If you want stronger, more memorable story settings, then I’ve got some writing tips for settings that’ll help you create the most wow-worthy fictional worlds you can! Settings are so important to orienting and engaging your reader, so you want to get them right.
An evocative, immersive setting will help take your story up a whole level. So I’ve researched and written my way to this advice for better settings.
Note: These are general tips for describing your fictional locations, not really for sci-fi or fantasy worldbuilding, which is its own complicated pot of noodles. But they are handy for strengthening most settings in your works.
So here we go!
Visualize and Describe Your Setting to Yourself
Before you can tell the reader where your story takes place, you have to know it yourself. You need to develop your setting in your head and know it really well.
If you’re a plotter, this means planning in advance. Pull out a sheet of paper, and prepare to fill with everything you know about your setting. Names, maps, weather patterns, and anything else you can think of should be on your paper.
If you’re pantser, maybe you’ve already written your story, or at least part of it, but you want to flesh out your setting. I suggest taking what you’ve written and highlighting every section of your text that pertains to setting. This info will tell you everything you know about your setting so far.
But then how do you get to know your setting better? More than all the vital details like what it’s named and where it is? It’s time to ask some questions.
One handy technique I’ve learned for building settings is the five-senses trick. This handy little one of the tips for writing settings relies on your senses. The five-senses trick just involves asking the following questions about your setting:
- What does it feel like?
- What does it look like?
- What does it smell like?
- What does it taste like?
- What does it sound like?
Start with a few adjectives for each, and then go into as much depth and detail as you want. Yes, I know you may not need all of these (Rarely do writers describe what a setting tastes like). But it helps get your brain thinking of all the little details.
For example, I could set a story in a seaside dock in a city, late at night. The dock looks dark, illuminated only by a few distant street lamps that cast strange shadows off the boats. The night feels cold, and if you took your shoes off, the wooden planks would feel rough on your feet. The air smells fresh, biting, and salty. In fact, so salty you can almost taste it, an acrid hint on your tongue. It’s quiet tonight, so the only sound you can hear is the gentle lapping of the waves against the ships.
So see how it can help you find details you might not have thought of? Ones you might choose to insert in your story?
Here’s another way to ask questions. Have you ever used character sheets to fill in all the details about your protagonist? Well, have you considered the same idea for your settings?
You could come up with your own list of everything you could ask about your setting, or I’ve actually put together a downloadable checklist for you to try. Print it out and build your setting through questions!
Click Below To Download
Better Settings Checklist (1) 
Build Both Your World and Scene Settings
One thing you have to keep in mind is how you create your macro-setting and your micro-settings. What I mean is, you have to describe both the locations where your scenes happen and the larger world they exist in.
Scene settings are the physical rooms and environments your story events take place in. The abandoned moon base, the grimy downtown bar, the beautiful temple in the woods—these are where the action takes place.
But you also need to think about what kind of larger setting your story paints. Don’t think just because you are writing in a realistic, modern-world setting—or even non-fiction—that you can ignore your world setting. The slice of our world you choose to portray and how you do it lends so much flavor to your story.
World settings are the larger areas and time periods your story takes place in. For example, the city of Chicago, a galaxy ruled by evil aliens, an alternate history where Nazis won—these are the world settings that all the grimy bars and moon bases are located inside of.
But what does this info mean? World setting are built by the scene settings you show your characters living in. You need to pick a world setting for your story (because the time, country, and planet of your story are usually critical). Then, you can pick scene settings to construct this larger setting.
Let’s say I want to tell a story set in the sleazy, crime-and-corruption-ridden fictional city of New Bayport (or Chicago). I need to pick settings for my characters to live in. Many of these settings will be dictated by plot needs, but not all. I decide that one of my characters likes to unwind at an illegal brothel or a seedy bar. Some of my characters walk and talk through downtown, past streets full of gangs and parks full of drug dealers. My protagonist gets in trouble and runs in a random direction—into a stolen car chop-shop! All these potential settings help build the larger picture of my world.
Make Your Setting Complement Your Story’s Theme and Mood
A setting should be so much more than a backdrop for your story. It should be an integral element of your tale. Your theme and mood are influenced heavily by your setting.
You want to write a setting that matches your story’s mood, whether dark, light, introspective, funny, serious, or something else entirely.
It’s hard to write an upbeat and uplifting story that takes place in a dark, blood-tainted haunted house. On the other hand, you can’t really set a dark and foreboding mood on a sunny island full of flowers, either.
You need to make settings that work with your mood, that are dark as the story’s tone or as light and refreshing. Take the adjectives that describe your story’s tone and mood, and make them apply to your setting.
Your setting should also help build your theme. Have you ever read Rebbeca by Daphne Du Maurier? In this story, a woman goes to live in a beautiful but haunted home surrounded by lovely gardens. The manor feels lovely but also cold and foreboding.
The garden has many stunningly beautiful types of flowers, which the story uses as metaphors. The narrator is shy and demure like the primroses, while the late mistress of the home, Rebbeca, is wild, beautiful, and overwhelming like the rhododendrons that tangle around the estate. As the plot unveils, she discovers Rebbeca was much the house—pretty on the outside, but scary on the inside.
This is a perfect example of the way you can use settings to create metaphors and comparisons that further your theme. Ask what parallels could be drawn between your settings and your plot or characters.
Create dark, nasty settings to mirror dark, nasty themes, or add wild winds that act as a metaphor for a wild character. Add settings that enhance your story’s theme.
Have Your Characters Interact With Their Environment
Do your characters sometimes sound like they’re just talking in an empty room? Do you ever have trouble with sections of your story that are just dialogue and nothing else?
One of the ways I was taught to make good scenes is to have characters talk while simultaneously interacting with their environments. This trick allows you to break up long conversations while also giving you a chance to describe the characters’ surroundings.
For example, take a story with two romantically interested MCs. Rather than having their dates at boring, nondescript restaurants, where the characters can’t interact with anything, take them somewhere interesting.
A rock-climbing date, where they grasp at grey-brown jutting rocks, feel the dust seep into their lungs as they try to flirt, and pull themselves up to view a beautiful landscape.
Take them to a carnival where the rich smell of popcorn tempts them to buy some before they catch sight of a shooting gallery and knock over some brightly colored targets after which they venture onto the rushing rollercoaster and cling to each other as the wind rushes in their faces.
Let them fight while doing chores, brooms clattering off scuffed wood floors, angry shouts resounding through one of their little apartments as one of them throws the laundry onto a days-old filthy heap of clothes, triggering another argument.
Anywhere interesting where your characters can interact with their environment is a great setting for your scenes!
This doesn’t just apply to scenes full of dialogue. You can use this tactic in many kinds of scenes, but particularly fight scenes.
Having characters work with their environment as they fight—whether leaping over obstacles, kicking up dirt, casting attack spells that rely on the environment, stabbing with improvised weapons picked up from nearby, or something else—can really take your action scenes up a level.
Incorporating the setting into your fights lets your character’s fight skills shine and gives your setting another spot in the limelight. Win-win!
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Those Are My Best Tips for Writing Settings!
So there you have it! Make sure to describe the setting to yourself in detail. Build up every room the story goes to and the whole world it exists in. Let the setting enhance your story’s theme and mood. Finally, let your characters interact with the amazing environment you created for them!
I hope these tips for writing settings help you create some killer scenes and awesome settings your readers won’t soon forget. Do you have any tips for writing settings that rock? What kind of setting do you like creating best? Let me know in the comments!
Mint is a writer and digital marketing pro who lives in coastal Virginia with her family and one lovable pitbull. Her passions include helping people and businesses display their best side through the power of communication, buying her dog costumes he doesn’t want to wear, and talking all day about Batman.
