Café Session # 4: Setting

Plums · Oct 22, 2012

Café Session # 4
Literate Beans Group: Here

Hey all! Welcome back to the pot. <3

Anyway, as the last session revolved around the ever loveable characters, I was thinking we could dive straight into another big topic. So you’ve got your character, but now what? Where do they live? What is the time period? With these questions in mind, let us visit the marvelous world of Setting.

Setting said:

Setting, in its most basic terms, is where your story takes place. It is another of the five most important elements of a story (along with Character, Plot, Conflict and Theme). Setting often refers to location, weather, time and time period.
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Setting said:

There are two distinct kinds of setting:

Natural: Nature shapes actions and can direct/redirect lives (e.g. tornado devastates hometown, driven to new home, etc.)

Manufactured: Manufactured items reflect the people who made them (large cities reflect a usually advanced civilization, etc.) Even possessions themselves often enter character motivation and development (Indiana Jones and the Holy Grail, for instance).

Setting can include the following:

Artifacts/Props: These are the things characters use (Thor’s Hammer, Stardust’s Banhammer, etc.)

Clothes: What the character(s) wear. These can be used to trace the time period (and natural setting) of the character (you wouldn’t see Tron running around with Joan of Arc on horseback).

Time of Day/Weather Conditions: This helps to further describe the natural setting and can even drive character motivations and the plot overall (Persona 3 is driven by the cycle of the moon, Persona 4 is driven by Cloudy/Rainy weather, etc.)

Geography and Location: This is the physical location. This can be used to describe the kind of upbringing a character has had (e.g. Jiku was raised in the highly Christian town of Romneyville), and also be used to create a conflict for the characters (Chev is living in Tacopeii and Mt. Salsuvius is close to erupting).

Smell and the Other Senses: The sense help to aid in describing the setting (e.g. “The air smelled of pine and fire” may indicate the character lives in a woodlands area).

All Physical/Temporal Objects: Pretty straightforward. These are everything that exist around a character (a glacier is physically massive and hard to move, however it’s not immune to time, will eventually melt).

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And as a kick start to discussion, some questions for you lot (YOU DO NOT HAVE TO ANSWER THEM ALL LOL):

What kinds of settings are you drawn to? How have they intrigued you?

Think about two of your favorite characters. How has their setting(s) affected the way they were raised and their ambitions?

If you’ve written a story before, think about one of them. What kind of setting did you use? Describe it. Was it a major motivator for your character, did it impede/speed up their growth, etc?

What kind of setting would you live in? And for a bonus challenge, think of two of your friends (offlien or online). If you could write yourselves into a story of any type, what kind of setting would you want it to be?

Saxima · Oct 22, 2012

Saxima finally participates in one of these. Woo.

What kinds of settings are you drawn to? How have they intrigued you?
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I think I mostly like settings that have more than just one thing going on it in; usually, if the book starts with a busy area, then I'm usually hooked for the rest of the book. I just feel like there's so much potential for the character if s/he starts around a lot of people.

If the author describes the actions/thoughts of more than one character in the busy area, you wonder which one is the main character - or if s/he is even there. I kinda like guessing games.

In contrast, I also like solitary settings, where things are quiet and there is much introspection for a character to be had. I don't like it when there's so much inner thought that the background is completely forgotten for a period of time, but I suppose it happens.

What kind of setting would you live in?
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I think I might like to be in a setting where the weather is nice, and the people are agreeable. If there are more than a handful of people, that would be okay. I'm not really a people-person, but I'm not sure if I would really mind it or not. A warm setting might do me best. Were it a chilly setting ( and I'm talking atmosphere, here ), then I would definitely become defensive and closed off.

Jiku Neon · Oct 24, 2012

Lost another attempt to reply. I nearly just gave up, but I'll start small and work my way through it slowly this time. Maybe then I'll get at least something down even if it's more than ten degrees separated from what I actually mean.

Plums said: ↑

What kinds of settings are you drawn to? How have they intrigued you?

Years ago I was a very big fan of shounen/super hero type settings. A place where anything was possible if you just tried and believed and did the right thing. It's a pleasant ideal and it can still be enjoyable but it feels a bit hollow after so much rehashing. It's probably a function of my age and progression through my engineering major but I feel like a world that can be bent by belief is silly. The setting should reflect that the world a big unrelenting place and all people should have a certain level of powerlessness when facing it. A character just like any other person needs to be at the mercy of the world. Without that, they're just breaking the game. That's why I feel like a setting that doesn't cut people slack or give breaks and is vigilant and consistent in its rules is the most attractive right now. It forces a certain level of complexity in any character than can handle it and allows us to see what happens to failures. The reason why I like this kind of world is, as I began before, because I'm jaded with optimism and looking more at realism to relate to.

Think about two of your favorite characters. How has their setting(s) affected the way they were raised and their ambitions?

Alright, I'm going to look at two ways a character can interact with their environment. We can have a character that fights with the environment. We can also have a character that goes along with it.

First, I love the character Kumagawa Misogi because he's pretty much the opposite of a main character in every possible way. So the way he interacts with his environment is resultantly different. I mentioned earlier that his perception of reality is so far gone from what other people in that same world believe that he's become unfathomable, ineffable. That puts him in a different relationship with the setting. A very antagonistic one. His defining trait is that he's a loser, an avatar of failure and weakness. So in a setting that revolves around winning to progress he goes against the grain and in many ways ends up doing things that conflict with the general flow. But at the end of the day his antithetical personality is only possible because of the setting and conventions of it. Making his existence somewhat ironic.

Second, I don't love the character Winston Smith but I do love the setting of 1984. Mostly because is looks at people as a setting. The Party is the setting, no way around it. They even dictate reality. It's just a very interesting thing to see people be the setting in its entirety rather than simply be a part of it. Winston's entire flow of action in the book is dictated by the machinations the Party already had in place for him. In a way, everyone is a part of the setting because the world itself controls every character's actions to a tee. It's a very different way to use setting and conveys a very powerful message.

If you’ve written a story before, think about one of them. What kind of setting did you use? Describe it. Was it a major motivator for your character, did it impede/speed up their growth, etc?

It's kind of convenient for me that my most recent full story is based on setting primarily. Darunter was started with the intent to take a preexisting setting and move it in a different direction. Anyone who knows the whole anime and manga thing probably recognized that I was taking off on series like Himari and Shana as far as physical background and past. It's what makes it different that counts for the most though. My setting is seen from the view of a minor character which really does change the setting. Like I mention outside the quote, setting is world type and tone more than it is weather or buildings. This is probably the prototype for all of my later works with less cooperative settings.

Anyways, the setting is just the small city where "The Chosen One" got his start and had his glorious three season long adventure with two films and an OVA. Only difference is time and window. Time is after the main events of the above mentioned story and the window is a minor character. Erica, the minor character, exists in a world centered around main characters so I can say that her setting is the reason why she's so far behind a lot of the other characters. She just doesn't have any of the things that the setting gives to main characters as a point of fact. But this also bleeds a lot into character traits and what defines a protagonist over a sidekick or less than a sidekick. So physically the world doesn't seem to be stacked in any way other than the fact that she's got not magicshit powers or anything. But the tropes and tone of the world make up for that most certainly.

What kind of setting would you live in? And for a bonus challenge, think of two of your friends (offline or online). If you could write yourselves into a story of any type, what kind of setting would you want it to be?

My favorite setting is that era after the Industrial Revolution up through WWI. This is when science was at its sharpest. Many of the ideas we're only just applying today were discovered or first thought of around this time. But there's one far more important reason. Biplanes. I love biplanes. The world I'd like to live in would be at this tech level but on a planet where air travel supersedes water travel dude to a geography more filled with large islands with small seas and channels between them than any large oceans or continents. That's the where, the physical, but the real reason why I'd like a setting like this is because it reflects an age when human potential seemed limitless. When technology and scientific advancement wasn't on the verge of mass extinction. When everything was still Newtonian and the world just had to work well enough. It's a place where we understand enough to be advanced while not having the muddy, bloody history to make us shy from adventure and exploration. This will be a setting truly based around freedom and discovery. Why? Because it seems really awesome. I'd invite any two random folk I know into this world because, honestly, I wouldn't bother living in many others.

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To be perfectly clear. I feel that world building is what setting should be about. By that meri setting isn't about whether or not this story is in space or in a quiet Elizabethan township or magical ****ing Tokyo. Setting is world, it's place, it's themes and it's atmosphere. All of my descriptions and answers revolve around the idea that setting is not a physical location at all, it is the extent of the story's universe and by that merit more related to ideas. In theory, we can have two completely physically different places that are the same setting. Sure the physical matters to a certain extent because it defines how far certain limits can extend but it's not by any means the main event. So I'm going to get out of that single element in world building and work outside of sights, smells, sounds and minutiae like that and try to take the long view.

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Café Session # 4: Setting

Plums Wakanda Forever

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Saxima [screams geometrically]

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Jiku Neon Kingdom Keeper