characters get around? Is your setting accessible? Is travel easy or stressful? How far away is the next town or city?
- Odors. Can you smell factories or farmland? Trains or highways?
- Communication. How easily can your characters communicate via technology? If you’ve set your story in the present-day, or anytime past Y2K, it will be harder to use communication to complicate your plot, given our emotional attachment to our phones and mobile devices.
