Building a world for your characters to exist in, and where the action of your story will play out, is an essential part of your creative writing process. Knowing how to write place and setting will not just enable you to create a backdrop for your characters, but will go a long way to making them believable and develop the atmosphere and ambience of the story.

Think of it as setting the stage for your story to take place. In a theatre, or in a film, you can see the background: the walls, the furniture, all the visual clues to the world in which the story will unfold. It’s in front of your eyes. In writing, all the action of a story takes place within a setting, and it’s a writer’s job to create that setting. To make the reader see where the story happens through the way we convey it in words.

In fantasy writing, where worlds are created that are not the same as our own but may be related, world-building is an essential part of the process, and vital to the success of creating an environment with its own logic that the reader can believe in, even though it’s not ‘real’. That skill, though, that ability to conjure the location of your story and bring it to life, is vital no matter what kind of story you want to tell.

Different types of fiction may need you to write different aspects of setting, and how they affect the way the story develops may vary, but all fiction needs to be set somewhere, and as a writer you need to put your characters in the right setting for your story and convey it in such a way that readers can feel as if they’re there, too.

Creating a setting

Your story will be set somewhere: in a particular place at a particular time. Setting provides the geographical and historical framework for what happens, but it’s not quite as simple as just knowing the date and the place. Think of the layers of information that lie behind the words ‘time’ and ‘place’. The social and cultural context. The environment, or landscape. The climate, and how it affects human behaviour in general and your character/s in particular. The social structures that influence the way people behave. The music. The food. Work. Politics. What people believe in. Religion. Superstition. What people wear. The colours and styles around them. How people communicate with each other. How they talk and what they talk about.

When setting becomes a character in itself

All stories need a setting, but sometimes the place in a story is so central to what happens that it can almost take on the role of a character. Think about the moors in Wuthering Heights, or the island in The Beach. Can you imagine Ian Rankin’s crime stories being set anywhere except Edinburgh?

If this is what you want in your story, lean it to it. Embrace it. Show how the place and the story it generates are inescapably linked.

The nature in their environment, or lack of it, and how they relate to other species. A writer needs to think about the effect all of these things will have on the character and on the way the story develops.