Want to level up your setting and instantly pull readers deeper into your scenes? Start by thinking outside the box about where each moment takes place. The right setting does more than anchor your characters—it acts as a powerful storytelling tool, creating mood, building tension, and making the story feel real and immersive.
But writing vivid, purposeful description isn’t always easy. Many writers struggle to know what to describe, how much is too much, or how to make the setting feel like it’s more than just background.
Here’s a trick that changes everything:
Choose each scene’s location with care and precision.
It’s true, the “where” matters almost as much as the “what” because you can activate a setting’s built-in superpowers. The right choice can reflect a character’s emotional state, add subtext, raise the stakes, trigger empathy, create tension, and reveal hidden conflict.
For example, consider how a setting can represent tests and challenges that characters must overcome (the Black Gate in The Lord Of The Rings, or the Cornucopia in The Hunger Games), or fortify a character, reminding them of their greatest strengths (Hermione and the Hogwarts library come to mind) or even reveal danger and vulnerability (the sewers in Stephen King’s It.)
It doesn’t stop here, either. A location can even reinforce a character’s deepest longing (the Notre Dame stadium in Rudy), act as a tangible reminder of a missing Human Need (The Incredibles’ Bob Parr, an unfulfilled insurance claims adjustor in his cramped office, who needs to be something more, something greater.)
Takeaway tip: When choosing a setting for the scene’s events, look at what is going to happen, and make a list of setting choices that can reveal something deeper about the characters involved. The setting should act as a symbol for one or more of the elements above, bringing forth deeper meaning and making characters and their desires matter more to readers.
Thinking purposefully about setting can also ensure we offer readers a fresh experience.
One of the big promises we make to readers is that we’ll take readers on a journey, somewhere fresh and different. A great way to do that is through your setting choices. Do they really want to see the same old places they’ve read about a hundred times? Probably not. Sure, genre might influence what types of settings readers expect, but that doesn’t mean creativity must take a back seat.
Take the typical party scene, a common sight in many contemporary Young Adult novels. This event doesn’t always have to be at the beach or in someone’s house while the parents are away. Why not have your teenagers sneak into a shutdown construction site or a closed-up factory, instead? Add some beer, a few spray cans, and the unexpected appearance of a security guard with a stun gun, and you’ve got a unique setting primed for tension and conflict. Too, when the location isn’t a typical one, it adds a fresh edge to the story moment, making it more of an experience.
Takeaway Tip: If you like to plan around the scene’s action, create a list of all the obvious places the story events could take place. Then, branch out, thinking about areas that are within your characters’ general location, but are fresher options.
Need location ideas for your scene? Find over 225 in the Urban and Rural Setting Thesaurus writing guides, plus the sensory details to describe each effectively.
Use adaptation to make something familiar new.
When you need a familiar setting, don’t stress—it’s all about how you make it your own through descriptive details. Shift the time of day, play with light and weather, tap into the season, and most importantly, filter it through your POV character’s emotions. These elements can turn even the most ordinary location into something vivid, personal, and unforgettable.
Plus, you can turn your setting into an obstacle course to differentiate it further because setting is a perfect vehicle for conflict.
Bonus Resource:
Our Setting Thesaurus books are also part of the massive description THESAURUS Database at One Stop for Writers, with even more locations. Check out the list of settings here.
Angela is a writing coach, international speaker, and bestselling author who loves to travel, teach, empower writers, and pay-it-forward. She also is a founder of One Stop For Writers, a portal to powerful, innovative tools to help writers elevate their storytelling.
Ah setting… yes indeed. I need much better focus on using setting more deliberately and creatively. I tend to write very lean, and now I am needing to go through and rethink the use of setting in my current trilogy. (contemporary). I remember slogging through pages and pages of description – 2 full pages between 2 dialogue points! I had to flip back to figure out who was speaking and why. Those experiences make my settings rather sparse, and not at all deliberate. Already I’m thinking of where I can expand one setting space for a symbolic theme.
Cool. I’ll be reading the Super Six from the newsletter shortly.
Merci – you are so generous with your ideas for writers, and I appreciate that very much!
I always start on the leaner side as well–just my process. I think Becca is more the opposite. 🙂 Either way, these books will help me, and I hope they’ll help you, Celia!
I like doing setting and world building. It’s fun going back and adding in little details. 🙂 But, while starting a new chapter I tend to make it bare bones. I’ve been told that there was too much description slowing it down so I try to only focus on what matters to the pov. This isn’t easy! Argg! I also tend to forget to add in props for them. xP
Setting is one of those things I tend to rush past in my first draft. In my second, I have to go back and remember to tell the reader where all the action is taking place. When a setting is new to a character, it’s easier, because they’re looking around just as the reader is, but when there’s action going on in a place the viewpoint character is familiar with, they wouldn’t stop to take in the scenery so it’s difficult to get setting across in the pages then.
When I began writing my novel, I chose a fairly remote area in another state I’d never been to. It has a population of 30,842. Why did I chose this particular location? I have no idea. But it has worked out well. I even went across to the other side of the country and visited the town and stayed for a week. I had a blast 🙂
That’s awesome! When Becca and I were investigating the locations in our new books, we had to travel to different locations. It was fun and it gave us both some new experiences, too. 😉
I tend to write heavy descriptions starting out that need pared later. And then as the book progresses, I write leaner and need to add a bit more in rewrites. Different, I know, lol.
I think people are either lean and add meat, or write thick description that needs to be thinned. In fact I’d say there are probably more like you than there are me! 🙂
The photo of the (girl?) (hanging?) in the forrest is so spooky…great demonstration of what you’re showing in this post. As always, good post!
I know, super spooky. I love it!
In our soon to be published short fiction collection, Through Button Eyes, one of my story’s settings was a 125 yr-old Victorian home, a historical town landmark, that was in the process of being fixed and upgrading. It was easy to incorporate a realistic setting into the stoy having just finished helping my daughter go through the refurb process of an identical aged historical Victorian she purchased a year ago.
So smart! May as well take advantage of every opportunity. I am sure the realism really came through too. 🙂
Great post, as always. I took a course by the amazing Mary Buckham and it changed the way I look at describing settings now. I think settings are their own character, almost as important as the H/H. In my WIP I have an angel trapped in a cave. Lots of room for play there!
I haven’t taken any workshops with Mary but I read her books awhile ago and they were filled with great ideas on creating meaningful settings.
I’m definitely in the “I love describing setting!” camp, though I have a tendency to overdescribe what I’m envisioning. (That’s something I’ve been fixing as part of my WIP’s third draft.) But setting is very important, especially if a story is set in a place or time that readers aren’t familiar with. Picking the right details can paint enough of a picture while leaving other aspects to the reader’s imagination.
As for my story, setting is something I’ve had to be conscious of because the WIP is partly a quest story. So there’s a lot of traveling, which meant paying attention to things like nature / scenery, weather, and what makes each place unique (details, dangers, etc.). It made sense to do this, since a) the MC practices a nature-centric religion, and b) certain locations either give the MC opportunities to prove herself or make mistakes.
Sounds like you have a good handle on it, Sara, and you’re choosing the items to describe for the right reasons. The big thing is to always ask how the description you want to include can do more. Rarely does a beat of description simply anchor readers in the story. It can almost always be planted to have a deeper meaning, symbolize an idea, show emotion, characterize, act as a gate to backstory, provide conflict, set the mood, create tension, encourage the reader’s emotional memories to form, supply an emotional value for the scene, etc.
what a list!!