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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/48139
License name: CC BY-SA 4.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/48139
License name: CC BY-SA 4.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

Setting is character. That is, setting functions in a story very much the way secondary characters function: it shapes and reflects the character of the protagonist, and it functions to propel the protagonist along their arc.

To a certain extent, we are shaped by the people around us, and by the environment we live in. You will grow up differently in a Pennsylvania mining town than you will in a Manhattan penthouse, regardless of your genetics. You will also grow up differently if you go to a poor school or a rich one, if your parents are scholars or farmers or drug addicts, if they are introverts, extroverts, or perverts.

But you can also choose both your environment and the people you associate with to a significant degree. You can move. You can choose different friends. You can cleve to your family or abandon them.

How your protagonist is shaped by the characters around them is fundamental to how you portray who they are, and to how you set them on their story arc towards their crisis and denouement. And, similarly, the choices they make about who to hang out with and how to treat those people tells us who they are, and thus how they will behave and react to the events of their story arc.

Setting does exactly the same thing. It shapes who the character is. The choices they make about where to live, or how to decorate their living quarters, tell us who they are, what they value, and how they will react to things. (Read Charles Ryders descriptions of his rooms at Oxford in _Brideshead Revisited_ for a perfect example of this.)

Does it matter that the couch is old and brown and stained? Yes, because it tells us either that the character is growing up in a poor household that cannot afford better furniture, or that the money is being spent on something else. Other details are needed to complete the picture. Is the couch next to an extensive liquor cabinet? Is there a battered miners lamp sitting on the arm rest, or a syringe and a piece of rubber tubing. Is there a Bob Marley poster on the wall and a battered paperback copy of The Lord of the Rings lying on the floor next to an empty pizza box? Together these details paint very different pictures of the protagonist's living arrangements, all of which suggest different circumstances or a different character.

This is the function of detail in fiction. It maps the influences which shape the character and the arc of their story. They help us understand, in small ways and in great, how and why the events of the story unfold as they should. Thus they are never arbitrary.

This is not to say that a different choice of details could not achieve substantially the same effect. Just as different characters could drive the story to the same climax, so different details of setting could do the same thing. But, nonetheless, the function of detail is precise and clinical, and it always matters.

Original score: 18