Course recommendation: Creating Powerful Settings
Plus an example of the implications of setting using the movie 50 First Dates
Setting is one of the key elements of a writer’s toolbox, like plot, character, theme, and so on, yet there seems to be disproportionately few resources that focus on the topic.
One that I found is Creating Powerful Settings, offered by author and writing coach C. S. Lakin.1 The course has about five hours of detailed, in-depth instruction spanning 11 modules. A main point is that writers need to immerse readers in the world of the story so readers can experience it. Setting—the environmental contexts in which the scenes of a story take place—is essential for that immersion and applies whether you’re in a speculative fantasy or sci-fi world or somewhere in our real world. After all, every piece of fiction builds its own world to some extent, because the world is in the imagination.
Characters, moreover, always occupy some space in a story’s setting. They move through the setting and they interact with it. They see it, hear it, breathe it, touch it, and taste it. These experiences drive a character’s actions and decisions and can provide powerful triggers for reactions that show who a character really is.
In movies, a viewer always gets to see settings directly. In writing, authors have to show it through written words. But writers have an advantage: whereas movies are limited to sight and sound, stories can use all the senses, as well as a character’s intuition. As Lakin says in the course, in writing you can really get readers to “smell the coffee.”
There’s another lesson to take from movies. How much thought is given to setting? A LOT! Haven’t you heard of location scouts who go all around the world looking for just the right settings for different scenes? And the Production Design department specifically creates all the stage sets and props as well as any sets that are brought onto location. Watch the documentary DVDs for The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit to really learn about and appreciate the intricacies of production design!
The point is that, in movies, every setting is specifically designed for the scene. And that’s what Lakin really encourages in this course for writers: don’t make settings arbitrary, mindless, or cliche (like the stereotypical coffee shop). Use them with intention to highlight what’s going on in every scene.
Lakin uses many excerpts from different novels to illustrate the conceptual points she’s trying to make. If there’s a fault with the course, it’s that these excerpts occasionally run on for a time without much analysis of the details. That said, the examples provide a helpful opportunity to find those details on your own, and I much prefer a course that uses real examples from modern novels rather than leaving matters on a conceptual or academic level.2
Each module of the course also ends with exercises to apply to a story of your own. My favorite exercise included this fundamental question, which I hope to keep in mind as I’m writing:
Where can I put my characters to generate the most conflict (inner and outer) and evoke the strongest emotions?
Again, I’ve seen few courses out there that specifically address setting, so Creating Powerful Settings is an excellent resource for writers that’s well worth the cost.
An exercise in setting choice
When I took Creating Powerful Settings, I thought about the movie 50 First Dates and how essential the setting of Hawaii is to the story.
This romantic comedy plotline is built around the question "What would it be like to court/date a person who doesn't retain any memories from day to day because of a head injury?" The female lead in this case, Lucy Whitmore, played by Drew Barrymore, is the one who was injured; she enjoys each day, but then forgets everything as she sleeps. The male lead, Henry Roth, played by Adam Sandler, is trying to court her, meaning that he has to engage her interest anew every day.
Lucy’s father and brother try to soften the impact of her trauma by resetting her environment each day (much to their repeated boredom). This plot point requires a setting where the passage of time is not that obvious. That makes tropical Hawaii the only location in the United States where this story would be possible given its relative lack of seasonal changes when compared with any other state. The one thing for which Hawaii does have a season, more or less, is with growing pineapples, which is why her family keeps a stock of frozen ones. But Hawaii otherwise doesn't provide a natural seasonal cycle that would conflict with the family’s attempt to deceive Lucy day after day.3
My point is that if you have a story that takes place somewhere within the United States, and you want to at least minimize the passage of time in the natural world, Hawaii is your setting.
Once you've made that decision, other details follow, such as:
What kinds of careers can Henry Roth have on Hawaii, especially one that would send him away for a year? It has to be a career that allows him some flexibility in courting Lucy, so he can't work on an offshore oil rig, for example. Making him a marine biologist hoping to go on a voyage works into the character who is afraid of commitments.
Hawaii hosts many of tourists, which is perfect for his backstory as a one-night-stand type of guy, which is clearly revealed in the movie’s opening montage. (And the fact that there's one man in that montage also suggests that Henry is bisexual, thereby casting even more doubt on whether his specific interest in Lucy is sincere.)
Lucy’s father's profession as a fisherman derives easily from the setting, as does the sidekick character (Ulla, a native Hawaiian) along with the supporting staff at the café where Lucy and Henry meet.
Being in Hawaii, too, provides a short list of other settings that fit naturally into the overall setting:
Oceans, beaches, docks.
Henry's boat.
Tourist activities like a sea life park and golf courses.
Tropical gardens and plantations. This also suggests the flowers, pineapple, etc. Open fields.
Small cafes frequented by locals (not tourists), a contrast to the tourists.
A rehab clinic for which a gentle environment is preferable.
All in all, the writers and producers clearly made a specific choice for the overall setting of 50 First Dates. Once they had the general location nailed down, many other aspects of the story were easier to decide because the setting limited and even helped determine the options.
Who writes under the pen name Charlotte Whitman and apparently lives in Grass Valley, CA, not far from my home in Nevada City.
I ended up taking screenshots of those excerpts, pasting the images into OneNote where I could easily extract the text (thanks to its automatic OCR) before pasting that text into a page and highlighting key bits of setting.
One oversight, which of course wouldn't be in the movie, is that Lucy would notice strange timings with her menstrual cycle. She might also notice the phases of the moon and also the change in the position of the stars. But she’s an artist, not an astronomer, so the movie can conveniently ignore those problematic details.