I don't know, I guess my big thing is that a setting that's just some cool stuff that's been thrown together is as valid as if you sit down and spend hours plotting out the history of the world. You need to pick what job you want your setting to do and if it does that job well, then it's a good setting.
So ignoring all this kerfluffle, I'm gonna attack this statement because I think it captures the thing with so many aspiring writers here and probably elsewhere.
Disclaimer: I am not a writer. I can't string words together to form a prose. I wish I could, I have tons of ideas, characters and settings I could bring to life, but I'm missing the critical connecting element.
But I still know a thing or two about stories.
Most people think of the setting as "the place where things happen". That that's basically true, but also so terribly vague it's practically useless.
Let's think real life for a sec: Do you live in a vacuum? Did your environment color the way you grew up? The way you think? The opportunities you had and the opportunities you missed? That's context. And therefore, that's setting.
The setting of a story provides
context. It sets the tone and mood of the story. It will inform your reader of expectations which you can fulfill or subvert. It will color the way events happen in the world. It's what ties everything together into a cohesive whole.
You
could write characters entirely divorced from their setting, but it will feel horribly artificial. You
could just throw together whatever sounds cool, but it will be jarring as hell.
One interesting thing about setting is that it doesn't have to be grounded to an actual place. I'm gonna take a horribly pedestrian example: Springfield, from the Simpsons. It doesn't exist, and I'm pretty sure its physical features are as mutable as the series' continuity, but it sells the
idea of a this 'average' American town for this 'average' American family. (Well it gets muddier later on but then again so did everything else)
(That said personally I feel making settings for its own sake is horribly masturbatory and pointless. Setting is useless without characters
doing things. It provides the context for stories, but so many people get so caught up in their worldbuilding they forget to make the world actually
tick.
Note that exploration stories are different. There you have a character
discovering a world and interacting with it.)