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Setting is one of the most useful tools we have as writers, and yet in romance novels it is often underused. I suspect it’s because so many books and articles about writing warn us against long descriptions of the setting. Perhaps novelists sometimes overreact, and veer away from writing about setting at all.

Claire McEwen, Writers and Authors, Book Cover

When I read a novel that doesn’t say much about the setting, I feel kind of lost. I want vivid pictures in my head when I read, and it’s a bit hard to conjure them up when the characters are wandering around in some barely-mentioned location.

If we’re careful about how we use setting, we can transport our readers to the world inside our stories without slowing the pacing down. Here are a few tips to do just that:

Think about how your characters see the setting, and describe it through their eyes.

How characters respond to a setting can tell the reader a lot about them. In my new book, Convincing the Rancher, the heroine, Tess, is completely uncomfortable in the mountains and doesn’t want to be there. So when I described the setting, it was negative, at least for the first few chapters of the book.

§ The high desert air nipped her skin with icy teeth.

§ Tess glanced back out the window, at the vast mountains filling the horizon, and the enormous empty sky graying in the dusk. She shivered.

§ These jagged hills… looked like teeth, Tess decided. Teeth from some strange monster with bad oral hygiene.

But later on, as Tess starts to appreciate the wilderness, her reaction to it mirrors these changes.

§ The skeletal hills were lit golden in the afternoon light, their cracks and crevices in deep contrasting shadows. That was kind of pretty. Rocks jutted through the thin soil like abstract sculptures, and she liked modern art.

Use descriptive sentences, but keep them short and within the character’s POV.

Large blocks of description will slow the pacing. Revise descriptions down to their most interesting parts and have the character think about them during conversations, or quickly, within a larger scene.

§ When the hero, Slaid, asks Tess what she thinks of the landscape:

Across the valley were hills, dry, stark and tumbling on, one after another. They were so barren that she could see every detail of the land’s contours. It was like being able to look through someone’s skin and see their bones.

Replace dialogue tags with description.

Dialogue is a very effective way to deliver description. It will transport the reader further into the scene and can be much more interesting than “she said,” or “he asked.”

§ “It’s beautiful.” Beautiful in a rugged, formidable way that made Tess want to jump in her car and race home.

§ She took a long, deliberate look at the crowd growing around the stage. “I guess well just have to see.”

§ “I’ve been here once.” She could swear the peaks of the Sierra Nevada were glaring at her.

Use setting as a way to inspire character self-discovery.

Being in a new setting can have a powerful effect on our thinking, bringing back memories or inspiring insight. Take advantage of this in your stories.

§ When Tess and Slaid go riding together, she asks if they’re on grazing land.

“Nope… These are the native plants. Tough as nails.”

Tess looked at the shrubs with new respect. They were tough, and prickly looking too. She could appreciate any creature that survived under tough conditions. Like she had. Ugh. Benson must have introspection in the air. She found herself constantly thinking about parts of her life that she had no interest in revisiting.

§ When Slaid takes Tess to the ghost town of Bodie, the setting is a catalyst for her.

Tess sat where she could see the town, so still under the bright midday sun. The dry heat felt good beating all around her, baking her muscles just enough to relax them. The hissing wind, the dull thumping of Slaid opening and closing the truck doors all lulled her, making her a little sleepy.

She studied the abandoned buildings, still littered with the remnants of long-ago lives. People had been born and lived and loved and died here, and now there was nothing but the wind whispering through the buildings. This place was a reminder that time passed quickly; lives were lived in the blink of an eye. Tess suddenly felt a sense of urgency – that she needed to be braver, more alive than she had ever been.

Setting can bring so much depth to a story. My hope is that this post gives you ideas for how to incorporate more of it into your book, without slowing the pacing down. If you have any other ideas for how to enrich stories with setting, please share them in the comments. And thank you for joining me today on Writers and Authors!

Claire McEwen lives by the ocean in Northern California with her family and a scruffy, mischievous terrier. When not dreaming up new stories, she can be found digging in her garden with a lot of enthusiasm but, unfortunately, no green thumb. She loves discovering flea-market treasures, walking on the beach, dancing, traveling and reading, of course! Convincing the Rancher is her third book for Harlequin Superromance.

Website: http://www.clairemcewen.com

Blog: http://blog.clairemcewen.com

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/7226137.Claire_McEwen

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I’ve always been most taken with novels in which setting is a character that has a life of its own. Whether it’s Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s 1940s Barcelona, Dennis Lehane’s Boston, or Cormac McCarthy’s American Southwest, a novel steeped in place engages me far more than a novel in which the setting feels generic, flat, or, worse, an afterthought, whatever other strengths that novel may have.

Being a fan of such settings, I work hard to create them in my own novels. I am not alone. Many writers I’ve worked with one-on-one or through MFA programs at Emerson College and the University of Virginia work hard at setting. Yet, often, the settings in manuscripts I’ve had the privilege of reading as an instructor, coach or fellow writer often fall flat, even when they have wonderful details.

What I’ve found undermines writers most is the belief that detail alone creates a good setting. Here are three key tactics to keep in mind when trying to write settings that readers can’t forget:

1 ) Create emotion through your details.

Often what makes a setting flat, no matter how lovely or original the details may be, is when there is no emotional, physical, or mental connection between those details and the character. Without some consistent connection between the setting and the characters, there is no connection for the reader. Details alone create only a flat, 2-dimensional world — much like a fake backdrop to stage play — if they do not impact or engage the characters.

To elevate your setting, and make it come alive, think about how the details you choose affect the character. What does your character feel and think about the setting, how do her surroundings impact her emotions and inner life?

Here is how I handled an early scene involving setting in my new novel THE SILENT GIRLS:

Rath drove north on his dirt road, past the enormous, looming, granite face of Canaan Monadnock, which gave way to flat farmland with the abruptness of the Fundy Escarpment smacking up to the Atlantic’s edge; a geologic anomaly in a state of worn, aged mountains that folded into gentle foothills and gradually leveled out into Lake Champlain to the west and the Connecticut River to the east.

As a boy, Rath had been fascinated by this peculiarity and spent nights tucked under his covers, his sister asleep in her bed beside his, enrapt by books on plate tectonics, volcanoes, and the Earth’s molten core …Those early years, Rath had been obsessed with the violence of nature and how it shaped the physical world. As he’d grown older, his fixation had shifted from the violence of nature to the nature of violence, and how to stop it.

When settings trigger your characters’ thoughts, memories and emotions, the setting becomes a character that engages other characters, and thus the reader. Think about what details you can use that will create that engagement.

2) Are your details “just right”?

What makes a detail “just right”? Because of how the human brain works writers most often write from general to specific in early drafts. It is most often a mistake to think the first details we create are just right. When we keep these early details, the overall impression is often a setting that lacks our own singular specificity, because we’ve not yet to dig deeper into our imaginations. My first image or detail is often a holding place for me to re-think what detail would be “just right.” Ask yourself, “Have I read a similar version of this before…” about the natural world or a cityscape I am inventing. Then ask: What do I know about this place, what small but specific detail can I use to make readers feel they are being taken on a tour by an expert with an insider’s track on Boston, the Vermont Northwoods, or Barcelona? Don’t be the bus tour that hauls around thousands of tourists on the main roads of tourist traps; be the insider who gives readers a glimpse of a place in a way they’ve never known. Surprise them.

3) Use all fives senses

So often we rely on the sense of sight for details of setting. Yet the sense of smell creates the deepest connection to emotions and memory. While visuals are fine, expand your use of senses. How does a place smell, taste, sound, and feel? Dig down to express each of these senses specific to your setting then figure out how those sensory details affect your characters, and how the character might think or feel about such sensory impressions. Your settings, and your novel, will be better for it.

Eric Rickstad’s taut, chilling literary crime novels strip back the bucolic veneer of rural America and root around in its tragic underbelly. His first novel Reap was a New York Times Noteworthy Book first published by Viking Penguin. His novel THE SILENT GIRLS, from HarperCollins, was published October 28, 2014. His short stories and articles have appeared in many magazines and been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He holds an MFA from the University of Virginia where he was a Hoyns Fellow and a Corse Fellow. He lives in Vermont with his wife and daughter, and is represented by Philip Spitzer of the Philip G. Spitzer Literary Agency.

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