5 Ways Setting Affects Your Characters

5 Ways Setting Affects Your Characters 

1. Certain characters will always be found in certain settings. It is true that people tend to group with others who are most like them. For example, wealthy, snobbish, status-conscious people will populate the tables of a new five-star restaurant. People who need to make money will serve them.
2. Settings shape your character. Where people come from shows us how they will act in these settings. For example, if your rich customers in the restaurant were born in a stylish home in the city, they will probably feel at home. If the customers were born in a poverty-stricken neighbourhood and made their money winning the lottery, they will probably feel out of place. As William Faulkner said, ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’
3. Settings can change your character. Being forced out of comfort zones into new places for extended periods of time will probably change your characters. Humans resist change. If you shift the boundaries, your character has to act, react, and adapt. Petronella Oortman is completely out of her depth in The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton. It is 1686 and the country girl arrives to become mistress of a luxurious home in bustling Amsterdam. She has to change to survive. (Read: 5 Tips To Help You Write A Gripping Read)
4. Settings can set your character apart. Characters who come from an unusual place will always be perceived as different, whether they are different or not. A person who grew up on an island without access to the Internet will be different when he or she sets foot in the city. A city slicker will be viewed as odd by the island inhabitants. Dr Joel Fleischman, a New Yorker is the outsider when he arrives in Cicely, Alaska in the TV series Northern Exposure.
5. Setting as a character. Sometimes a city or a house or a room can be so integral to a story that it becomes as real as any of the characters. It creates a mood in your story. Ian Rankin uses Edinburgh to menace, to hinder, and to help the characters in his Rebus series. Emma Donoghue uses the room in Room as the place that both protects and imprisons Jack and his mother. (Read: Why Writers Should Create A Setting Like A Character (& How To Do It)

Never underestimate the way in which you can define your characters by the places they have been and where they end up.

Think about the ways setting affects your characters when you write your books.

If you’re looking for help with setting, buy our Setting Up The Setting Workbook.

by Amanda Patterson

© Amanda Patterson

If you enjoyed this post, read:

1. A Tense Situation – Five Tips To Help You Write A Gripping Read
2. 12 Crucial Things To Remember About Setting
3. How To Write A Beginning And An Ending That Readers Will Never Forget
4. The Daily Word Counts of 39 Famous Authors

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