How to Use Setting to Reveal Character

All of us are impacted by setting. Every place we’ve been has made an imprint on us in some way, whether small or significant.

In fiction, we want our characters’ past and personality to be gradually revealed. Amateur writers dump information about a character entirely out of POV. What this means is they are not showing their characters reacting and acting from moment to moment. Rather, they are telling the reader about the character, which is a no-no most of the time.

Setting is a great way to reveal character. I’ve written a lot of posts on this topic, and my course Crafting Powerful Settings goes deep into the ways setting can be a versatile tool in the writer’s toolbox.

What do you need to reveal about your character? What are her strengths and flaws? How will those characteristics come into play in your plot? They have to.

While you need outward, external obstacles in your characters’ paths as they go after what they need and want, they also need internal ones.

Setting can trigger those. How? Think about the settings in your past? Conjure up some wonderful places you were in that formed your character, that brought you a sense of joy, peace, and security. Now come up with a few places that caused you trauma. Places that inspired fear, worry, insecurity.

If you’ve taken the time to richly develop your characters, particularly your protagonist and antagonists, you’ve created past incidents that have formed them. To create great flawed characters (yes, that’s the goal!), you need to give them both joyful and painful memories connected to places in their past.

I spent my early childhood summers in the Bronx, New York, in my grandparents’ hot (no A/C) apartment, with mosquitoes attacking me at night while I hid under itchy wool blankets. I attended PS 93 (the local elementary school) for a few months, where I was teased for my California accent. I was terrified to take the trash down to the basement, which was smelly and dark and where I imagined evil men or monsters lurked. I experienced many uncomfortable, unpleasant, tense, and fearful moments as a child in New York; I didn’t go back for more than forty years because of the distaste I had for that place. But when I did finally return, I was surprised at how much I enjoyed it.

In real life, everyone has baggage—past experiences that cause quirks, sensitivities, phobias, and flaws to develop. The same should be true for our characters. Simply put, they have issues, and many of these issues can be traced back to a specific setting, such as academic failures in the classroom, a brutal attack in a dark alley, or abuse in one’s home. Conflict can be introduced through revisiting an old, painful setting because it will bring to mind bad memories and stir up unwanted emotions for your character, reminding him of when he was most weak and vulnerable.

In the movie First Blood, John Rambo is a war veteran and former POW trying to find his footing in post-war America while battling his demons.. The similarities between his current setting and his traumatic past act as a trigger. Rambo assaults his captors, breaks out of the police station, and sets in motion a series of events that makes it virtually impossible for him to reenter society in the way he had hoped.

While this is a dramatic response to a past event, it’s legitimate, considering Rambo’s circumstances and past abuse. Different characters might respond in ways that are more subdued but will still cause problems that must be overcome. They may lash out at those around them, damaging important relationships. They might run away from a difficult memory, postponing the healing that needs to take place for their goals to be achieved. They could shut down completely, rewrite the past in their own minds, regress into fantasy, or lie in order to cover up the past—the possibilities for conflict are virtually endless when a character is reintroduced to a painful setting.

Setting forms us and contributes to who we are. The choices we make as adults as to where we will live and work and play are influenced by our past experiences with setting. Setting is highly influential to us and should also be such for your characters.

If you take the time when creating your characters to think about setting as an important part of their background, you will create richer characters. Don’t just give your characters a general past. Know exactly where they grew up and what that place (or places) was like and how it affected them.

And determine what greatest obstacle they will face in your story and try to link it to a past trauma that is rich in setting.

In my novel Colorado Promise (written under my pen name Charlene Whitman), my hero’s greatest trauma was losing his wife and baby in childbirth during a snowstorm. He had been unable to leave and get help, and he could not save them. This is an extreme trauma that wounded him greatly and made him fear ever allowing himself to love or have a family going forward.

Of course, being a romance story, my hero, Lucas, falls in love again, though he resists. And the best thing I could do to him in my story was make him have to face his greatest fear. I put him in another snowstorm and in a situation where he had to deliver a woman’s baby. You can bet the similarity in both situation and setting was horrific for him, but he had to face it all and come out the other side.

In all my novels, I try to create a strong past incident greatly tied to setting that caused a wound or trauma. And that wound is ever-present, impacting the character’s life choices and attitudes. It’s right before the climax of the story, in that “dark night of the soul” moment when the character is forced to face their fears that stem from that traumatic time in their life.

When you put your character in a similar place (or the same place) as that past trauma, it can trigger all those memories and make it hard for her to handle. Little details in a setting can be triggers—a flower, a sign, an old rusty truck, a certain smell or sound. Work to embed these into your story so they help reveal character.

Some Exercises

Exercise #1: Write 3 paragraphs, 3 significant events that happened to you while growing up.  Think about that setting. Think about “life wounds” (something traumatic) or an exhilarating experience that changed you. You want your main characters to have some event in their past that has impacted the way they see themselves and their world, that’s created a lie they believe. Write one paragraph for each event, summarizing. Your past.

Think of the hard choice or action your protagonist must face in the climax, then think how a past event in the same or similar setting can make that choice more traumatic/hard/exacerbated.

For example, if you have a character who grew up on a rugged coast and who watched his fisherman father die in a storm at sea, he will have some very intense conflicted feelings about spending a day on a friend’s sailboat. And if you add a storm to that present-day outing, think how that might affect him.

You don’t have to create some tragedy in a character’s past that is tied to setting (although that can often be great to do depending on your plot), but at very least, think how region and locale greatly influences your characters and find ways to bring that into your story.

We all have pasts, but too many writers create characters that have none. They show up in novels as ciphers, appearing on the stage with no background whatsoever, and as a result hardly have any personality. Too often I read novels with flat, boring, nothing characters. And a large reason they are that way is they have no connection to locale—past or present.

Exercise #2: Think of the 3 most influential settings or locations in your past, where something very important or intense happened to you. This may take some time—or not. Where did you meet your spouse? What is the best or worst trip you ever took in your life? What is the worst tragedy you witnessed or suffered and where were you? Do you feel creeped out when you walk through the corridors of a hospital? If you’re an ER nurse, maybe not. But if you watched someone you love die in a hospital bed, you might feel uneasy.

The more your characters can emote in believable, intense ways, the more chance your readers will be moved and affected as well. If you deliberately place your character in a setting that will bring up strong emotions in him, you will have a better, more effective scene than one in which you place your character in the local Starbuck’s just because you haven’t bothered to consider coming up with a more appropriate setting.

Exercise #3: Now, come up with 1 key place for your protagonist where something impacting happened in his past. What’s the story—briefly explain. Come up with a scene in which that character is either back at that exact spot (give a reason for that) or one so similar, it triggers that strong memory. What does he learn from this reflection or realization? How does it change him, his perspective, his choices? Does it give him courage to step up or speak out, to do something he wouldn’t have been able to do at the start of your novel?a

Don’t discount the power of setting. If you haven’t spent much time on the topic and want to learn great techniques, take my setting course! You will be surprised how much you learn!

Featured Photo by Alex Vasey on Unsplash