How To Create Atmospheric Settings
Interesting settings can help your book stand out for agents and publishers and make it easier for publicity to promote it.
Why bother putting effort into scene setting? Aren’t those the boring descriptive bits? Well yes, done badly, scene setting can feel like tedious filler. But done well, it’s brilliant in so many ways:
➟ Good scene setting leap-frogs conscious thought, flooding the senses with sights, sounds, smells, tastes and touches. Your reader will boomerang to their own personal associations and then get plonked back into the middle of your scenes, experiencing them viscerally.
➟ Settings evoke the mood of your book, getting the reader into the right emotional state for your genre. Unnerved for thrillers. Feel good for romances. Sad for tragedies.
➟ Settings can almost be a character themselves, a vivid physical entity which fascinates: the island arena in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins; the graveyard in Pet Sematary by Stephen King; the room in Room by Emma Donoghue.
Interesting settings can help your book stand out for agents and publishers and make it easier for publicity to promote it. Murder in Slough? Or murder in Alaska? Though any setting can be made atmospheric, from a vast sweltering jungle, to a tiny locked cupboard.
Here are some tips on how to do settings well, with examples from the novel The Saved by Liz Webb.
1. Choose Your Settings Carefully In The Planning Stage
The Saved explores how you can ‘come back from the dead’ if you have a heart attack at freezing cold temperatures. “It was initially set in a walk-in freezer in a hotel, but when I moved the story to an isolated Scottish slate island in mid-winter, it became far more distinctive.” Liz explains.
To the right of the small bricked dock ahead is a slate beach, which hardly fits any category of ‘beach’ I’ve ever known or imagined. It’s an awesome expanse of glinting angles, endless jagged grey shards, as if this huge gunmetal sea all around us had risen up into the air, frozen, and then exploded all over the shore.
2. Visit Your Settings & Take Detailed Notes
Even if you know a place well, it’s worth experiencing it afresh. Write down absolutely everything, literal sense reactions, metaphoric comparisons, abstract connections. Scribble down as much detail as you can. It’s surprising what’s useful when you come to writing. And take photos and videos, both to inspire your writing and to use for articles, websites, and social media.
Liz tells us that she visited the slate islands of Easdale, Seil, and Luing off the west coast of Scotland to help her describe the island.
It’s long and tapering, comprised of endless curves and planes and painted with every gradation of grey, green and brown imaginable. It looks like a dappled sleeping monster, half submerged in the grey sea and basking in the sun.
3. Visit Your Settings In Different Seasons, Weathers, and Times Of Day
Liz travelled to Scotland twice, once in summer, and once in winter. She says the same scene looked and felt drastically different in different seasons, which was useful for her in showing how a character’s mood had changed.
Before the colours of the hills were sables and coffees, now they’re grubby blacks and dried poo. The trees seemed ethereal and proud last time. Now they look twisted and grasping. The hilltops were sharply defined and snow-sprinkled, now they’re blurred and shrouded in mist. I notice churned blackened earth, cut timber strewn like bodies and freshly planted trees with supporting sticks. Which look like war graves.
4. Write Freely, Edit Frugally
When you’re writing your book, use loads of detail and be as wildly creative as you can — but then edit, edit, edit to the best lines. Don’t over-describe or use esoteric vocabulary. Less is more. Your reader will fill in the gaps.
The scene is picture-perfect: the steep hills, the ins and outs of the coastline, no outline identical yet with a rightness to the lack of symmetry. And the sea is sparkling like it’s been photoshopped for a Scottish tourist board ad.
5. Use All The Scenes
Sight, sound, touch, smell and taste.
As I stumble across, the slate beach has a bizarre woody Jenga-block sound.
6. Show The Familiar Differently
It’s good to use slants to help the reader see the familiar with new eyes.
I’m awed by the huge paperweight of blue sky in front of me, pressing down on the carpet of silvery sea below it.
7. Metaphors, Similies & Parallels
All are useful, but be sparing.
What fills the sky now isn’t the gossamer streaks of earlier, but a crushing wodge of greys and purples, lowering like an alien spaceship and blocking out the light.
8. Imagination Is All
If you can’t actually go to your settings or they’re made up, don’t stress. There are loads of videos, photos, and articles online, and descriptions in books and interviews to inspire you.
Many writers had to cancel research trips during the pandemic and still wrote evocative books. However you do your research, the most important thing is to experience your scenes, physically or in your imagination, and then try to evoke the details, sensations, and thoughts that will captivate and transport your reader.
