The Stories Inside Your Setting

Most writing advice about setting tends to sound like instructions for assembling furniture. First chapter, establish your location in time and place. Provide sensory detail. Build your world in pieces. Keep the reader grounded.

(Using Setting to Create Conflict in Fiction.)

Good advice, but helpful only to a point.

It’s become something of a cliché when talking about fiction to say that a good setting feels like another character, and it’s hard to tell what people mean when they say that. Usually this seems to indicate only that setting was rendered nicely, with lots of good detail. Or maybe it means the setting has a lot of personality, some quirky bowling alley or gothic castle. All of that is fine, really.

But sometimes setting isn’t only where and when a story takes place, or a place that’s unique and well described. Instead, setting has the potential to be one of the things actually shaping the story as it unfolds.

When I began writing The Reel Life of Zara Kegg, I knew I was writing about a teenage girl dealing with grief. Zara is 16, recently lost her mother, and has drifted into an unusual job: She’s essentially running a fading old movie theater called the Palace. She has a boss who mostly sits around reading magazines, so it’s Zara who sells tickets, threads the projector, shows the movies, handles the occasional odd customer, and spends long stretches of time alone in the projection booth drinking coffee and watching the screen below.

At first the theater felt like a backdrop, one with personality. But it didn’t stay that way.

Very quickly the Palace started determining the kinds of scenes the book wanted to have. Conversations that might have happened in a kitchen or a classroom suddenly took place in the dim light of the projection booth, with a beam of film flickering over Zara’s shoulder. People wandered in during weekday matinees. Late-night clean-ups left her alone in the building after midnight. The theater itself created situations I probably wouldn’t have invented otherwise.

That’s the moment setting begins to matter—not when you describe it well, but when it starts generating scenes that couldn’t have happened anywhere else, and which in turn starts to affect every other part of the story.

The Palace isn’t a glamorous theater. It’s the sort of place that’s seen better days, better decades. The seats are worn. The equipment breaks down. A few old Dracula and Frankenstein posters line the darkened hallways. In other words, it’s the kind of old building with history and cobwebs hanging around in the corners.

For Zara, the theater becomes both refuge and hiding place. From the projection booth she can look down on the audience and watch people react to the movies playing below. It’s a strangely fitting place for a character who’s still trying to figure out how to reenter the world after losing someone important. She’s present, technically speaking, but also removed, an outsider to the business of ordinary life.

Writers sometimes feel the need to explain what a character is going through—spelling out the emotions, the turmoil, the reasons behind certain choices. But sometimes place can suggest those things more organically. A girl alone in a plywood projection booth already tells us quite a lot, before we even really know her.

Your setting can do that kind of subtle emotional work if you look for opportunities.

The other thing that happened, gradually, is that the movies themselves started becoming part of the setting.

If your main character runs a movie theater, she’s going to spend a lot of time surrounded by films. In Zara’s case, the films are the slightly strange B-movies that used to fill late-night television schedules. In fact, the novel opens with Zara talking about one of them—Carnival of Souls, a cult film from the early 60s in which a woman wanders in a fog while the people around her seem not to notice she exists. She stumbles through the world like someone slightly out of phase with it. For a grieving girl sitting alone in a projection booth above a nearly empty theater, that image lands a little close to home. Zara is haunted not by her dead mother, but by the absence of a life that’s been taken from her.

Making that connection was the moment I realized that the movies themselves were part of the novel’s atmosphere. They weren’t just something playing on the screen. They were mirrors, reflecting parts of Zara’s experience back toward her. This never could have happened in that quirky bowling alley or any other setting I might have chosen. There are monsters on the screen, yes, but there are monsters in real life, in our own psyches, as well.  

Confession: I understood none of this going in. I only picked the Palace as setting because I love those terrible old movies and wanted to write about them.

One of my favorite moments in the book comes when Zara ends up showing a movie to absolutely no one. The theater is empty, not one ticket sold. She decides she can’t stand the idea of the movie playing to nobody. So she takes her popcorn and coffee downstairs, sits in the audience like a regular customer, and watches. Her logic is simple: If someone went to the trouble to make a movie—even 60 years ago—it seems sad for no one to see it. Everything, in its own way, wants to be seen.

The movie happens to be The Hideous Sun Demon, which is exactly the kind of movie the title suggests. A scientist gets exposed to radiation and turns into a scaly monster whenever sunlight touches him. To avoid hurting anyone, he decides the only solution is to stay out of the sun and live his life in the dark. By the end of the film, Zara finds herself crying in the empty theater.

Mostly the movie is ridiculous. With its awful effects and worse dialogue, it looks like it was filmed for about 10 dollars. But Zara ends up feeling bad for the guy because all he wanted, really, was to be left alone in the dark. Zara, sitting in the deep end of loss and mourning, has this thought when she’s sitting alone in the darkness that surrounds her, both physically and emotionally.

Again, these connections were not something I planned in advance. The setting simply made those moments possible. Once the theater existed, the stories came with it.

It’s helping for writers to remember that a good setting pushes back on characters a little. Weather interferes with plans. Rooms force people together. Familiar spaces carry memories that characters might prefer to avoid.

The Palace Theater does that for Zara. It gives her somewhere to hide—a quiet place full of flickering stories where she can stay removed from everything else happening in town. But it also traps her in that distance. The projection booth offers her protection from the world in the same way a jail cell would.

That tension becomes part of the story.

A simple test for any writer to see what amount of work their setting is doing is a quick thought experiment: Imagine your story in a different setting.

If the plot works exactly the same way in a different location, your setting may not be pulling its weight. This can be true no matter how good your details are, how well you have rendered the world you’re building. It needs to be more than a time and place.

When setting becomes fully woven into the fabric of the narrative—when scenes grow organically out of the place itself—it becomes difficult to separate the two. Setting informs who your main character is, beyond just a place for her to move around in.

By the time I was well into writing The Reel Life of Zara Kegg, I realized the novel couldn’t really happen anywhere else. The Palace Theater wasn’t just where Zara worked. It is where she hides, where she watches the world, and eventually where she begins to step back into it.

It couldn’t have happened anywhere else.

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