The Setting as a Character

The feller bunchers, those screechy logging machines that take down large stretches of trees, crawled their destructive path through the forest of Port William.

And I wept. I grieved. I raged.

(Using Setting to Create Conflict in Fiction.)

Port William is the setting for Wendell Berry’s eight novels about a fictional town in rural Kentucky. The stories span a hundred years and include several generations of interconnected characters. The character that holds them together is Port William itself, a living, growing, and evolving setting. 

Each person in what they call “the membership” is loved and lovable. And the land that sustains them is their beating heart. The loss of those trees is an amputation, an act committed by one of their sons, from a generation that has entered a different world, the techno-modern world. More than that—it is the destruction of the series’ most significant character.

I grieved for the trees and for Port William.

In Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, the setting is a different sort of character. The whole planet Camazotz is an extension of IT. Not I-T, but a character named IT. Meg, Calvin, and Charles Wallace walk through the streets past identical houses, watching children in identical driveways bouncing their balls to a unison beat which is the soundtrack of this character. They are walking through the soul-crushing conformity which expresses the mind of IT.

IT repulsed me.

How does a setting become a character?

There are four potential structures to a story: character, plot, idea, and milieu. Each answers its primary question:

Almost every book contains all four elements. The structure is determined by what the author cares about the most.

In most stories, the world is simply the location, the place where the events happen, the people speak their lines, and the problem is solved. In milieu stories, the author’s purpose is to introduce the world itself. If the author cares enough for the setting, it can become a character of its own. It interacts with other characters. It shapes them and their actions, while it is shaped by them. The place communicates the author’s intent.

Genre has a part to play in which structure is used. Action/adventure stories, like John Grisham’s The Client, lean into plot. Biography and memoir, like Michelle Obama’s Becoming, tend to emphasize character development. Agatha Christie’s mysteries are idea stories, solving the problem of whodunit. And Diary of a Tuscan Bookshop, by Alba Donati, puts its structure right in the title. It is the memoir of a place. Halfway through that book, I wanted to meet the place.

Whether the author is a plotter (one who already knows what will happen) or a pantser (an author who finds out where the story is going as she writes), many authors have the experience of a character taking charge and going their own direction. That happened to me with A Gritty Little Tourist Town: Bar Tales from Costa Rica.

The subtitle, Bar Tales, was my original working title. I thought I was writing a collection of character-driven short stories with standard plots. Each began with a setting and collection of characters; some little thing happened; the perspective shifted.

But as the collection took form, what I came to care about the most was the place. The bar, the Pato Loco, has a life of its own, as does its locale, Playas del Coco, that gritty little tourist town that claimed rights to the title. The history, culture, economic challenges, and evolution of that village on the northwest coast of Costa Rica worked on me and demanded to be told.

Just as Jimmy Carter was surprised when a character in his novel had an affair, I was surprised when the place insisted that I break form and give an extended account of a whole week, Semana Santa, Holy Week. This annual series of events that range across the town expresses its spirituality, the part that today is going underground, as trees are cut down and the town is reshaped by the tourist industry. The place took charge of its own story. It wanted me to preserve a record of its soul in the face of destruction wrought by economic “development,” while its heart still beats.

Sometimes readers tell me they want to meet certain people from the book. Every reader wants to sit at the Pato Loco’s family table. For readers, as for myself, the place is the book’s most beloved character.

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