When you write about a place you give it life. Perhaps the best way to ground a story is to focus on where it takes place. Steinbeck spent pages describing the California countryside in The Grapes of Wrath, Neil Gaiman sets the story of The Graveyard Book in (you guessed it) a graveyard. I can think of no better example where the setting of a story becomes a character. The setting in that book is alive despite itself. It offers beauty and dread and in this writer’s humble opinion, the story would be lost without it. One could spend days discussing the various uses of setting in literature regardless of genre.

I have always felt that the surroundings the characters of a book find themselves in are tantamount to adding another character to the scene. In Carolyn Forche’s prose poem, The Colonel, the setting stands out as a stark reminder of the situation in which the speaker in the poem finds herself. Stucco walls with broken bottles embedded in them to “scoop the kneecaps” of would be intruders, and the razor wire on the walls, all serve to provide the reader with the sense that the speaker is in a dangerous place. But it’s more than that, it’s as if the dictator’s compound itself looms as a shadowy henchman over the speaker. It makes the implied threat to her real at all times.  

Wherever we go, if we take a look around and notice the uniqueness of our surroundings we might see that even the buildings or mountains or trees appear to have their own sense of personality. I live in Tempe, Arizona. On McDowell and Priest Roads there is a park known as Papago Park. Red Rock Mountains rise from the park at the peak of the hill crested by McDowell to overlook Phoenix. Aside from the amazing sunsets, if you look from the western side of the mountains you can see a face in the rock. It looks like it could be the face of a gorilla or maybe Jabba the Hut melting. I’ve never been able to drive by without noticing it.

What does the use of setting say about the following short pieces based in downtown Phoenix? 

Barrett drives home from the mental health clinic through the familiar streets of Phoenix. The clinic sits behind a dusty, barren lot surrounded by a chain-link fence between railroad tracks and an old factory. Shanty huts made of anything scrounged from dumpsters are stuffed into underpasses like broken childhood dreams. A woman walks down the dimly lit sidewalk as the sun closes its eyes to the world. She stops at a motel with more boards in the windows than glass, wearing a gray gown fit to her form. Down the side, from armpit to ankle, her dress is cut like a knight’s tabard. It gives a side view of the woman’s naked body underneath. Seeing her reminds Barrett of another woman who used to go to his clinic.

The first time he met Grace, Barrett and her case manager conducted a home visit. Grace was a woman in her thirties with a face of sixty. The smell of cigarettes leaned on the nostrils when she opened the door. A cockroach sat in the open on a wall. Grace reported that she took her medications, for the most part. She was wearing a gray dress with a hole cut in the crotch, where the mid-morning light died in her pubic hair. Inside the apartment, a thin mattress sagged on the floor under a weight Barrett could not imagine. There was one chair but no table for the social security checks that paid for the apartment.

“Have you been saved?” Grace asked Barrett.

Surprised, he answered, “I’m not religious, Ma’am.”

She smiled and said, “I’ll pray for you.”

The examples above, I believe, show the use of setting as a means to express a sense of loneliness or hopelessness in someone’s situation. The trappings of poverty or wealth can convey so much about a person in a story. Who they are or what they do can sometimes be decided by their surroundings.   

Below is a different example.

Barrett locked up the clinic for the night and parked his car a few blocks from work. It was Friday, the end to a long and trying week. He was ready for a beer he was ready for twelve. He walked by the old psychiatric center where he used to take people when they were psychotic or suicidal. It had been closed for years and now had a fence around it promising a smart new restaurant or nightclub. The area around it had been gentrified. Where before Barrett would have seen a dive bar, a drive-thru liquor store and a strip club he now saw a coffee house and a trendy spot where people could drink craft beer and play shuffleboard. Downtown was confusing now, there were tall buildings where before was only sky. Smiling women walked together down sidewalks dotted with lamps. The night was young and full of fun. The light of possibility and youth danced on their cheeks.

The setting above shows something quite different from the two before it. Ironically, all these are composites of real parts of Phoenix that are all only a few blocks apart.

Setting is important, and something that I try to give due respect to, though I have been guilty of overwriting it. The characters should still be the focus in the story. I say that for myself as well as anyone who might benefit from it. Too much exposition and not enough character development can stifle a story. As writers, we all have to find our own balance.

Have you ever walked downtown at night and really noticed the various buildings? High rises and squat, rectangular shops are like people in a crowd. How do they fit in a scene? Maybe they are innocent bystanders to the characters in a story. Or maybe they are witnesses who stay silent at the scene of some tragedy. They stand around, apart from one another, nobody speaks–they just stand there knowing. Buildings in cities do not look each other in the eyes. When something happens, they just stand there. Silence is their dialogue, perhaps saying, “This is how it is. This is how it has always been.”