Story Elements: The Setting
As they say in Real Estate, “Location, location, location.” In stories though, I begin this blog post not entirely convinced. My brother has a movie he really liked which is basically three people wandering around talking. The setting is a castle or something, but it winds up irrelevant. They could have been anywhere.
On the other hand, ‘The Hunchback of Le Louvre’ just doesn’t have the same ring to it. To put it on a slightly more modern footing, would "Oh Brother, Where Art Thou’ been as funny set in Canada? Okay, it might have been slightly more amusing, depending on the number of moose and back-bacon references.
Then again, and especially in this format, I’ve done whole stories with almost no mention of the location or atmosphere. They’re usually heavy on dialogue. Come to think of it, they usually wind up a little detached and philosophical.
I think what it comes down to is that your setting is an additional character. Like any character the story might survive without it or with an alternate. However, as a character, it deserves at least as much attention as any other character, if not more. After all, the setting will probably be the largest character unless you have a story about giants set on a tiny, tiny island.
Updated by Kevin: Sorry to butt in to THX’s lovely blog post, but I didn’t want to push it off the homepage since he spent so much time writing it. But, I wanted to say thank you to everyone who helped out with the server support project! There’s still time to donate, but we made our goal so as of 9/1, we’ll have hosting paid for for the next year! Also, I had some time this afternoon – so I fixed the search engine. Search is working again (for real this time, not just the tags)!
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