Settings

How a character reacts to or feels about setting adds to a story, movie, or novel, creates emotion, connection and depth. Setting can become a whole poem. Think about Gone with the Wind and you think about Tara, how Scarlet felt about it, what it meant, how it shaped her life. Think about Witness and how place was as much a character as Rachael, her son, Samuel or John Book.

Setting-where you are born, grow up or what you are introduced to in your life shapes you. You love or hate a place or learn to. Place sets a tone. It seeps into every aspect of a person’s life. Dictates speech, tastes, attitudes and actions. Think about your own life and how where you have lived has made you who you are, who you become. This is what you need to do with every character in your writing.

It’s more than getting the details right. It’s having as much firsthand knowledge as possible. It’s seeing a place as your character sees it. It’s standing in the rain and seeing how the corner store looks, misty and sad. Knowing the roof leaks in the northwest corner by the magazines. Knowing how irritated your character will be because that northwest corner is where she likes to hang out to read People magazine. It’s knowing the last gas pump to the north at Common Sense is always out of order and damn the inconvenience.

So, whether I’m writing a poem, a novel or a story I research setting. If I’m lucky enough to visit the place, I take notes and pictures. I try to get a feel for the place, close my eyes and listen to the sounds of everyday life. I try to imagine how my character feels about this place; figure out his/her emotions. This is nothing new. You’ve heard this before from writers teaching how to do setting.

It works, too. I go a step farther and do a character sketch of the place. That helps. I list words that fit the scenery. I watch people and imagine my character interacting with them.
We’ve been vacationing as a family in the Uintahs for twenty years, my husband, much longer. He knows the roads and terrain well, but still there are places he hasn’t seen. In the summer, while we were stuck inside because of rain, I studied the map to get names of mountains, etc., for a poem I was working on.

There was a small lake my husband hadn’t been to. Heart Lake. Wonderful, intriguing name, isn’t it? As it rained most of the vacation, we were never able to take the ride to see it. We took the opportunity between rainstorms, this fall. The road to Heart Lake was rough, the scenery shattering. Another lake on the way-Yellow Lake.

Tiny lakes, scenery that fed my soul. We didn’t get all the way to Heart Lake because of the road and storm threatening. Still, I wrote tons of notes, took pictures, spent some time pulling in the feel of the area. Will I ever use it? I’m certain, there is a poem coming. And I can see using the scenery for one of my western historicals.

More importantly, I see that something of that place, that setting has stamped me, changed me. Made me something more than what I was. That is what setting does.