Craft Lesson: Setting

Mavis Gallant, Scott Spencer, Sarah Broom, André Dubus III

Kenyon Review is accepting submissions for their short nonfiction contest through December 31. The winning entry will be selected by Lucy Ives.

May 18-24, 2025, I’m leading a writing retreat in Bordeaux, France hosted by Foreword Retreats. All genres and levels of experience are welcome. Lodging is in a chateau north of the city, with meals prepared by an on-site chef. Registration deadline is Jan. 10, 2025. Please apply soon—space is limited.

Bookish subscriptions are 30% off this month. A preview of November’s agent list can be found here.

Next week’s post will be an interview with fiction writer and a founding editor of Chicago Quarterly Review, Syed Afzal Haider, whose excellent new story collection, The Dying Sun, was published last month. 📗

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Setting is “the location and time in which a story occurs. The physical surroundings, as described by the narrator” (as defined by Alice LaPlante in The Making of a Story).

Vivid settings are defined by strong concrete imagery and sensory details, i.e. appeals to the visual, auditory, tactile, gustatory, and olfactory:

The looming, snow-capped presence of Mt. Baldy in the distance; the red pickup truck parked in front of the white duplex with the green shutters; the two sleek black dogs running with the gang of gleeful, shouting children; the pervasive scent of dark chocolate from the candy factory’s river-facing vents.

In the following excerpts, two fiction and two nonfiction, note how specific and frequent the appeals to our senses are.

From the novel A Ship Made of Paper, Scott Spencer:

        “Because the pickups and deliveries of Ruby generally fall to Daniel, he has been to this house ten or fifteen times, but each time Iris has Ruby dressed and ready to go upon his arrival. Nevertheless, in those moments of polite exchange, he has breathed in the smells of her domesticity—the aromas of whatever meal was being prepared, the smell of a newly painted room, of eucalyptus stalks stuck into a beaded glass vase that stood upon an end table in the living room, just visible from where he usually stood. He has taken in everything there was to see in the foyer itself: the blue-and-silver-striped wallpaper, the illustrative hooked rug (streetlamp, horse and buggy), the tiger maple table near the door with its resident wicker basket filled with junk mail, the occasional stray mitten, the curling cash register tape from the supermarket. From this he learned that her purchases included such items as Playtex tampons and Dry Idea deodorant…Sominex sleeping pills…Revlon emery boards, Tylenol PM.”

From the memoir The Yellow House, Sarah M. Broom:

     "From high up, fifteen thousand feet above, where the aerial photographs are taken, 4121 Wilson Avenue, the address I know best, is a minuscule point, a scab of green. In satellite images shot from higher still, my former street dissolves into the toe of Louisiana’s boot. From this vantage point, our address, now mite size, would appear to sit in the Gulf of Mexico. Distance lends perspective, but it can also shade, misinterpret. From these great heights, my brother Carl would not be seen.

    "Carl, who is also my brother Rabbit, sits his days and nights away at 4121 Wilson Avenue at least five times a week after working his maintenance job at NASA..."

From the story collection Paris Stories, “The Moslem Wife,” Mavis Gallant:

            “Across a road nearly empty of traffic were handsome villas, and behind and to either side stood healthy olive trees and a large lemon grove. The hotel was painted a deep ocher with white trim.  It had white awnings and green shutters and black iron balconies as lacquered and shiny as Chinese boxes. It possessed two tennis courts, a lily pond, a sheltered winter garden, a formal rose garden, and trees full of nightingales. In the summer dark, belles-de-nuit glowed pink, lemon, white and after their evening watering they gave off a perfume that varied from plant to plant and seemed to match the petals’ coloration. In May the nights were dense with stars and fireflies. From the rose garden one might have seen the twin pulse of cigarettes on a balcony, where Jack and Netta sat drinking a last brand-and-soda  before turning in.  Most of the rooms were shuttered by then, for no traveler would have dreamed of being south except in winter. Jack and Netta and a few servants had the whole place to themselves. Netta would hire workmen and have the rooms that needed it repainted—the blue card room, and the red-walled bar, and the white dining room, where Victorian mirrors gave back glossy walls and blown curtains and nineteenth-century views of the Ligurian coast, the work of an Asher great-uncle.”

From the memoir Townie, Andre Dubus III:

            “…The Merrimack originated one hundred miles north in the mountains of New Hampshire, and I imagined it was clean up there, not like where we lived where the wide-fast-moving water was rust-colored and smelled like sewage and diesel and something I couldn’t name. Later, I would learn this was tanning dye from the shoe mills, that all fish died here, vegetation too. Posted down near the littered banks were signs that said no swimming or fishing, not just because of the current—the yellow industrial-waste foam of it rising off in the wind—but because the water itself was toxic.

            “Decades earlier, Haverhill had been named ‘the Queen Slipper City of the World’ because the town’s Irish and Italian immigrants worked endless shifts in the mills along the Merrimack churning out a lot of the country’s shoes…By the time we moved there in the early seventies, it was a town of boarded-up buildings, the parking lots overgrown with weeds and strewn with trash. Most of the shops downtown were closed too their window displays empty and layered with dust and dead flies. It seemed there were barrooms on every block—the Chit Chat Lounge, the Lido, Ray and Arlene’s—and they were always full, the doors open in the summertime, the cackle of a woman spilling out of the darkness, the low bass beat of the jukebox, the phlegmy cough of an old man born here when things were good.”

A few tools for evoking place:

• Use a specific address, The Yellow House, “4121 Wilson Avenue”

• Name buildings, businesses, and other cultural and commercial identifiers, e.g. Townie excerpt, “the Chit Chat Lounge, the Lido, Ray and Arlene’s”

• For interiors, many writers focus on decorative details, e.g. from “The Moslem Wife”: “the red-walled bar,” “the white dining room,” and from A Ship Made of Paper: “the blue-and-silver-striped wallpaper, the illustrative hooked rug…the tiger maple table near the door with its resident wicker basket filled with junk mail, the occasional stray mitten, the curling cash register tape from the supermarket.”

• Locate a character within the setting, as we see Broom do in The Yellow House, “Carl, who is also my brother Rabbit, sits his days and nights away at 4121 Wilson Avenue at least five times a week”

Writing exercise:

Write a scene that takes place in a location your character is seeing for the first time—use concrete details. Now write about the same place, but your character knows it well—how do they see it differently?