How many of you can place the quote in the title? That's right -- Charlie, in the pilot episode of Lost, what I still consider one of the greatest TV shows of all time. If you've seen the show, then you know that one of the most important characters in the story is ... not really a character at all. It's the Island.
Yes, the Island. What started out as just a lush, tropical paradise ended the show being an almost sentient character in its own right, interacting with and changing the characters' lives in ways they never would have dreamed of.
And yet, don't all of our settings in all of our stories change and impact our characters? In the extreme, you have the setting is short stories such as Jack London's "To Build a Fire," where the only characters are a man alone in a frozen wilderness, and the cold itself, which is trying -- albeit not consciously (it's just weather, after all) -- to kill him.
When I'm explaining setting to my students at school, I tell them that there are two parts of setting: a place, and a time. Let's explore these both to see just how important setting really is.
Place -- This is what we most usually think of when we think of "setting" -- where is my story taking place? Where we choose to set our story physically is perhaps one of the most important choices we face early on in our story. A love story set in New York City will be very different from a love story set in the middle of the country, and both will be different from a love story set on an alien spaceship orbiting a star some thirty light years from Earth This even extends to things such as cultural elements (typical behavior in rural America is very different from typical behavior in downtown Tokyo), and a character's familiarity with the setting (a character reacts very differently to a setting he understands that to one he is unfamiliar with).
Time -- This is something we pay almost no attention to in our preliminary preparations for our novel, but why shouldn't we? A story set in London in 2010 will be a very different novel than one set in London in 1510 -- same physical place, totally different temporal location. There are also temporal constraints (if your story takes place in the year 500, you're probably not going to have an eighty-five-year-old man) and technological aspects (cars in an 1825 story don't work; a horse and buggy in a 2225 story gives rise to all sort of plot questions) to bear in mind.
What's really interesting about the setting of your story is how not only your characters interact with it, but how it in turn interacts back with them, changing and molding them in ways a different setting might not. As you work on your novels (or, if you haven't started your novel yet, then get to the NaNoWriMo website and get started!), think about how the setting of your story can impact your characters, instead of just considering your setting a cute backdrop for your story to happen against, like a vinyl pull-down painting at a portrait studio.
On Sunday, we'll look at a very important aspect of writing a rough draft of a novel -- one that is crucial when writing a novel in a month: silencing our inner critics. In the meantime, I'm off to add several thousand more words to my novel ... I hope. Good luck writing!
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