Do you want to learn how to make a setting feel like a character? Raymond Chandler's work, especially that focusing on Phillip Marlowe. He makes Los Angeles feel alive.
What is the Purpose of a Setting?
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VolantRedX
Official Conscience of Worm Fanfiction!
I've always been apart of the Tarantino school of fiction. One time someone asked what film school he went to and his answer was he never went to film school he went to films. If you want to learn how to make a good book or a good movie don't look for the answers in some old tome written by some old academic. Just read some good books. Watch some classic movies. They can teach you far more than school.
Jace911
Spider-Dork
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As someone who has spent a number of years studying this, it's really not. There is in fact a science, albeit a broad one, to writing. It is not a giant academic field of "your opinions man" and y'know it kind of cheeses me off when people who obviously don't know the first thing about literary criticism and writing insist that it is.
Hey, you remember The Godfather? That fantastic book that got turned into a fantastic movie trilogy? That Godfather? You want to know who wrote that?
Mario Puzo, a literary writer.
Writing The Godfather was slumming it for him, and people fucking loved it. Because he actually learned how to write literature first.
oh, and
VolantRedX
Official Conscience of Worm Fanfiction!
I hate the Godfather. It's a well done movie but I'm not a fan of the story.
Best writer/filmmaker of our generation.
Jace911
Spider-Dork
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Congratulations?
I like how the only defenses you have for your position is literally some opinions.
VolantRedX
Official Conscience of Worm Fanfiction!
Well he is. He is able to blend themes and tie in an insane amount of tropes and classic Hollywood into really intriguing stories with a lot of action and cool characters. No other filmmaker is consistently as good as him in creating a movie with both action and intellect.
Jace911
Spider-Dork
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VolantRedX
Official Conscience of Worm Fanfiction!
Alright man as fun as it is to be badgered by someone who thought literature was worth getting a collage degree in I'm starting to think this has nothing to do with the topic. You really want to bitch at me? Shoot me a PM.
Yeah, screw those people who get college degrees in stuff they enjoy! STEM master race amirite?
There's so much to learn about being a good writer or what great writers have done before us that you might be surprised to hear that there are colleges, very well respected colleges, that only offer a major in "The Great Works."
VolantRedX
Official Conscience of Worm Fanfiction!
What is STEM?
Man with a degree like that you can write your own ticket.
Acatalepsy
Firewall Proxy
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[warning=Warning]This thread is about world building and settings. This comparative education derail can stop now.[/warning]
chez-mix
Trying and Failing yet again.
Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math.
One Classy Hydra
Bespoke Time Machines est. 2874
The important thing to remember is that the setting contributes to the story as much as any individual character. It can be as small or as broad as it needs to be, but the world itself needs to help to tell the story you want to convey. A bland or lifeless setting can have any level of history or detail to it, but it doesn't matter if it's a poor fit for the tone you're looking for; likewise, even a seemingly simple and constrained setting (say, a single room) can add meaning and tension if properly managed.
Personally, my philosophy is no two characters should have the same relationship with the world around them. People affect and are affected by their surrounding. The same world will seem vastly different through different individual's eyes, so you should always endeavor to capture this subtle relationship people have with their perceived world.
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It is, in fact, one of the five major aspects of writing. Theme, style, plot, character, and setting.They're all hugely important, but laymen almost never know anything about them beyond plot and character, which they develop a working knowledge of solely through sheer exposure to media.
When you boil it down, though, there are plenty of ways to make exceptions. For example, when offering advice to people regarding crafting a plot, people are often going to say that a story needs to follow a logical path; often simplified to "a beginning, a middle and an end", with a good chance that if that person paid attention during tenth-grade English they might bring up the concept of the Three-Act Structure or the Five-Act Structure-
Only, you know, there are wild exceptions to that, too. For example, try telling Laurence Sterne that he had to stick to the typical structure of a story! (Don't, because he'd laugh in your face, and also because he's kind of dead.)
As such, we go back to what I originally posted; the overarching purpose of a setting, which is to provide a backdrop to, and support the development of, a narrative. This is actually enormously more complicated than it seems, much like crafting plot and characters is actually hella more complicated than just "Oh, I had an idea so I'll toss it in!".
VolantRedX
Official Conscience of Worm Fanfiction!
I would argue though that a good story well told can be set anywhere and still achieve the same goal. I mean set Romeo and Juliet in the Bronx in the 60's and you get West Side Story. I mean the whole Starcrossed Lovers story is so basic that it can be set anywhere and still be the same basic story.
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It's a good thing that Romeo & Juliet actually tells a story containing a hell of a lot more than the basic story, then, isn't it?
VolantRedX
Official Conscience of Worm Fanfiction!
My point is that a setting can inform a story but if that story's core elements are strong enough the story can exist anywhere and any when. Some times that's not always the case such as in sci-fi or fantasy but for something like say Frankenstein can take place in anyplace or time because the story itself is not about the time. It's about the monster and the doctor.
Kyte
Never quacked for this
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.)
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Kyte actually covered this pretty damn well, so just, like, read what he said.
Kyte
Never quacked for this
While stories and themes can be universal, only through their interaction with the setting they gain flavor and come alive. Imagine if you took the play, word for word, and set it on the Bronx with no further adjustment except perhaps hairstyles and clothing.
That doesn't sound quite right, now does it.
(For the record I am fairly sure Frankenstein isn't about the monster and the doctor, it's about a character's rejection from his 'family' and society and prejudice in general)
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One Classy Hydra
Bespoke Time Machines est. 2874
Setting entails a heckuva lot more physical location and time period. West Side Story is more than a transplanted Romeo and Juliet (though an interesting discussion could be held on how far you can diverge Shakespeare's plays before you could acceptably call them a different work entirely), and the world it takes place in is more than just the Bronx or the 1960s United States.
Frankenstein is very much dependent on setting. It thrives on the concept of isolation, the wall between academic Germany and the idyllic, saccharine Geneva, and plays with the concept of travel as an attempt at escape from yourself and your personal world. Victor is constantly on the move throughout the novel because he feels 'pursued'- and eventually, he actually is. The line between setting and theme can be paper thin at times; you're right that it didn't need to be North Europe specifically, but you can't just change the locale without also modifying the essence of what the story is to some degree.
VolantRedX
Official Conscience of Worm Fanfiction!
It was alright. Leo was in it and he's good in everything.
This was my issue in the worldbuilding thread.
Look I think a setting should have a lot of detail. Like I said it's like a stage for a play. Unless the aim or resources require a spartan set your going to want to put as much detail in the set dressing as possible. But nothing on stage should be there for the sake of being there. If a character brings up something about the history or a character talks about how "downtown isn't the same anymore" it better matter to the over all plot. Nothing in a story should be there for the sake of having it.
One Classy Hydra
Bespoke Time Machines est. 2874
Not everything in a story, is for the sake of the plot, per se.
Rather the plot serves the story. As do the themes, characterization, setting and so on.
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Kyte
Never quacked for this
How is this in any way relevant to the discussion.
Also: West Side Story was in fact super adapted to the setting.
Like, have you watched it? It's not dudes with swords, for starters. That's kind of the point.
Settings don't need to have a lot of detail. They could have almost no detail. That's actually surprisingly irrelevant to the actual quality of the setting. Again, Simpsons. Vague as all hell, but does its job effectively.
And this isn't actually in any way relevant to what we're discussing. It's true, overdoing it in describing pointless asides is bad and totally kills the narrative. But this isn't specific to the setting, it could be the same with character descriptions.
We're talking about the value of the setting as a concept and why exactly it's so valuable, which you seem to be dismissing because you don't actually understand what you're talking about.
I want to emphasize this: Setting is not just time and place. It's context.
(Also I dunno what fancypants plays you go to but the ones I've seen are actually fairly sparse in props. Enough to sell the idea of the context, but no more)
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I don't necessarily disagree. You want to throw things together with a purpose in mind. If you're writing heroic fantasy, you need a world sufficiently filled with random encounters. If you're writing about a Weird Place, the people and places in the story have to be sufficiently outlandish. If you're writing a dystopian novel about the relationship between the government and big business and the effect it has on the people trapped in the middle, you have your work cut out for you.
That said, how much emphasis you place on the relationship between your characters and your setting can vary greatly.