Graphic by Peg Ihinger
Let’s talk about setting for a minute.
For purposes of this post, the setting is not just the physical location (geography, buildings, flora/fauna) of the story. It encompasses all that, plus things like the history, politics, culture, and customs of the people who live there. This can also include the backstories of the central characters.
As a result, writers face constant choices between saying “a forest” and “an old-growth forest of pines that soared over a hundred feet in the air over a five-inch thick layer of fallen needles” or between “a monastery” and a two-page infodump describing the architecture, history, and current routines of the inhabitants.
Both the completely generic choice and the two-page infodump are valid choices. Whether one of them is the right choice for a particular story is a different matter, depending on things like what is going on, pacing, and available word count (short stories have far less room for long descriptions; action scenes may need more specifics than the writer initially thinks in order to establish the existence of the barrel the character trips over or the frying pan they use as a makeshift shield).
Infodumps are not a bad idea or a forbidden technique. Boring infodumps are the bad idea.
Now that that’s out of the way, there are four things a writer needs to consider when working out which setting details to use and when to use them:
- What the reader needs to know in order for a scene or a story to work. These are the objects, customs, etc. that the scene needs or that set something up for later on. Chekhov’s famous gun on the mantlepiece, for instance, or the chair the protagonist trips over in another three paragraphs, or the fact that not offering to exchange knives with a new acquaintance is a grave insult.
- What readers are going to expect, assume, or fill in on their own if the writer uses the most minimal, generic description. Sometimes, many or even most of the specific details are unnecessary. “Over the next three weeks, they passed through fields, several hamlets, and a small town” usually doesn’t need more details about any of the locations. The writer has the opportunity to choose to add more specifics to these brief descriptions, which can add richness to the worldbuilding, atmosphere or mood to the story, and possibly set something up for later without being terribly obvious, but one is not required to take advantage of every opportunity.
Thinking about readers’ expectations also allows the writer to deliberately undercut those expectations by providing unexpected details: “the medieval library” that contains only cubicles with VR helmets; “the palace” that is laid out like a Best Western hotel; etc.
- What are the unique features or aspects of the setting, also known as “if your reader suddenly woke up in this place for no apparent reason, how would they know they were in this place and not a generic tavern, forest, city, etc.?” What makes this place different from any and every other tavern, forest, palace, monastery, city? Which elements of the building, furniture, customs, etc. would most readers find unexpected and surprising, exotic, or just really strange? Which ones would the characters find unusual, startling, or memorable?
- What things would the viewpoint character notice or react to in ways that a reader would not? This is where a lot of how-to-describe-stuff advice starts, sort of, because what the POV notices is partly a characterization thing. But it is also a setting/worldbuilding thing, especially when the viewpoint character’s reactions differ from those of the expected reader.
For instance, a character who is stunned by the waste and expense of using wood as fuel, probably comes from a place where wood is a rare and expensive import, like a desert or arctic area. This tells the reader both something about the character’s background and something about the world (that some places are inhabited in spite of their lack of certain resources the reader would consider commonplace).
The interaction between these four things is one key to providing readers with information about setting that is interesting and likely to be useful. One the writer knows what readers and characters expect or take for granted and which things they’d notice or find memorable and surprising, it’s easier to make a setting interesting and alive.
A two-page description of a medieval tavern in a fantasy novel that details every scratch on the trestle tables, every bench that’s sticky with spilled beer, every barrel behind the bar, every drunk moody elf and rowdy dwarf, and every torch trying to light the dim, smokey atmosphere often struggles to hold readers’ interest, because no matter how beautifully it’s phrased and how accurate the details are, everything in it is exactly what the reader is expecting to find in a fantasy tavern. A two-sentence description can be much more interesting even if it limits itself to the slightly ratty stuffed unicorn head hanging over the bar, the two-foot high door in back that has “Gnomes Only” written on it in elegant silver-green letters, and a locked cupboard behind the bar that contains wine bottles that glow bright blue, one of which is half-empty.
The short version holds attention for two reasons. First, it’s a bit unexpected. It doesn’t confirm the reader’s expectations of a generic place, though the tavern may still contain sticky tables, barrels of beer, and drunk moody elves. It gives the reader a couple of touchstones that identify this specific fantasy tavern, distinct from all others.
And second, the specific details imply interesting things about the world and raise intriguing questions. Is unicorn hunting common? Where does that little door lead? Why is it even labeled when it’s too short for anyone but gnomes to walk through? What’s in those glowing bottles and why is one of them only half full? These questions may be totally irrelevant to the main story, and they may never be answered, but they make the setting more interesting without bogging the story down.
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