In a post on Writers in the Storm, Lisa Miller writes that small details in your setting can pack a big emotional punch. “Setting is so much more than the physical location and the time period in which a story is set,” she writes. “There are also social and historical context components to setting.”
The seating chart of the head table at a future wedding reception. A social media post. A letter announcing a birth found in a box of old stuff in the garage. A familiar postcard pinned to someone else’s wall. The jumble of spices in a kitchen cabinet. The well-worn dining table with all the leaves left in so the entire family would fit at a moment’s notice. The tall grass and weedy garden of a neglected backyard.
Miller examines Shauna Robinson’s book, The Townsend Family Recipe for Disaster, to show how small details can both reveal and impact a protagonist. In the novel, a seating chart for a wedding reception prompts the bride to lie about her family. A social media post takes the same woman to the funeral of a grandmother she never met. The grandmother’s massive dining room table shows the importance of family gatherings, all of which the protagonist has missed. A decades-old birth announcement and old post card presage the revelation of a family secret.
“Five very small elements in the setting of this story,” Miller notes. “But they all sent ripples across how Mae’s view of herself and how she fit into both sides of her family.”
