Setting

In practice

Setting is more than a backdrop. The time and place a story happens in decide what characters can do, what they fear, what they take for granted and what it costs them to want something different. Move the same plot from a city apartment to a farm in 1930 and almost every scene has to be rewritten.

In a screenplay, setting is the most practical element on the page. Every scene opens with a heading that names a place and a time of day, and those headings become the schedule, the budget and the location list once a script goes into production.

Writers often over-describe setting and under-use it. A paragraph listing furniture is easy to skip; one specific detail that tells the reader something about the people who live there, or a place that pushes back against what a character wants, does far more work.

A setting that tells you who lives there

Two scene headings give the place and the time, which is all the format requires. The details do the rest: the taped-up sign says the family has refused to sell for years, the calendars say no one throws anything away, and the second mug tells us someone is missing before a single line is spoken. Setting has already started the story.

What setting means

Setting is where and when a story takes place. It includes the physical location, from a country down to a single room; the time, from a historical period down to the hour; and the social world, the customs, class, laws and beliefs that shape how people live there.

Setting also carries mood. Weather, light, sound and the condition of a place all affect how a scene feels. The same conversation plays differently in a hospital corridor at three in the morning and on a beach at noon.

Setting is one of the basic elements of a story, alongside character, plot, conflict and theme. In a short story it may be sketched in a sentence; in a fantasy novel or a period film it can be one of the main reasons people come to the story.

Elements and types of setting

Teachers often break setting into place, time and environment. Place answers where: a city, a ship, a house, a planet. Time answers when: the year or era, the season, the time of day and how long the story lasts. Environment covers the conditions around the characters: weather, culture, politics and the people who share the space.

Writers also distinguish an integral setting from a backdrop setting. An integral setting is essential to the story, which could not happen anywhere else: Titanic needs the ship, and The Martian needs Mars. A backdrop setting could change without changing the plot much, as in many romantic comedies set in an interchangeable city.

Stories can have a single setting, like a play in one room, or many, like a road movie. Contained films such as 12 Angry Men use one location to raise pressure, because the characters cannot leave.

Setting as a character

When a setting is strong enough to shape the story, writers sometimes say it acts like a character. The Overlook Hotel in The Shining isolates the family, feeds on their weaknesses and seems to want something. The town of Amity in Jaws puts profit ahead of safety, which is why the shark keeps killing.

In Chinatown, Los Angeles and the fight over its water supply are the story's real subject. In Mad Max: Fury Road, the desert's scarcity of water, fuel and people drives every chase and every alliance.

A setting acts like a character when it creates obstacles, reflects or contrasts with the protagonist's inner state and changes over the story, or changes the people in it.

Setting in a screenplay

Every scene in a screenplay starts with a scene heading, also called a slugline, which states whether the scene is interior or exterior, the location and the time of day: INT. DUNMORE FARMHOUSE - KITCHEN - NIGHT. The heading is required, and it is the first thing a reader and a production team see.

Description under the heading should be short: a line or two that gives the essential look and one telling detail. Leave room for the director, production designer and location scout, and save detail for what matters to the story.

Settings have a cost in production. Each new location means a company move, permits and set dressing, and exteriors at night are expensive to shoot. Writers working on low budgets often combine scenes into fewer locations, which can also make a script tighter.

How to write setting well

Choose specific details over general ones. "A messy kitchen" gives the reader nothing; "dishes stacked in the sink, one clean mug on the drying rack" tells them someone lives alone. Look for the detail that also reveals character or situation.

Introduce setting through action whenever you can. A character fighting a stuck window, stepping over a sleeping dog or squinting at a sun that never sets shows the place by having someone deal with it.

Make the setting push on the story. Ask what the place makes easy and what it makes hard for your protagonist, and use that pressure in scenes. A setting the characters must struggle against is one the audience remembers.