By: Grant P. Ferguson
Last Updated: December 27, 2023
Similar to the contribution of characters to your novel, you can personify your plot’s story settings to magnify the emotional tone and mood of your novel.
Create Memorable Story Settings
Design settings that readers remember long after they close your book. For example:
- Think how the moving staircases in the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft enhanced the magical aspects of the Harry Potter films.
- In The Lord of the Rings, assess how the detailed descriptions of Middle Earth amplified the story’s emotional mood and tone.
- Take a trip down memory lane and remember your surprise and delight at the different settings in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
In addition, consider other books and films where the settings played significant roles. For example, Sherlock Holmes, Watership Down, and The Shining.
How Do You Personify Your Story Setting?
Similar to describing traits in a character profile, decide how each setting will:
- Move the story forward.
- Help you develop characters’ thoughts, choices, words, and actions.
- Affect the hero’s emotions, external goal, and inner need.
- Expand or exacerbate hero’s problems based on historical events.
- Increase the hero’s conflicts with people or the environment.
- Shape the hero’s actions toward others.
- Showcase the effect of weather and lighting on characters.
- Control the outcome of one or more scenes.
- Influence what the characters see, hear, smell, touch, or taste.
- Create vivid images that evoke a visceral response.
Convert Your Answers into Descriptions
To personify your story settings, use the decisions from above to describe a setting based on your style and genre.
Here are two ways you can satisfy readers’ expectations:
- Long-form Description – Write two or three paragraphs using vivid words that conjure up detailed images. The first time you introduce a location, use the long-form description, but instead of a single “info-dump,” creatively intertwine the paragraphs with action and dialogue.
- Short-form Description – Summarize the long-form description into one or two sentences, but leave in specific words that convey the desired mood and tone. Later, as needed, update and use short-form descriptions to remind readers of how a location remains essential to the story.
I encourage you to customize a setting template for your genre. For instance, similar to creating profiles for each character, use your template to write a long and short description for each setting.
If you’re looking for more information on this topic, the Trellis Method’s Plots Development Workbook and its prompts help you create the long and short descriptions, gathering and recording those details that personify your settings.
Need Help to Convey Tone and Mood?
I’ve listed below two inexpensive resources* you can use to create settings that engage readers.
- The Rural Setting Thesaurus: A Writers Guide to Personal and Natural Places
- The Urban Setting Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to City Spaces
I highly recommend both books by Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi.
Conclusion
Use these resources to surprise and delight readers. Make locations come alive—personify your story settings.
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- Amplify Your Main Plot: Turn Random Story Ideas into Subplots (Part 1)
- Amplify Your Main Plot: Build a Story Spine for Each Story Plot to Enhance the Overall Narrative (Part 2)
- Amplify Your Main Plot: How to Create Your Plot Map (Part 3)
- Fiction Writers: Map Your Plot Structure and Weave Together Subplot Threads Like a Pro
- 7 Tips for Structuring Plot and Subplots
Resources
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Describe your method of adding something special to a setting that makes the location come alive to readers?
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