Where the Devil Are We?
How to choose a setting that fits your book
Where is your book set? Along with the plot and characters, the setting is a defining part of your novel – set anywhere else, the story would be completely different. Here are some things to consider when choosing and developing the setting for your book.
How does your setting work with the plot?
Your setting might come first and be part of the hook of your novel, like the single-room set-up of Room. It might become almost a character in its own right, like Hogwarts, where the castle interacts with, helps and hinders the students as they move through the story.
Or your setting might play a more subtle role than that, perhaps being an unnamed city or town – but even here it plays an important role. Is it the kind of place where your characters can be anonymous, or where everyone knows each other? And how does that impact your characters as they make decisions and move through the story? Is it somewhere your protagonist has lived for a long time – and so knows every inch of it – or somewhere they are new to?
It's useful to think about how you want the setting to aid your plot’s progression too. For example, if you’re writing a police procedural or detective novel, and you want your detective to stumble across a certain clue or connection at some point – that one of their informers might have a link to their suspect, for example – you want to make sure that the setting makes clear that that is a likely possibility.
If your novel is set in a huge city, that might feel too much of a coincidence; in a small town it might not. On the other hand, setting your novel within a huge city might give you other benefits: more scope to involve more specialised officers, or extra believability that the number of murders required for your book or series is realistic (unless you want to consciously go the Midsomer Murders route, and have people dropping like flies in a way that isn’t entirely consistent with your setting’s population*…).
