From Tabletop to Paperback – Setting the Settings on the Setting

Welcome back to another installment of From Tabletop to Paperback. Today we'll be talking about Setting. Setting is definitely a double edged sword for gamers with aspirations of writing. One the one hand, a great deal of games are billed as "settings" and there are whole campaigns consisting of "just" creating a setting and letting your players run rampant in it sandbox-style. On the other hand, these kinds of labors of love can become monolithic shibboleths so detailed that they actually become useless as Settings for Stories.

Setting Defined

This is going to sound like I'm being a smart ass, but the honest definition of Setting is "the place where the story happens." This can be deceptively simple, though. Place can encompass things like "time period" or "culture." Even the obvious concept of "geographical location" can be a moving target. Are we talking about what city, state, country, planet? Or are we being specific as in "which house?" or "what floor of the building?" We've seen many stories, many of them truly amazing, with a singular setting.

Think of tv shows like "Cheers" or "The Office" where the setting is almost exclusively a particular bar or office. Think of movies like "Die Hard" where nonstop action occurs in a single office building. Or the favorite of Victorian literature that was so well loved it became a genre unto itself, the Locked Door Mystery. These are almost always set entirely in a specific house and its grounds.

So, I'm sure you all think you're very clever and know what Setting is. And, on an instinctual level, you're probably completely right. That said, after the last few chapters, it's probably worth reiterating what Setting is not.

Setting is not...

The Antagonist. Setting can generate antagonists (prison story filled with dangerous, desperate customers). Setting can make some antagonists better choices than others (nobody wants a pirate in their ninja movie...unless that's the point). Setting can even generate the Highly Visible Antagonist (systemic racism in the Deep South, for instance ..although even that should be embodied in an actual character). But the Setting is never, ever the Highly Visible Antagonist itself.
The Plot. Again, the Setting can generate plot (will he survive the lunch line on his first day in prison?). Setting will suggest plot points (the hero is inside an ancient temple, so there should be some traps and maybe even a mummy). The Plot can even dictate the Setting (samurai stories tend to happen in Japan in specific eras). But the Setting is never the Plot itself.

So while Plot, Antagonist, and Setting are all distinct things, they have obvious overlap. They aren't three separate pieces created in a vacuum from one another (usually), they influence and impact one another. Incidentally, that integration is a thing that gamers are already very good at, although we'll talk about that more in part two. Right now I want to talk about the Setting Trap.

The Setting Trap

The Setting Trap can be summed up in one word: Realism. Realism is dangerous. Realism has killed more stories than laziness, slush piles, and bad reviews combined. Realism can smother your story in the cradle.

Every time a helpful blogger writes an article entitled something like "What Every Writer Needs to Know about Guns/War/Medieval Society/Religion/Horses/Every Other Damn Thing," a puppy and a kitten die. In a cage match with each other.

Look, Setting forces you to make decisions which, in turn, forces you to have a bare minimum amount of knowledge about how some things work or don't work. Don't put silencers on revolvers and don't treat horses like motorcycles, that kind of thing. But don't ever feel like you have to be an expert on every little thing going on inside your Story. As long as you're an expert on telling a Story, and about your Story in particular, then you're in a good spot.

You should allow Setting to impact the story you want to tell at the Plot level. If you want a strong, non-Caucasian, female hero in a Victorian era story, please do that! But you have to realize that not addressing the racism and sexism of the era on some level will lose large swathes of your readership. But if the story isn't about the sexism and racism of the era, then you can feel free to treat it the same way action movies treat gunshot wounds: an inconvenience that could grow to become a real problem if the story needs it.

What I'm saying is, and what most people are really saying when they think they want realism, is you have to maintain verisimilitude. The rules you set for your story, including which parts of any given setting -- including a homebrew setting -- you choose, must remain logical in terms of themselves, must remain internally consistent, and must involve a very bare minimum of knowledge about the setting.

Just as I wrote these words, I happened to read a tweet wondering why Superman leaves contrails in the teaser trailer for next year's "Man of Steel." She insisted this was a science fail and, upon some Wikipedia reading, I found she's absolutely right. At first, I had a moment of sadness, but then I immediately decided to not give a crap. Contrails have a scientific reason, but for story purposes, they mean "this thing flies really fast." With that in mind, contrails are the best decision that trailer could have made.

Realism versus Verisimilitude. If you could only have one, which one would you choose? There's only one right answer for a maker of fiction.

But Setting Also Sets You Free

A traditional horror story becomes a metaphor for high school as hell thanks to setting. Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew becomes a tale of high school drama thanks to setting (along with some significant shifts in plot points and character along the way). A hardboiled detective story similarly becomes a whole other flavor of story when the setting becomes a southern California high school. Adding an element like magic to a Chicago outside your window creates a whole new landscape against which to tell stories. A Western, but in space.

All these ideas are Settings with a twist or multiple Settings mashed together. Each of these stylistic choices were made in order to tell stories that could not be told in any other way or to tell old stories through a fresh lens. While the realism of any given Setting can certainly trap you in a quagmire of details that drags the narrative to a halt, the unlimited nature of being able to do whatever you want with a Setting, even if it's tear a few apart to create new Settings from bits of old ones like a patchwork quilt of awesome.

Setting can set you free. Free to retell old stories, free to reimagine stories, free to filter stories until they become different stories, or so free that you start out to retell a story and, thanks to the changes imposed by the setting, your mind finds itself free to rewrite rather than retell. Probably more than characters or plot, it's Setting that forces me to think in new and different ways. And that's pretty amazing.

There are a couple other ways that Setting can trip you up, like creating a Story that serves the Setting rather than the other way around. There are a couple more ways that Setting can make your life easier, like allowing the Setting to dictate the scope of your story. While both these pinnacles and pitfalls are far from unique among novice writers, they tend to loom a bit larger (for both good and ill) over the the gamer turned writer. Which is why I'll deal with them more on Thursday. See you then!