Table of Contents
What is the importance of setting?
Settings not only help to clarify a given story’s themes. They can also help us to understand a character’s worldview through how they think about their surroundings. The setting is the physical location of the story, and it can heavily inform a story’s mood. For instance, a story set during a sunny day will be predisposed to a happy or carefree mood, while a story set in a haunted house will be predisposed to a sense of tension or fear. There are two types of setting you can choose from: integral setting and backdrop setting. Integral setting is a specific place and time that plays an important role in the story. An integral setting dictates other societal elements in a story like language, dress, and transportation. You might think of setting in terms of 3 “types”: temporal, environmental, and individual. Students are familiar with the four types of setting: physical, social, historical and psychological.
What is setting and why is it important in a story?
The setting of a story is the context in a scene or story that describes the elements in which a story is taking place, including time, place, and environment. Each component in story setting helps to build the narrative’s mood, plot, and character development. The core elements of setting—including physical location, time period, and background events—are the foundation upon which writers build their plotline and main character’s development. Often, a story only needs to allude to the general setting, but a specific setting is exactly what the name implies: extremely specific. This means you will need to develop details, some of which might not make it into the final version of a story. Setting is where and when a story or scene takes place. The where can be a real place like the city of New York, or it can be an imagined location, like Middle Earth in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Similarly, the when can be a real time period (past or present) or imagined (the future). Place Where does the story take place? Time When does the story take place? Environment How would you describe the place?