Story Setting: How to Create a Captivating Setting for Your Fiction Novel

Writing a captivating story setting can be challenging. Getting it “just right” can be hit or miss – too many details may get skimmed and skipped and not enough details leave the characters with no place to be. A story’s setting can help form and enhance the characters and the plot.  

A great story setting should:

• help tell your story
• deepen your plot
• enhance your characters
• set the mood
• increase emotional connection to your characters
• engage the reader

But how do you write a captivating story setting that hooks readers? Keep reading and I’ll show you.

What is Setting?

Setting is the when and where of your story. It provides the reader with important background information, such as a specific period, geographical location, or even a world that is vividly imagined. The setting of a story serves as the background to everything happening in a story, and often it sets the mood for the reader.

Why is Story Setting Important?

When you create a captivating setting, storytelling can be taken to the next level. An interesting setting is a must in fiction novels because it provides the framework for the story. Not only does the setting create the location and time period, but it also includes the many details and distinctions that make that place interesting. The setting of your story should be a place that a reader would love to visit in real life. An attractive story setting elevates the narrative therefore enhancing the reader experience.

Elements of Setting in a Story

While the basic definition of story setting is the time and place of a story, different elements add to the creation of a setting. These elements include:

• Geographic location: A specific place where the story takes place, such as the moon, a small town in Virginia, a desert, or a jungle.
• Physical location: This falls within the geographic setting and is a character’s immediate surroundings. Some examples include a car, a house, a castle, a spaceship, etc.
• Physical environment: Environmental setting covers weather conditions (electrical storm, rain, snow, hail, tornado, etc), climate (tropical, dry, etc.), and other forces of nature (electromagnetic force, gravitational force, etc.).
• Time period: Time period can include a historical period, season, time of day or night, or time of year.
• Social and cultural environment: Location and time period will typically determine this environment. For example, if a story is set in the late 1960s, the cultural background may focus on the Vietnam War. If it’s set in a high school, trends specific to teenagers will be the norm.

Story Setting Planning

When planning the setting for your story, consider these important points:

• Align the setting with the plot. If the setting doesn’t line up with the plot the story will not seem realistic and it won’t make any sense.
• Make sure the setting fits the overall story. Events and objects, for example, within the setting should not feel out of place because that confuses the reader. For example, a Mini Cooper being used as a getaway car for bank robbers would probably be a little weird.
• Make the setting fit your character(s). Your story setting should always align with the main character(s). If your main character is an introvert and shy, have her in the corner of a café reading a fiction novel instead of chatting with a group of friends in a bar.

Ask yourself these questions:

• What is the most surprising thing about this place?
• What’s one thing my main character loves/hates about this place?
• What is the history of the setting?
• How is this setting important to my main character(s)?

Story Setting Research

While you may know a lot, chances are your natural knowledge is not tremendously wide or diverse. Researching a story setting is important because you need to know exactly how to “show” your setting to your readers. A captivating setting helps readers visualize the story as it unfolds. It can also make readers feel as though they are embedded in the plot, right there with the characters.

It’s somewhat easy to research your story’s setting if you live in or near where your story takes place, or have even visited there. However, even if you haven’t physically been to the place, it’s still possible to set a vivid and captivating setting for your story.

Consider asking yourself these questions when researching your story’s setting:

• How dense is the population?
• What nationalities are represented in the population?
• What is the main religion of the area?
• What other religions are there?
• What is the climate like?
• What is the government like?
• What are the terrain and other geographical features like?
• What are the typical weather patterns for that time of year?

Here are some ideas on how to research the setting for your story:

1. Draw inspiration from real life.
If you live in New York, for example, show readers what it’s like to walk down Broadway on a breezy, yet sunny Monday morning in December. Describe the scene as the character walks past buildings decorated for Christmas in as much detail as you can. Make the reader feel like they are in the story walking down Broadway, too.

2. Use Google Street View.
A great way to research an area that you’ve never been to and cannot get to is to use Google Street View. It’s a free, three-dimensional interactive image that covers most of the world. Just enter an address and you’ll be there. For example, if you want to write a story set in Atlanta, Georgia, you can use Street View to see what it’s like to walk the streets of the city. You can see the architecture, how many people are on the street and their appearance, how much traffic there is and what the vehicles look like, how far it is to the highway, and which streets intersect with each other. You can even see what kind of advertisements they have!

3. Engage your senses.
The best settings aren’t just about a distinct look, they also include smell, sound, feel, and maybe even taste. Even if you’ve never been to that particular place, you can draw inspiration from places you have visited. Remember what you heard, smelled, touched, and tasted while you were there.

4. Don’t spend too much time describing little details.
Giving too many details in a long descriptive setting may have your readers nodding off. You can create a captivating and vivid setting with the occasional detail that has an impact on your plot. This will enrich your story and help engage readers, keeping them awake and feeling like they’re part of the story.

Some helpful sources for researching the setting of a story include:

• YouTube
• Google Earth
• Encyclopedias
• Newspapers
• Photos
• Archives
• Libraries
• National Geographic

Setting and Conflict

The relationship between story setting and conflict in a fiction story is also important. The outcome of an action is significantly influenced by the setting in which it takes place.

For example, a character slipping something discreetly into his pocket at home looks different from doing the same thing in a store, which may provoke suspicions of shoplifting.  

Certain locations tend to encourage conflicts more than others, transforming the place into an adversary. For example, the aspiring actor starts to hate their unbearable hometown.

How to Describe Setting

To describe a captivating setting that engages readers, remember to use detailed adjectives, stronger verbs instead of adverbs, and detailed descriptions using your senses. There are many ways to describe settings to keep readers engaged. These include:

• Set the scene through informative narration. The beginning of a setting provides an excellent opportunity to offer concise descriptions that set the context and provide specific details about the visual elements.
• Expose setting through character actions. What might your character dodge in a high-speed chase or bump into while watching the girl across the street?
• Describe a place through your characters’ senses. Use senses such as sight, hearing, touch, smell, and even taste in your setting and dialogue. Think about tone and mood. For example, if your setting is dusty, what does dusty smell like? Old books, maybe?
• Include accurate time period details. Time is an important piece of setting. Buildings and cars will look different in a story set in 1960s New York than one set in the late 2000s. Describe details such as people’s clothing and speech, types of buildings and shops that line the main street, technology, culture, current interests, challenges, and obstacles.
• Include small-scale time changes. Think of how the time of day and physical changes to a place can affect mood and tone. For example, a beautiful city that has been bombed. Describe what it looked like before and after. Including time of day can create moods such as fear (night may bring vulnerabilities), excitement (daybreak of an important event), or laziness (the golden light of a late summer afternoon by the pool).

Tips for Writing a Captivating Story Setting

When trying to come up with a setting for your story, keep in mind that creating a captivating story setting adds character and enriches the overall story. Creating an engaging setting for your reader can be challenging. It’s sort of like a large puzzle – lots of little pieces working together to make the big picture appear seamless.

Here are some tips for choosing a captivating and engaging setting for your story:

1. Decide what mood you’re trying to create.
Mood is defined as the overall feeling a reader has when reading a story. How do you want your readers to feel? Use any word that can describe an emotion to describe the mood of your story. For example: gloomy, cheerful, mysterious, romantic, tense, lonely, calm, hopeful, etc.

2. Show the reader the setting.
Use active writing to engage the reader. Don’t forget to include the senses when writing about certain things. Instead of writing “the ugly wallpaper,” try “the wallpaper looked like it was from the 1950s with its yellow and orange mushrooms and smelled like a dusty, old attic.”

3. Build an unforgettable setting.
Start with sharing the location and geography of the setting, then add more details, building an unforgettable setting a little at a time.

4. Don’t forget about your characters.
Remember that your setting has a purpose – it’s created based on your characters.

5. Don’t describe the setting all at once.  
It’s important to stretch the setting out enough so that readers will read it instead of skimming and skipping. If you give readers too many details at the start of your story, they’ll most likely put the book down and never finish reading. Add pieces of the setting here and there throughout the story, writing it in as part of the action.

6. Don’t go over-describe.
If you don’t leave some of the details up to the reader’s imagination, you’ll lose them because they won’t feel involved in the story. Keep in mind that you don’t need to include every single little detail. If a machine sounds like a buzzing bee, that’s enough. You don’t have to describe the sound.

7. Remember that the plot and characters are affected by the story setting.
In real life, our environment affects our mood, so it shouldn’t be any different for your characters. For example, a character who lives in Portland, where it’s dark all winter, may become depressed. And if she lives in a home in the middle of nowhere with frigid air seeping in through the cracks around the doors and windows and no heat, readers will feel sympathy for her.

Find more writing tips here:

• How to Ensure Unique Character Voices in Writing
• Brainstorming Ideas & Techniques for Your Fiction Novel
• Simple Sentence Structure Rules

Books on setting I recommend:

*As an Amazon affiliate, I receive a tiny commission if you decide to make a purchase.

• Build Better Settings: How to use setting to show character arc in your fiction
• A Writer’s Guide to Active Setting
• 101 Writers’ Scene Settings: Unique Location Ideas & Sensory Details for Writers to Create Vivid Scene Settings