Every Story Happens Somewhere: Notes on Place in Fiction
How Setting Informs the Story
Welcome to The Caffeinated Writer craft series. This post is excerpted from my on-demand course, Foundations of Novel Writing.
If you enjoy this post on setting in fiction, you might also like reading The Art of Description and How to Start Writing Your Novel: Part 2.
We all live somewhere. We all grew up somewhere. We all explore the world, to varying degrees. We are all formed by the places that raised us and the places where we live, the places we visit. That goes for your characters too.
And we are all formed by the time in which we live. In narrative, setting encompasses not only place, but also time. Where does your novel happen, and when? How essential is the specific location to the events of your story?
Some novels are so deeply influenced by place and time that they feel as if they could not exist without this particular setting. This is true for The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, by Milan Kundera.
In February of 1948, the communist leader Klement Gottvald stepped out on the balcony of a Baroque palace in Prague to harangue hundreds of thousands of citizens amassed in Old Town Square. That was a great turning point in the history of Bohemia. A fateful moment.
On that day, a photograph is taken and widely distributed as propaganda. A few paragraphs later, we discover that the photograph was later doctored to remove a comrade who had been “charged with treason and hanged. The propaganda section immediately made him vanish from history…”
The state-mandated culture of forgetting in Czechoslovakia under the Communist regime is central to the story. Without the city and its politics, its history, the novel would not exist. Note that we don’t need lengthy descriptions of place to make this setting central; in fact, they are not described at all. The name of the city and the square, alongside the year, provides all the specificity we need.