Setting is one of those all-too-common aspects of how-to-write books. It’s right up there with character and dialogue in the list of things a dull-witted writer needs to be reminded to put in their book. To judge by many self-help writer’s manuals, the secret to writing a good book is to generate a list of essential items, and tick them off as you go. Insert character. Tick. Insert
Plot Point A. Tick. Insert Setting. Tick. The problem is, of course, that writing is bothersome and difficult and refuses to be so simple to do, especially to do well.

There is no checklist, no formula, no right way to get in all the necessary bits. Every time you write, it seems, you’ll need to find new ways to navigate and communicate the basic elements of story: character, narrative and setting. And each time the tricks you use will be different. Sometimes radically so. There are a few ideas, though, that I’d like to share with you in terms of how I approach the issue of setting. These aren’t meant as instruction, and certainly not as tick-the-box lists. They’re ideas that help me to think about what setting is in a story, how it works, and how I might approach the issue of trying to create, in a reader’s mind, the idea that there is this place - somewhere - in which these things happened. And that this place - either imaginary or real - was significant to the people who lived and worked there. That it mattered.

First of all, I find that it’s important and useful for me to remember that, like the connection between a character and a person, there’s only a superficial and imaginary relationship between a physical place and a setting. In his lovely book of historical criticism, Landscape and Memory, Simon Schama points out that even wilderness is an idea: that what we see and recognise as wilderness is culturally and historically constructed. A National Park is a frame around an area of land we choose to see as wild, and valuable; a garden fence frames a different notion of ‘landscape’. The point is that these ideas about the land, and its meaning, are as important as the naturally-occurring and man-made elements of the world your characters move about in. Who they are, and where they come from, inform their sense of where they are, and therefore infrom the way they filter, interpret and narrate setting.

A character who works, for example, in a hospital setting, will have a very different vocabulary for describing and interacting with the building. For them, it is a workplace, peopled with familiar objects, rituals, and events. For a patient, however, or a visitor, the hospital can be a very different place: a source of comfort or alienation, of pain and fear, or redemption, healing and birth.

The iconic poem of Australian landscape, My Country, was written by a young, urban professional woman with little experience of the Australian bush. Her poem essentialises the bush, and presents it as many early white Australians saw it: grand and terrible, dangerous and alien:

The love of field and coppice
Of green and shaded lanes,
Of ordered woods and gardens
Is running in your veins.
Strong love of grey-blue distance,
Brown streams and soft, dim skies
I know, but cannot share it,
My love is otherwise.
I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of drought and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons,
I love her jewel-sea,
Her beauty and her terror
The wide brown land for me!

In this familiar poem, Mackellar compares the ‘home’ of the cultivated European landscape, with its “coppiced woods” and “soft, dim skies”, with the “ragged mountain ranges ... droughts and flooding rains” (! we wish). These images of Australia
reflect the perspective of a white Australia still looking to the verdant greens of ‘mother’ England. Dorothea clearly loves the Australian landscape, but it is the love of a discoverer, a traveller, a visitor rather than of a narrator who lives in and draws nurturance from the environment they describe. This is emphasised in the distance she puts between herself and her beloved Australia: a distance emphasised in the way she describes the Australian landscape as if from a distance (in a dramatic picture postcard) with ‘far horizons’, for example, whereas her description of Europe is more intimate and cosy: there is a sense of being ‘in’ the landscape of wooded lanes, whereas the Australian landscape is indeed terrible, if picturesque. This sense of the beloved but ‘Othered’ landscape is common to many colonial writers and poets, particularly in Canada and Australia, writing about their newly-adopted homelands.

By comparison, the following is extracted from the National Aboriginal Conference’s paper on ‘Aboriginal Ideology’, and expresses a very different relationship to the same landscape. Here the emphasis is on a lived relationship with the land, one
which draws on a history of living in, on and with the land described (much as the first stanza of MacKellar’s poem reflects a way of describing a world that has long been lived in and managed by its author’s ancestors):

The land, for us, is a vibrant spiritual landscape. It is peopled in
spirit form by the ancestors in the dreaming. The ancestors travelled
the country, an adventure which created
the people
the natural features of this land
the code of life
The law has been passed on to us
Through the reverence and the celebration of the sites of the ancestors
Songs and dance
Body, sand and rock painting
Special languages and legends
These are the media of the law to the present day.

These examples, of course, emphasise not just a personally significant difference in their narrator’s relationships to a particular setting, but also an ideological and historical divide. This is a difficult and hotly-contested difference in describing
the landscape. There are other differences that are less politically-chargecd but, nonetheless, an awareness of which can enrich and deepen your reader’s sense of setting.

David Malouf has written and spoken often about his sense that growing up in the hilly suburbs of Brisbane has been a deep and lasting influence on him. Not simply in terms of the settings of his novels, short stories and poems, but also in terms of his sense of the shape of a story. Similarly, the French philosopher, Maurice Blanchot, wrote a book of phenomenology in which he discusses the ways in which spaces - particularly the spaces of childhood - inform the ways we think, act and feel. For
Blanchot, home is more than merely a place, it is the stuff in and of which we are formed. Cupoboards, attics, shells and boxes each contain and are contained in our sense of self.

There are a number of aspects of this notion of the importance of the notion of home, and of the childhood home in particular, that I find intriguing, and worth considering when working on or thinking about the places that my current writing project is about:

1. That a writer and their work is informed by - charged by - the shape of their home, by their sense of what is and is not wilderness, home, etc;
2. That a place is formed by, and of, the people who lived in and passed through it;
3. That a character and a story are made by, and make, the places in which their lives are lived.
   

Here is a simple enough exercise you can do to play with setting; one which reveals the ways in which place is essential to the structure of story, and to the formation of character. Write out the names of a series of settings on cards: these needn’t, and perhaps shouldn’t, be detailed descriptions: office, bedroom, forest, shopping centre will do, or perhaps a set that briefly describe the settings in the story you are currently working on. Arrange these settings in order on the table and consider what kinds of stories immediately suggest themselves. Given the settings I’ve suggested above, for example, consider the
radically-different stories that already leap up from the ordered juxtapositions of:

Office -- Shopping Centre -- Bedroom
Shopping Centre -- Bedroom -- Forest

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