In a post on DIY MFA, Fran Hawthorne suggests five ways to establish your setting quickly and subtly in your opening paragraphs. “If you’re writing mainstream fiction, your readers ought to be able to establish some bearings early in the narrative,” she says. “You need to set the scene.” Her tips include:
- Clothing equals geography plus season. ” People strap on sandals, pull off raincoats, and hug sweaters around their shoulders all the time,” Hawthorne says. “Not only are these hints about the setting, but they’re also great ways to break up dialogue.”
- Make it part of the action. Set scenes in locales with a unique flavor that will inform your reader of your location. Local sports teams, famous streets, and geographic details can clue them in. Use a famous tourist site as a backdrop.
- Eat it up! In modern times, most bigger cities have multiple restaurants offering a variety of unique cuisine, but you can still use eating habits to say something about your characters. You can also use cuisine as a marker. “Maybe your protagonist is thrilled that her little town in Nebraska finally got a good bagel place,” Hawthorne writes. “Maybe your location has the best Thai food within 100 miles of Phoenix.”
- The details can wait. You don’t need a lot of detail at the outset. In fact, it’s usually better to sprinkle information throughout your story as you need them.
- It’s okay to use crutches…carefully. Plenty of novels use a dateline at the beginning of each chapter to establish the date, time, and location, and sometimes the character’s action. This is often used with prologues. This technique is acceptable, but you shouldn’t overdo it, and don’t use it in place of solid, sound description.
