How to Figure Out the Macro and Micro Setting of Your Novel

Lesson 5 of "How to Finally Get Started on that Novel"

 Mariam Chagelishvili

Lesson 5 of 8 from “How to Finally Get Started on that Novel”

Once you’ve created these gorgeously alive characters, found your novel’s voice, and started to sculpt your plot, you don’t want to leave all these things to float in the ether. Think about how much The Great Gatsby is defined by the setting of “one the strangest communities in North America,” and, importantly, the fact that all of the main characters are outsiders in this glittering East Coast world. Think about how Mrs. Dalloway is in many ways a love letter to the act of walking through London. And so on.

We often say that in a well-crafted novel, the setting is kind of its own character, which is honestly an odd way to describe it, given that generally speaking a place lacks agency and can’t really make decisions on its own. 

Or can it? I guess what’s even more odd is that sometimes places do seem to have minds of their own. In my novel Unseen City, Meg takes her inability to find an affordable new apartment so personally that she starts to feel that New York City is literally shoving her out on purpose – the city itself becomes her antagonist, which is painful to her, given the long love affair they’ve shared before this point. In the world of the novel, it turns out that the city is in fact swarming with ghosts, who do sometimes impose their will on things. Ghosts, gentrification… it’s always something in this town.

In that vein, some of the central conflict in a novel can indeed come from the setting. Think about those two classic story skeletons: A person goes on a journey, and a stranger comes to town. In both, the distance between the protagonist and their setting provides a lot of the dramatic tension.

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Setting consists of Place and Time

The “where” of your book is the specific and definite location of a story, both on a large level and a small level. To take my book mentioned above as an example, the setting is New York City in both contemporary times and the late 19th century, but there are also some important smaller places: Meg’s apartment; the library where she works; the haunted house she becomes obsessed with. I also had to think a lot about how those places were shaped, what they look and smell and feel like.

I like to draw maps or floorplans of these spaces as I’m writing. This helps me to stage scenes in ways that make sense, since scenes can seem really different depending on who is where in space. (It’s also just fun, and it is my personal belief that, at least in the early stages, novel-writing should feel like play.)

When we think of setting, we also need to think of time.  Time can give us a sense of the backdrop of the story in the big sense -- the era, century, year -- as well as small -- the season, day of the week, time of day. This seems obvious if a book is historical. For the historical elements of Unseen City, I did so much research about exactly what Brooklyn was like in the 1860s.  But I needed to plant just as many specific descriptions and time markers for the contemporary scenes. I don’t want my fiction to read like marketing copy for brands or anything, but I do think it would call attention to itself if a fairly normal character in, say, 2016, didn’t have a cell phone. 

(I recently was delighted to come across a nod towards this in Sigrid Nunez’s novel The Friend: “It is one of the great bafflements of student fiction. I have read that college students can spend up to ten hours a day on social media. But for the people they write about – also mostly college students – the internet barely exists.” I get the temptation – phones and apps and the like are annoying to have to write about, and scenes are so much more dynamic if characters are talking face to face instead of texting – but honestly it just calls attention to itself is all Sigrid and I are saying.)

What’s more, a lot can be revealed about the setting by how its characters perceive it. And a lot can be revealed about a character based on how they perceive their setting. 

Take this excerpt from Severance, by Ling Ma:

The End begins before you are ever aware of it. It passes as ordinary. I had gone over to my boyfriend’s place in Greenpoint directly after work...we watched a movie projected on his wall. The screening was Manhattan, which I’d never seen before...Just looking at New York on the screen, the city was made new for me again, and I saw it as I once did in high school: romantic, shabby, not totally gentrified, full of promise. It made me wistful for the illusion of New York more than for its actuality.

We learn from this both how the character sees New York, and how she wishes she could. We learn that she is a transplant, who first got to know the city through its various depictions. And we learn, on a smaller, more particular level, that she is the kind of person who has a boyfriend but they don’t live together yet, and furthermore, he’s the kind of boyfriend who lives in hipstery Greenpoint, and projects movies onto his wall. Gotcha.

Of course, the setting can also be an antagonistic force. In Sinclair Lewis’s 1920 satirical novel Main Street, a young woman with big dreams finds herself in a dusty small town, trying to see something to love:

She told herself that down the street the leaves were a splendor. The maples were orange; the oaks a solid tint of raspberry...But the thought would not hold. At best the trees resembled a thinned woodlot. There was no park to rest the eyes… She glanced through the fly-specked windows of the most pretentious building in sight… There was no other sound nor sign of life. She wanted to run, fleeing from the encroaching prairie, demanding the security of a great city.” 

Were she charmed by Gopher Prairie, Carol might see the trees as lovely, the “pretentious” building as a grand structure livening up the street. It’s not just the setting we receive, but her reaction to it. We know from this description that it’s a plain little town, and that she is trying very unsuccessfully to see something that redeems it; in the book, she moves here with her new husband and immediately feels bored, stifled, and trapped.

It’s just like how characters don’t exist as disparate paper dolls, but rather in relation to each other – the setting is significant in as much as the characters react to it; it’s narratively important for how it affects them and how they affect it. In Mrs. Dalloway, for example, Clarissa sees London as full of life, in part because she sees so many familiar faces in her neighborhood, and is able to partake in its luxuries as she pleases. For her, it’s a place of connectivity and possibility. In the same book, Septimus feels London is a kind of a prison, precisely because he doesn’t feel connected to life there. Same setting, but with a different role in each character’s life (and thus, looking, sounding, and feeling different to each).

The Sensory Component of Setting

Okay, but how does one create a setting that feels alive? Here is where you really have to use all of your senses. Frequently, in first drafts we describe how things look. That’s a great start. Eventually, if you want to really place your reader in the world of your story, you’ll need to activate the other senses, too. 

How does this place sound? I’ve never been to a ranch in Montana; if your book is set there, you’ll need to describe to me if it’s quiet at night, or noisy with locusts, or if sleeping horses snore, or what.

How does it smell? If you’re writing a book that’s set in Brooklyn in the summertime and there is no description of the scent of baking trash on the sidewalks, I know you’re bullshitting me.

If your character has been away from home for years and finally returns and gets a bite of her dad’s famous tamales, how do they taste in that moment? Make it real, make it indelible. 

This gets tricky if you’re setting your book in a place you don’t know well. I would just say, please for the love of all that is holy, don’t rely on movies and television shows to portray a place. The Hollywood version of a place is generally some form of simulacrum. Like, I wouldn’t go to a Rainforest Cafe to understand what the rainforest is like. You know?

If your setting is foreign to you, do your research. Read firsthand accounts of the place in different seasons. Talk to someone who lives there. Visit if you can. Or imagine your own version of a place, if a slightly surreal or altered version of reality works for your book. But get as close to it as possible. 

Exercises:

1. Where is your novel set? Describe it in as much detail as possible: both the macro setting (city or general area) and micro setting (the rooms and spaces in which the action takes place). Take into account the era/when we are in time, too.

2. Choose one of these locations – the smaller the space, the better. The family living room perhaps, or the break room at the office. Describe it from the POV of a character who loves this place. Now describe it from the POV of a character who hates this place.

If you’re up for sharing, I’d love to read these.

Up next (Thursday Nov 21) → A craft area that I find frequently trips up new writers - What is the POV of the novel?

Amy Shearn is the author of five novels, including the forthcoming Animal Instinct, a queer exploration of divorce, sex, and surviving the pandemic. She works 1:1 with writers, teaches for the educational cooperative Writing Co-Lab and elsewhere, and writes a monthly newsletter called How to Get Unstuck.