Writing Setting to Illustrate Conflict and Character Development

I remember setting as the bread and butter of my days in Reading class. Setting was the most wonderful (and most analyzed) part of every fiction story we read. Were there trees? What did they look like? How do they make you feel?

As you move up in the writing world, so to speak, setting begins to take a back seat in writing classes. Not that good setting is easy to write, but it becomes neglected as a tool. Setting is usually the one part of any story that is most easily grasped and understood. If you read a book that has too much setting, you still know exactly what's going on in the story - you can see everything. If there isn't enough setting, then you don't see and understand the imagined world. Oh well. It wasn't a very interesting story to begin with.

So we have a dichotomy with the teaching of how to write setting. One the one hand, it's taught early because it is so "simple" to understand. As a child, I couldn't have told you the first thing about character development, but I could read a story and describe the setting. On the other hand, setting is somewhat ignored later because a story can survive without it. In my experience, workshop stories often have problems with the setting (most of my own stories have setting issues, as well), but readers don't give much feedback on how to fix those problems. Larger issues take precedence. Is the main character fully realized? Do we see the conflict in light of the protagonist's inner development? "Oh, by the way, I wasn't clear on where this story was taking place - was it in the hospital room? Okay, if you can just fix that for next time." Sometimes we hear "you know, the description of the flowers in the vase on the bedside table was a little too much exposition." Okay, too much setting, so what? Don't you want to know where the story takes place?

Fortunately, we have a yardstick to judge whether you have "too little" or "too much" or "just enough" setting. In any work of fiction, setting must contribute to the story. It can set the tone, it can establish the character's mood, it can be a part of the action, and sometimes it acts almost as a character itself. The task of the writer is to identify the role played by the setting and to ensure that the setting fulfills that role without going overboard. The best way to understand this is through example.

Tone and mood are relatively straightforward. Let's say you have a detective novel - a young girl is kidnapped and held for ransom. Is the kidnapper a terrible villain? Are the parents worried? Is there a strong possibility that the girl is already dead? You can hint at all these things through your choice of setting:

The parents, they lived up on a mansion at the edge of the bay. I drove up in the rain. All I could see through the storm was the road - the sky and water to my right merged into a wall of black, and the mountain on the left looked like it might fall in any time. Lightning flashed - suddenly I saw the house, white like a corpse in the rain. The back end was a box floating in space over the bay. I figured it was only a matter of time before the whole place slipped away into the ocean.

Dark and brooding, with rain for tears - it's blunt, and such a setting builds the expectation that something terrible has happened or will soon happen. But you can go for a more subtle effect. Say the kidnapping happens in a small town - you may want to give the impression of innocence lost:

One by one, the clowns gave out balloons - long puppets twisted into lions and parrots and puppy dogs. The cotton candy vendor smiled and pointed over to her treats - clouds of syrup sweet pink and blue and yellow waited. A hand-lettered sign with a smiley face advertised "Hot Dogs, Too!" I looked away. In the corner of her stall was the garbage stuffed to overflowing. A pile of cigarette butts had been left on the counter by the ketchup. Obviously, no one had told these people the news.

What do cigarettes have to do with kidnapping? Nothing. But through the eyes of the protagonist, they take on a new meaning. Just as people always remember the clouds at funerals and the sun at weddings, your protagonist will see the world through the lens of mood. Beware of clumsy techniques in writing - it's rarely good to simply tell the reader exactly what the protagonist feels. "I was frustrated because the girl had disappeared, and it was my watch" abuses the reader's intellect. Instead, by focusing on setting, your narrative accomplishes two tasks as once. In the example above, it's clear how the protagonist feels - the readers don't yet know that the girl is gone, but they don't need to. By withholding this information and establishing a dark tone to "the news," you build immediate suspense. As you continue to answer questions and build more suspense, you will gain the trust and more importantly the interest of your readers. If you tell your readers everything right away, then there's nothing left for them to read.

Naturally, once you've got your readers hooked in the opening lines, you need to keep their attention. Setting alone cannot do that (unless of course you're writing a pure landscape...though painters normally have better luck with that than writers). Reader interest requires action, and setting is crucial for establishing the context of events. In speculative fiction genres, setting is often half the story - what would the science fiction masterpiece be without starships and plasma cannons? How can one read a fantasy tale without magic? Some authors confuse the need for setting with an excuse for exposition. When you need setting to establish your story, incorporate it with action:

Deidre climbed faster. The ladder's narrow rungs pinched her skin and bruised her shins. She could hear them below - their voices echoed up the narrow shaft. They couldn't have been closer than twenty feet - they sounded practically on top of her. She pulled herself up too fast, and the spin of the ship knocked her into the wall. Dazed, she kept up her climb.

Compare that to the following exposition:

The decks of the ship were linked by a ladder shaft. The ladder had metal rungs, and the shaft's interior carried echoes across decks. Coriolis forces from the ship's spin prevented objects from falling in a straight down the shaft.

Both examples provide the same setting details, but the first offers excitement and danger while the second provides a description without reference. Why should the reader care that the shaft carries an echo? If the reader has no reason to care about a detail, that detail will be forgotten, even if that detail holds critical importance later (and you don't want your reader leafing back to figure out "what the heck?" after getting to the exciting part).

There is, of course, a drawback to incorporating all setting into action - a good action scene is often too quick to adequately explain the setting. Readers may become confused by the spin of the ship knocking Deidre into the wall, and breaking out of the narrative to explain Coriolis forces interrupts the action. You can use judicious exposition establish the setting you need for upcoming action scenes. Build the tone and mood of the story tone to make details memorable:

Deidre avoided the long shafts between decks. The cramped metal walls and the narrow ladder left her claustrophobic. The echoes of voices from the other decks made her imagine ghosts inhabiting the ship. Most of all, though, she didn't like the Coriolis forces, as the engineer called them. She understood how the spinning ship provided a sense of gravity, but she didn't understand why nothing could fall in a straight line. She had tried it with a quarter, dropping it down the center of the longest shaft. The quarter's ricochets off the walls had nauseated her with a sickening ping!

Finally, we come to perhaps the most complex use of setting - establishing a world or a place with the force of character. You can cheat with personification, but most readers distrust stories told with "the glowering eyes of the thunderclouds" and "the chatter of the power lines as they exchanged the gossip of electrons." When setting takes on the element of character, if must fill the duties of a character from the background - it must drive plot, is must react to events in the story, and it should give opinion of its own. And it must accomplish these tasks without a body or dialogue. To pull off this feat, you must successfully provide your setting with a believable voice of its own. The key is in the interaction between your characters and their surroundings - the reactions of the characters become the window for viewing setting's character traits:

Turtle stared up at the clouds gathering overhead. He pointed the end of his walking stick at a funnel cloud beginning to come down.

"You've angered the sky," he said.

John rolled his eyes. "What, you think global warming will go away all on its own? We expected the mirror to leave a storm front."

Turtle lowered his stick, leaned his weight upon it. Through the ground, he could feel the vibrations of distant lightening. It struck the Earth harder, now, than before. Like a freight train, the sound of it carried through rock and soil. It was only a matter of time before this new lightening found a city for its hunger.

"Look at the bright side," John said. "All this lightning's a great source of renewable energy."

Here, the raging storms are a reaction to something the characters have done, and we can see that John's last line ensures an ongoing conflict. Can the sky really be angry? No, of course not. But for the story, Turtle will perceive it as angry, and Turtle's reaction to this setting establishes both his and the storm's attitude.

Ultimately, mastery of setting in your writing will come down to obeying the one rule: everything in your writing must work in terms of the story. Too much setting will drown a story in detail just as easily as an undeveloped sense of place will leave the reader thirsting for context. Use the examples here as a guide, but push forward in your own direction. If you fear that you are writing too much setting, keep going - you can always edit later, and sometimes it is harder to write in new setting than it is to pare down the words already on the page. Conversely, if you fear that you are not writing enough, keep going in the direction you are on. In the first draft, you are looking for the core of your story, the essence, and sometimes an aspect like setting gets left for later as you sketch out your plot and characters. Whatever it is you are writing, write it - that alone is the only sure way to success.

How to Write Compelling Characters

Write Compelling Characters


There is nothing - nothing - that will kill a story faster than a dull protagonist. I'm not talking about a character who sits at home with his mom on Friday nights eating popcorn while watching reruns of that morning's soaps (though that would, of course, be pretty dull). Worse than this is a character who sits at home and does nothing, thinks nothing, decides nothing. The kind of protagonist who takes life in stride and learns nothing. A dull character, indeed.


But in your writing, how you do break out with an interesting character? What are the tools of character development? And how do you use these tools to craft a compelling character for a compelling story?
First, step back. Think about the beloved characters of fiction - the enduring voices that refuse to die. I myself think of Jane Eyre and Elizabeth Bennet. Not that they jumped off the page to join me for breakfast, but these characters took on life with a unique verve. They were single women who did not go quietly into the endless white of the Victorian wedding. At the time she was written, poor Jane was viewed by the English as a scandalous creature - and she wasn't even real.



Victorian Weddings? Scandalous creatures? If you haven't read Jane Eyre or Pride and Prejudice, you might be wondering if I myself am dull. Let's try a comtemporary example like Han Solo from Star Wars. Not exactly literary fiction, no - not even a book. But when you watch the classic trilogy, it isn't Luke Skywalker or Darth Vader saying the balance of the snappy lines. It's Han who doubts The Force and questions "the old man" Ben Kenobi and rankles at the orders from "Princess" Leia. He provides a voice the audience can trust. He is a man who follows the one voice that should matter - his own. As he steadily transforms from cheeky rogue to loyal Rebel, audiences relate to the Start Wars story because Han raises the questions that viewers themselves need answered. Why does this story matter? Why should we believe (or care about) what's going on?



This is what your characters must do. Creative writing is about suspension of disbelief - it is about convincing your reader to sit down, read your words, and imagine for a moment that everything you write is true. The characters within your stories have a burden to this truth - they must not only live with this imagined reality, they must illustrate it. They must live it.



So where do we start? How do we create a character who believably lives and breathes unreality? The best place to start is freewriting. In freewriting, you sit down and transcribe the first images that come to mind. The goal of the freewrite is to let go, to ignore the little voice that says "no, no, that's impossible" and simply write. This is fiction - nothing is impossible. Let your unconscious mind generate the most outlandish notions for your characters. For example: ok, freewriting about blaster-wielding time traveler who hates evil people. She wants to kill evil-doers like Hitler and Stalin. She wears high-heels. Why? Because in her future they've outlawed uncomfortable shoes.



Suddenly, we have a character. Is she feminist? Is she retro? Impossible to say. Like a real person, though, she's complex. She wants to kill the kind of men who most embodied the brutality of a masculine militarism, and yet she desires a fashion that some say was created by male expectations of how a woman should look - maybe she seeks oppression. When you freewrite, components of your characters will emerge that seem to be in conflict. Embrace this. These conflicted personalities form the nucleus of strong characters. Protagonists who can't agree with themselves certainly won't agree with everyone around them. Waking up the morning will be enough to generate conflict - and then you throw in a dragon or two and the wife asking for divorce while the kids are possessed by demons, and by golly you've got a story.



Conflict now becomes your next stop in character development. Ideally, your readers will see your characters as perfectly suited to the story you've written. As you write, though, it's the the other way around - your story will flow from the characters. Say, for example, your story's about a dragon. Is your main character a knight? Then of course he goes and tries to kill the dragon. Is your character the knight's loyal son? Why, then, of course he'll go and try killing the dragon, too. But these two characters cannot give rise to the same story. The knight might have a tale of sacrifice and hardship while seeking vengeance against the dragon who ate his goddaughter. He may be even be seeking personal redemption for a lifetime of war and death. But the knave isn't old enough for that kind of journey. The story he creates may involve sacrifice and hardship, but it will be in relation to coming-of-age. The goddaughter may have been his best friend, the girl he kissed during innocent games of "Sleeping Beauty," and he may be coming to terms with her death. But this knight's son is too young to know true regret - he may dream of war, sure, but he's never killed a man or seen a family burned alive. You could write the same plot for both these characters, the tale of "man kills dragon with spear and magic helmet," but the stories would be completely different.



To ensure that your story follows the character, catch a glimpse of your protagonist with a quick freewrite (you can use the first paragraphs of your story, if you like). Then start writing your character out of danger and into conflict. This sounds absurd, perhaps, but consider: what does every human being try to do, even before sex? Stay alive. And what happens when your character goes to extremes to survive? The boyfriend feels left out while "hero girl" goes saving the world. The archvillain's two-headed hellhound (he was just a puppy!) is sacrificed because "boy wonder" wanted that magic amulet. The dragon goes hungry because the bad man in the shiny metal tunic locked up the virgin behind a wall of sharp pointy things. By getting themselves out of danger, the protagonists of strong stories set up entirely new conflicts ramp the danger up to critical levels of "omigod I need to finish reading this next chapter." Bear in mind that danger takes all forms - the only difference between danger and conflict is immediacy. Danger must be resolved right now, whereas conflict is free to fester. That chick trying to steal my prom date - that's conflict. This damn heel that broke and I can't walk a step without everyone knowing I got my shoes from Payless - that's danger. And you can bet the evil chick will capitalize on danger.



Now comes the tricky part. Once you have a protagonist, a solid character, and you have an ongoing series of conflicts for your protagonist to face, you'll need to step back while still writing. You'll feel the urge at times to write in what your protagonist "should" do. You might want to write in what "should" happen. This is death to a story. This is our dear friend staying home with Mom to watch reruns because she's lonely and that's what he "should" do. Let the characters write themselves. As you're writing your story, pushing toward what you think is the right way, listen to the first impulse from your character. Your protagonist might not want to do the "right" thing. This protagonist may try something completely unexpected. No worries - it's called taking a left turn. Sometimes you might not like the results, and you might later go back to delete, but you still discover a hidden level to your protagonist's personality. Other times, you find that the left turn redefines your story, revealing the "true" story that you hadn't known was there. The only way to find out, though, is to let your characters take the lead.



That said, reconsider the dull boy sitting with his mother. If he's lying in wait to ambush the good-for-nothing vampire who killed his dad last week, that's a different story altogether.

Make the Most of Writing Workshops

It has become very popular, now, to promote the ideal that all writing is worth reading, that all writing deserves a kind word. This attitude results from a very brutal fact about writing - good writing comes from deep within, and a scathing review is tantamount to cutting open the writer's soul. Many writers - especially writers just starting out - are not ready for this treatment. Many who face such critics end up hating themselves as much as they dread writing. Would-be careers are cut short before they've even begun.

Unfortunately, a writer who receives no negative feedback will not improve. I used to be such a writer. The words I put to paper thrilled me. Some of this was the fact that I had math and chemistry waiting and and early curfew - it was so much more fun to write than it was to do homework. And talk to my parents? Heck, that wasn't gonna happen - I was a teenager. So instead I wrote. I made up fantasy world spinoffs from King Arthur and The Lord of the Rings. I studied Dungeons and Dragons rulebooks as if I could grasp the essentials of storywriting through mastering the character template for hobbits.

Unfortunately, this wasn't good writing. I didn't understand plot or conflict, and my idea of character development was stealing Tolkien's Silver Mithril Armor (Hit Points Plus Three!) and draping it over my dice-rolled half-elven wizard knight. Somehow, the words "derivative plagiarism" never occured to me.

I was young, but I was also very lucky. The teachers I had took a holistic approach to reading - they taught the elements of good literature. Stories fascinated me, and from school I began to understand the components of good writing. I tried to emulate my favorite writers. I wanted to recreate the quirky tales we read in class - and of course I wanted other people to see my name attached to such good stories. I wanted to be a bestseller at sixteen.

It wasn't until college that my first workshop instructor told me the bad news about writing: good fiction is about conflict. He was polite, he was understanding, but he also told me that my story couldn't be a story without conflict. "Nothing really happens in your piece," he told me.

I was more confused than crushed. My piece had divorce and it had the new girlfriend and there was of course the poor kid shuttling back-and-forth between Mom's House and Dad's House. I thought it was poignant. But nothing happened. The characters did not grow or change. The little boy was cute, but he did not drive plot.

So I went back, and I thought about what my teacher meant. Some days, I still go back and ask myself because, as a writer, that is my weakness - my stories lack conflict. They lack the primary motivation that makes humans struggle. I'm getting better, sure, but it's a daily quest to find that inner turmoil to drive new stories forward.

When you sign up for a writing workshop, you look for crucial feedback like this to make your stories stronger. This is especially true for anyone just starting out. Whether you're age seventeen or age seventy-one, the stories you submit may be the first you've shared with other readers. It's a very tense moment. You want to know if your story works. You want to know if you've left out anything major - like conflict - and what you should do about that. But you also want to know something more critical still. You want the answer to the question that no writing instructor or workshop leader can answer directly. You want to know if your writing "has it," if your writing follows the recipe for "good" and "worth writing more." You listen to every ounce of feedback looking for the answer, looking for the clues that say "keep going," dreading the ones that say "don't bother."

Let me share a secret with you. Let me tell you what good writers take for granted, even on the days when it feels wrong. Once you've reached the point of sharing your stories with others, you have it. The writing may not be perfect, the characters might need work, but you are a writer. You are on the road. The key is to keep writing, to listen to the feedback, to learn how to strengthen your words. There will be days you don't feel like writing, even some days you might not feel that you can write, but those will pass. You will learn the tricks to get through them. You will improve. You will submit more stories to the workshop. And the feedback you dreaded most will become your stepping stone to the next level.

Visit my Creative Writing website. My own online writing workshops are coming soon. Or, if you like, you can visit my Feedback Page to send me an e-mail.