Where You At? Setting

In its basic definition, setting is a story's time and place.  Setting can help illustrate a historical moment or create a story within a particular social context.  Years after 9-11, writers began to integrate this horrific event into stories and use hints of the tragedy to reflect societal issues that erupted after the event, such as fear, safety of one's self and his or her family, and love loss.  Setting can also create mood. A story set in Maine in January has a different feel than a story set in Louisiana in August, or Paris in the spring.  The first could help create a mood of entrapment as piles of snow fall upon the state, closing people in, perhaps giving them cabin fever.  In the third scenario, a writer might find the perfect opportunity to illustrate a romantic story as Paris in spring gives off a romantic air.  In some way, characters have to interact with the story's setting, and their interaction can reveal characters' traits.  Oftentimes, setting is developed within narrative description; however, writers can show setting through character's thoughts, action, and/or dialogue.

Setting has, at its core, at least four components:

Geographical Location
Baltimore, Paris, DC, and Jamaica are all geographical locations.  One of my favorite books, Sugar by Bernice McFadden is set in Bigelow, Arkansas.


Time Period
Time periods could be 1948, Great Depression, today, and the 1960s.  Sugar is set in the 1950s.


Socio-Economic Characteristics of the Location
This can include specific information, such as the earnings, employment, income, poverty, and wealth within a particular location. Sugar is set in a tiny Southern town, where the vast population consists of blacks who are neither rich nor terribly poor; however, they work hard, very hard to survive and create a slice of normal living for them and their families.


A Specific Building, Room, ETC.
This can include the specific "places" within a geographical location where characters interact, such as a bus, a school, a military base, lawyer's office. Sugar has several specific places, as most books do.  One specifically that I recall is church. Faith plays a big role in this story, but that's not why it's such a searing remembrance for me.  In one scene, the main character Sugar is in the church, where she faces the gossipmongers, the adulterous men she's slept with, Pearl (the woman who has become a good friend to Sugar), and Joe (Pearl's husband and a man with an unknown connection to Sugar). The church itself is almost a character in this setting and definitely, I would argue, in the story overall, and this specific scene paints an extraordinarily poignant moment that brings the story, really, full circle.