Setting as Conflict
Road trips, for most vagabonds, even older ones like me, are about the people you meet and the new places you see. Passing through unfamiliar landscapes, wondering who lives in that farmhouse or that crumbling building on the corner of a one-street town, engages my imagination and my creative self. As a visual artist as well as a writer, I can’t help but soak in the different colors, textures, and vibration of different settings. I capture some on my phone, burn the rest into memory (for later paintings, perhaps, or a story I’m mulling over).
That’s my tendency—a fascination with place and who inhabits it and why.
But I know, having taught scores of writers over scores of years, more than a few are bored by setting. Why is that, when it offers so much potential for conflict?
Maybe it’s setting’s relative slowness, compared to action. Maybe to certain readers any descriptive sections stall the momentum, dilute the tension. But I’ve also learned that immediate dismissal of setting as boring usually means a poor use of this tool—an author who is too dreamily enamored with it, writing in more than is really needed or placing it unsuccessfully.
There’s a keen balance of setting details and active elements in successful story. Random setting details, irrelevant information just to fill space, bores me too. Setting only works when it is considered a character, placed for emotional effectiveness and the conflict it offers.
The setting around me here, where we are camping in our van on friends’ property, is so utterly unfamiliar. It’s way tropical to my New England eyes. I’ve already gotten one weird rash (poison something) and fire ant bites on my flip-flopped feet. So I’m constantly thinking about where I’m walking, what I’m hearing, and how the air feels on my skin. That’s conflict, to me—stuff that makes me alert, making decisions to stay safe, or (in the fire ants’ case) avoid more trouble.
Setting, ideally, is something to fight against. Only then does it truly come alive. And I’m convinced it can truly increase conflict, as much as passionate action or heated dialogue.
But to achieve this, we have to broaden our definition of setting.
It’s not just the physical landscape, the looming weather, the cramped van we’re sleeping in. We must consider other levels of setting to create a complete “story atmosphere” that defines conflict. These include the bigger cultural, political, religious, family, and community settings that contribute to the physical one.
So many of the writers I’ve met over the years of teaching don’t effectively use these additional setting elements. Maybe they think that describing the weather or the street is enough. But if you’re curious to expand your skills, as a writer, and use setting more fully, I’d like to share some information about the various kinds of setting that are available in fiction and nonfiction. We’ll explore when to use each kind, how much to include, and where to place it.
Basic setting—the physical environment
Getting clear on the page about where your scene takes place is essential to make setting relevant for the reader. Even if you’re completely bored by setting in stories you read (skipping pages has become a norm!), you need to consider how grounded the reader will be in place in your own writing.
So here are a few basic setting questions I always ask first, once I have the basic actions and people set up in a scene. I ask this about every scene, eventually, during my revision process—no duds allowed!
Some writers start with these, setting the stage, so to speak, before they even introduce the cast and actions—it just depends on what you prefer.
Are we inside or outside?
What are some sensory details about this place (is it hot or cold, stuffy or airy, are there nice smells or awful ones, does it feel crowded or open, is the atmosphere menacing or comforting, what sounds might the character hear)?
What’s the weather like at this moment? Is there anything approaching that the character senses?
What’s moving in this setting—characters? Something else? How does that affect the tension in the scene?
Who experiences conflict in story? Characters, of course—they are the primary effects of conflict, and conflict makes them decide and change and move forward or backwards.
Our goal as writers considering physical setting details is to be aware of what will increase the conflict for our characters and to choose accordingly. If we want to intensify the tension in a scene, we don’t just look to the actions. We also look to the external setting, right?
Seems simple, but many writers don’t use this important tool. Those who do, get huge payoff.
Choosing specific physical setting details for increased conflict
I remember teaching at a writer’s conference where the headliner on the program was Andre Dubus III, a writer I’d been following for years. At the time, I was enthralled with his latest novel, House of Sand and Fog. I taught it often in classes for the amazing tension he captured via physical setting details.
One pivotal scene especially showed this.
The two main characters are in a revolving restaurant high above the city. They are entering into an agreement, a contract, that will drive the rest of the story and result in death and serious loss, but they don’t know that—all they want is to join forces for revenge. The conversation escalates from flirtation to negotiation, both of them risking their lives and ethics. The setting, the restaurant windows that change views each time a new step is taken towards their agreement, that shows a disorienting view of how their future lives will play out, is so much a character in this pivotal scene.
I’ve read and taught these four or five pages at least two dozen times as a stellar example of the power of setting in skilled hands.
During a break at that conference, I approached Dubus with the question I’d carried since I first read the novel. Did he start writing that scene with the setting (the revolving restaurant)? Or did he start with the action (the two characters deciding to join forces, to the eventual destruction of both)?
Was this incredible scene birthed from external setting or from plot, in other words?
As I remember, he was very open about discussing this. He said he began with the revolving restaurant setting then built the scene around it.
Imagine a terrible turning point taking place in your story. Where do you place that scene? Dubus chose a revolving restaurant, so every time his narrator looked up, a completely different view paraded by, an experience that was both exhilarating and very disorienting. (As I remember, the female narrator slips into near-dizziness from all of it.)
So many writers I personally admire take setting into account, some from the beginning drafts, others during revision. Writer Elizabeth Gilbert said in a recent interview: “The first thing I get for my fiction is the place. As a traveler this probably makes sense. There's a geographical or cultural story that’s fascinating to me, and I want to know every single thing about it. I want to disappear into that place.” (Read her entire craft discussion with the amazing Jane Ratcliffe here.)
Place. Setting. Where we are physically located. It’s an easy way to up the conflict in your stories automatically. If you want to take the time to do the work of setting.
Before our trip, I read The Maid, by Nita Prose—a fun read, light and entertaining, with plenty of action. Without its setting, the Regency Grand Hotel—where murder, false accusations, heroic decisions, and the narrator’s eventual victory take place—there would be a lot less conflict. I can’t imagine it happening anywhere else.
Great settings are like this. But external setting isn’t the only element that writers can use to increase conflict via a story’s surroundings. The outer location you choose (or where you focus your camera eye) can also be amplified by what I call “internal setting.”
We’ll talk about that next.
Internal aspects of setting
The internal life of your “setting” is its spoken or unspoken culture: the family history, the rules and beliefs and values people live by, the politics and religion they follow, the community they conform to or rebel against.
They also provide a huge potential for conflict in your scenes.
I research the internal setting as thoroughly as I research the physical landscape of my books. But these aspects enter my writing practice first through character research.
I look at my cast and ask who might be the clearest resource. Who cares the most about the family beliefs, for instance? Who fights them? Who carries the history of trauma or success? Who lives by their values or breaks free of them, even violently?
Once I’ve pinpointed a few characters for research, I ask them questions and write down whatever comes to mind as answers. This is actually fun—pretending they are real and pretending I’m a reporter sent to interview them. If I really get into this exercise, the answers often surprise me, which is the goal. Then I know I’ve stopped infiltrating the character with my own values, beliefs, and internal setting.
Questions I might ask:
Do you remember anything about where you grew up, what rules your family made you follow, what you loved about this or hated?
What was your best memory of childhood? Your worst?
Who was the person with the strongest beliefs in your family or community? Describe those beliefs.
What do you miss now, from that time? What are you glad to leave behind?
From this, I often capture details about the internal culture of the character, both the past and what the character lives now. Then I can make a list of those. I’ll ask myself which could be brought forward into the story to create friction.
An example: In my new novel, Last Bets, which will be published next month, Elly, the main character, was born with second sight, so she sees the moves of a game before they happen (think The Queen’s Gambit). Elly’s father learned of this when she was a young girl and trained her to help him cheat and win big at the gambling tables, which destroyed both her family and her health.
To answer the questions above, Elly might say:
My father’s rules were that I use my talent to help him cheat, which I hated. I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone about it.
Her best memory of childhood was taking art classes at the museum nearby. Her worst were the headaches she got after helping her father.
The strongest beliefs in Elly’s family were held by her mother: Never lie, cheat, or steal because you’ll go to hell.
She misses her sister Lily, who left home early and died tragically. She is happy to leave her parents behind and her father’s addiction.
These were just the start—as I interviewed Elly and worked with her in scenes over the course of three years, I got a clear picture of the internal struggle between trying to please the charismatic father she adored and the tyrant mother she hated. She chose her father’s culture over her mother’s, even though it almost killed her. In the novel, Elly as the adult will face these two cultures again, represented by different people in a different place.
Her biggest challenge in the story: will she use her second sight for good, to help others, or for selfish reasons like her father used it when she was a child?
Echoing conflicts in external and internal setting
When I think of that revolving restaurant scene in Dubus’s novel, I am impressed with how he echoed the conflicts going on inside the two characters with the different levels of setting. These are just my reader suppositions, but I saw the “culture” of the restaurant as determinedly elegant. It’s high above the chaos of the everyday world. It offers oversized menus, white linen, crystal and silver. It creates a feeling of well-being, rules being followed, predictability expected. Completely contradicted by the criminal arrangements being discussed.
How brilliant is that! Our job with our own stories is to first get this clear sense of both external place and internal culture of setting. Once these are sketched out and researched, we can deliberately juxtapose the characters’ lives in such a way as to produce conflict.
This usually happens with me in later drafts, though. I don’t always remember to bring them in during early scene-writing, but as I revise, they become a serious tool for increasing tension.
A good start: look at the places chosen for each scene. Are they throwaways? A throwaway location is a fine placeholder to begin with, but we need to remember to think about the underlying meaning eventually. Maybe there’s not an obvious meaning in the external setting right off, but try this technique: pretend you’re a camera eye and zoom around the location. See if you can find something that could irritate or ruffle the character: a dripping faucet, the noisy train whistle, the sticky grit on the subway floor, the smell of sauerkraut in the hallway, the neighbor’s cat using the garden bed as a toilet. Then enhance that deliberately, as Dubus does with every aspect of his scene.
I find this step takes concentration. Slowing down. I have to stop being an action junkie and zoom in. What small details are coming forward?
When I’ve got a few ideas—say, the chronically awful smell in the apartment hallway—I’ll go back to the internal details I’ve taken down in my character interview. I’ll ask why this particular smell causes conflict. What echoes from the character’s past or present culture, beliefs, values are connected with this smell? Maybe it was the smell of childhood during a traumatic time. Or it smells like poverty that the character has worked hard to rise out of. That tiny external setting detail will trigger something, cause tension, even if it’s an unconscious tension.
That’s what we’re after.
When I first read Dubus’s scene of the revolving restaurant, I didn’t realize the trigger of the disorienting view—then I remembered the topic being discussed. The character is homeless. The lack of stable views echoes this. Where is she, actually? She has no place that feels or looks familiar. It’s a brilliant juxtaposition of external and internal setting, the conflict it brings out in the character who is placed there.
Your Weekly Writing Exercise
Choose a scene you’ve drafted, one you’d like to bring more conflict to. Ask yourself what is missing: an external setting that shows conflict or an internal one?
Then scroll up to either the landscape questions or the character interview questions and try them out.
What did you find out?