Setting of a Story: A Fiction Writer's Guide to Establishing Time, Place, and World

The setting of a story is like the stage for a play: it transports your audience to a new world and brings your novel to life. Setting is one of the most important elements of a story, creating a mood, revealing insights into the theme, reflecting on characters, and anchoring your plot.

Whether you're starting fresh or revising a work, spending time carefully choosing and developing your setting will create a stronger story. Fortunately, we’ve got the insights and tools you need to establish time, place, and world.

This article will explore what the definition of setting is, why setting is important, the main types of settings, and tips for how to write setting and create a vivid world. 

What Is the Setting of a Story?

The setting of a story establishes the time and place in which the events of your story occur. It's when and where your characters live and act and can include many different aspects of their world.

• Physical Location: The geographic and physical landscape, which may involve particular buildings and rooms. For example, your characters may live in a small town, or spend most of their time in a spaceship or office cubicle.
• Time Period: When the story takes place, such as the Victorian era, distant future, or present day. 
• Culture and Society: The customs, values, politics, fashion, technology, and general vibe of the environment in your story. For example, is it a totalitarian dystopia or a peaceful village? It could even include slang or distinct languages.
• Climate and Environment: The weather, seasons, and natural features in your story, like forests or oceans.

Settings may be fictional or realistic, contemporary or historical, fantastic or mundane—whatever your fiction genre calls for. But every story requires a particular setting that immerses readers in the tale you’re trying to tell.

Setting vs. Worldbuilding 

While setting includes the time, place, society, and environment of your story, worldbuilding can be even broader. It’s often used within fantasy or science fiction to refer to crafting an entire fictional universe with diverse cultures, languages, histories, creatures, geography, technology, and belief systems.

For example, the island setting of Lord of the Flies is confined in scope. But Tolkien’s Middle-Earth contains expansive worldbuilding encompassing thousands of years of mythology, races of elves,  humans, orcs, dwarfs, etc, languages, political dynamics, and extensive lands.

3 Types of Settings in Literature

When and where your story takes place can profoundly shape your characters and plot. Settings generally fall into three types: geographical, temporal, and cultural.

1. Geographical Setting

Also known as location or place, geographical settings are the environment or geography of where your story takes place—whether real or invented. They can be rural, urban, suburban, wilderness, outer space, fantastical, and more in order to evoke a certain tone, theme, or push forward a specific plot.

For example, rural settings like Little House on the Prairie's 19th century Midwestern prairie evoke themes of family, simplicity, and connection to the land. Meanwhile, the empty halls, endless corridors, and isolated location of the remote Overlook Hotel in Stephen King's iconic horror novel The Shining cultivates an oppressive, creepy tone.

2. Temporal Settings 

Temporal setting is the time period or era of your story. The time of your story setting will have a massive impact on your narrative, shaping your plot events, the technology available to your characters, their roles in society, and more. This is especially true if you’re writing a historical novel. But it can also impact theme.

Science fiction stories like Ready Player One, set in 2045, explore where current technologies could lead. And medieval-inspired works like Lord of the Rings create a realm that evokes mythical archetypes, emphasizing heroic struggles.

3. Cultural Settings

The cultural setting of a story includes the customs and social rules that shape your characters. For instance, in Jane Austen novels like Pride and Prejudice, the strict social expectations of upper-class 19th century British society dictate the characters' actions and drive their romantic tensions. The men and women in her novels would act very differently if the stories took place in a modern story setting with different social mores.

Why is Setting Important?

Writing isn’t a visual medium (unless you’re writing a comic book). This means the words you choose to describe your setting paints a picture in your readers’ minds. The details you divulge on time period, place, location, culture, and more builds authenticity—whether it’s an authentic modern day New York or an authentic spaceship in a galaxy far, far away.

But beyond the image you want to create for your readers, setting has a profound impact on several pieces of your story: 

Story Setting Affects the Mood

Setting can change the overall tone of your story. Everything from weather to architecture to colors, crowds, natural elements, and physical details work together to create a distinct atmosphere. 

For example a dark, rainy city can provoke a sense of bleakness while a sunny beach town can evoke lightheartedness.

Setting Contributes to Theme

When you create a setting that’s aligned with your theme, it can emphasize the central message. For The Great Gatsby, the lavish Jazz Age mansions underscore material excess. In Brave New World, the futuristic setting brings the ethical dilemmas of technological advancement to the forefront.

The vivid backdrops in those stories makes their themes impossible to ignore. When writing, research historic time periods or societal issues that enable you to create settings that reflect your message.

How the Setting Affects Characters

The time and place in which your characters live should shape their beliefs, motivations, obstacles, and the choices they can make. Like real people, your characters are products of their environments.

For example, a novel set in 1945 in New York City will create a vastly different backdrop compared to a small town in the American South in 2020. The sociopolitical climate, cultural zeitgeist, fashion, slang, entertainment, technology access, and accepted social roles would all be different—and so would who your characters can be as people.

Protagonists also tend to chafe against the restrictions of their native environment, seeking adventure, meaning, or progress not found in their status quo world. So character arcs often depend on breaking out of their initial confined time and place. 

Setting Ties to Plot

The plot of a story has to align with the setting you establish. Whatever time and place you choose to put your characters in, the world needs to follow the constraints of it—whether that’s culture, technology, or social roles. 

For example, a quest plot in medieval Scotland wouldn’t reference modern technology. And even fantasy or science fiction novels usually adhere to rules within their made-up worlds, such as magic systems or biology.

Setting can also contribute to the plot by presenting conflicts for your characters that are tied to the time period or location. Factors like a snowstorm can help two romance characters stuck inside fall in love, or force characters in an adventure to seek out shelter.

Setting Examples from Classic Literature

Let's look at how master storytellers leverage setting in writing.

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Fitzgerald contrasts the settings of East Egg and West Egg to establish themes of old money versus new money and class division:

"Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound...I lived at West Egg, the—well, the less fashionable of the two…My house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season. The one on my right was a colossal affair by any standard…with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming-pool, and more than forty acres of lawn and garden.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë:

Brontë evokes a gothic tone in her description of the bleak, windswept moors around the old manor, Wuthering Heights:

"One may guess the power of the north wind, blowing over the edge, by the excessive slant of a few stunted firs at the end of the house; and by a range of gaunt thorns all stretching their limbs one way, as if craving alms of the sun."

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

This passage from Twain immerses us in the time and place of the Mississippi River and antebellum South. The river is a setting that symbolizes a journey towards freedom:

"Sometimes we’d have that whole river all to ourselves for the longest time. Yonder was the banks and the islands, across the water; and maybe a spark—which was a candle in a cabin window; and sometimes on the water you could see a spark or two—on a raft or a scow, you know; and maybe you could hear a fiddle or a song coming over from one of them crafts."

How to Write Setting & Immerse Your Readers

If you want to write an engaging novel, your setting should feel like more than just a backdrop. Good writers make their stories come alive through vivid details—big and small—that tie together plot, characters, theme, and tone.

Follow these steps to craft an immersive fictional world:

1. Choose Your Story Setting With Care

Because of the impact it has on your novel, the setting of a story deserves thought and attention. Choosing your setting is like assembling the perfect picture frame. You can’t just pick randomly or it won’t fit your photos. You have to deliberately select a location, era, and culture that aligns with your narrative vision.

The shortlist of questions you should ask yourself are:

• What time period or location will increase tension and transform my characters? 
• Will a certain era or geography suit my genre and plot best?
• Will my setting meet genre expectations while still allowing me to make unique choices?
• Are there cultural or environmental details that can push my protagonist outside their comfort zone?
• Is there a certain mood or theme I want to convey that setting can enhance? 
• Have I visited or researched this place or time enough to depict it with rich details?

When you choose a setting, pick one where you have the experience or knowledge to dive below surface aesthetics. Then consider which locations will create escalating tension and how the era, culture, and values will shape your characters' choices.

Next, think about which settings will convey your desired mood and themes. Remember the foreboding, wind-ravaged moors of Wuthering Heights in the example above? They mirror Cathy and Heathcliff’s brooding passion and cruelty.

Can Setting be Multiple Places in a Story?

While some novels stick to one primary story setting, many use multiple. When you choose multiple settings, you can create a contrast between them, chances for characters to evolve when thrust into new environments, and variation to refresh readers. 

For example, The Lord of the Rings begins in the Shire but then ventures through medieval forests, misty mountains, and dreadful mines as the journey progresses. 

If you’re making large narrative leaps, just make sure to use transitions that clarify the passage of time and quickly re-establish place.

2. Conduct Thorough Research

J.R.R Tolkien spent over a decade crafting the histories, languages, and maps of Middle Earth. 

While you may not need to spend that much time, you can do photo research or visit locations in person to add true-to-life textures. You can study histories, maps, images, texts, music, attire, speech patterns, cultural practices, sociopolitical climate, belief systems, architecture, weather patterns, and anything else relevant to your story. 

Want to keep all your research in one place? Motif lets you attach links and research documents to your novel. Learn more.

For invented settings, many writers choose to worldbuild all of the pieces above. Some base their imaginary worlds on real-life places or combine details from multiple locations. But the main rule is to maintain internal consistency. Write out any magic or technology systems, logic, contradictions, and details so it feels real. Map it out in full.

The goal is to become familiar with how your time and place looks, sounds, feels, smells, and tastes.

3. Use Vivid Sensory Details 

Make the setting in your story interactive and immersive through dynamic sensory details. Don't just describe places, make readers experience them viscerally, through:

• Sights: Depict exact visual details like a creaky wooden door or glittering skyscrapers. Make architectural choices that shape the desired tone. Select colors deliberately for impact.
• Sounds: Add in ambient sounds like birds singing, rain pattering, or murmuring crowds. These cues set the mood.
• Smells and Tastes: Describing scents and flavors connects readers to palpable sensory experiences.
• Textures: Rough cobblestones, sleek metal, dusty wood—tactile details make settings feel authentic.
• Changing Conditions: Seasons and time of day all show the passing of time. Weather can reflect emotions and establish mood.

4. Reveal the Setting Gradually

Don't unveil the entirety of your setting in writing all at once, or you’ll bog your reader down in the details. They need time to be eased into a fictional world, especially if it's highly complex, imaginative, or introduces a lot of names. 

Start each scene by grounding it in the immediate surroundings from the viewpoint character’s lens. Allow their perspective to focus on select setting details that add to your plot, theme, or mood. As the character moves around, include more visuals, sounds, textures, and smells.

You can also use characters moving through physical spaces to transition between multiple settings. In Harry Potter, the passageway from Platform 9 3/4 transports Harry from a London train station to the magical Hogwarts Express. 

5. Keep Readers Oriented

It’s easy for readers to get disoriented, especially if you have complex worlds that span multiple locations or time periods. Establish clear spatial relationships in each scene to reinforce setting geography. 

You can use cardinal directions, maps, or diagrams to help readers visualize layouts and relative positions. If characters climb multiple flights of stairs, specify “to the east” or “south corridor” to track movement. Give measurable distances like “100 miles north” when transitioning. 

Chapter beginnings or scene breaks are good moments to cue readers into new settings, time periods, or locations. Remind them of the relevant sights, sounds, and smells when a character re-enters a setting later in your book.

6. Develop Character Connections to Settings

Characters should have psychological, emotional, and physical interactions with the setting of a story. Reveal how a place impacts your protagonist, such as bringing up memories, causing discomfort, or feeling safe. 

Show characters actively engaging environments by picking up objects, gazing out windows, trudging up slopes, or ducking indoors from rain. Have them directly influence the story world through actions like slamming doors or igniting fires.

You can also connect setting to your characters’ dialogue. They can discuss a place they visited, reflect on their feelings of home, and debate their changing environment.

7. Maintain Internal Consistency Across Settings

As your world expands, maintain consistency in timelines, causality, and details. Keep track of invented rules, customs, seasonal changes, and character activities across settings. Use notes, maps, and timelines to chart your world. Continuously ensure character actions, artifacts, and plot events plausibly fit your established settings as the story progresses.

Want to keep all your worldbuilding details in one place—and easily pull them up while you’re writing? Motif offers storyboards and planning tools for every writer. Learn more.  

With a detailed setting to stage your story, your characters can put on an unforgettable show. Transport readers with settings that wow their senses, draw them in emotionally, and linger long after "The End."