How to choose a setting for your story

All too often, novice writers focus on plot and characters, overlooking setting to their story’s detriment. Simply put, the location of your story matters, as it ought to complement the plot and characters.

When selecting where you will set your story, allow it be more than a backdrop for your tale. You can accomplish this by ensuring your setting:
• Offers opportunities for your character to have conflicts – If a character is experiencing a man vs. nature a man vs. himself conflict, then being marooned on an island is a great setting. That location won’t work for a man vs. man or a man vs. society setting, however. But think even deeper than that. Ask yourself where would the conflict and the plot our main character goes through best be expressed? Suppose, for example, that our protagonist, now retired, decides to move back to the place of his childhood and renovate an old residence that nature is quickly reclaiming. A good setting for this would be a forested area that is really far out in the boondocks, the complete opposite of a big, urbane city where he has lived his entire adult life.
• Delivers a place where such conflicts naturally could occur – Don’t force a setting to fit the plot. Two ambitious corporate attorneys, for example, wouldn’t work in a small town but instead in a big city downtown high rise. Their environs are the restaurants, offices and penthouses of their corporate clients. If the attorneys chose to live and work in a small town, this would undercut the story’s believability.
• Provides plenty of space for lots of action to occur – If your main character needs to grapple with kidnappers inside a building, make it a large skyscraper or a massive warehouse. A seaside village doesn’t allow a lot of space for a sophisticated spy to battle a criminal organization throughout a novel, though it would work fine in a scene.
• Feels like real place to readers – A setting obviously can be made up but ought to feel like it actually could exist. That means appealing to the reader’s five senses in your description and then including parallels to something similar readers are familiar with (which is why so many science fiction novels structure spacecraft operations of the future like today’s naval vessels). If using a real place, always do your research so that you don’t include factual errors and so that you can provide evocative details that capture the location’s feel.
• Improves the story’s quality via the feeling or tone of the setting – The seedy side of a city at night is perfect for a dark, gritty story. A swamp works well for a horror story. That’s because the emotions the setting evokes matches the story’s tone. If you’re successful at this, you probably will create an interesting and memorable setting.

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