Welcome to the fourth and final exercise in this fiction writing challenge. If you’ve followed along this far, give yourself a pat on the back. You deserve it!
Over the past few exercises you have focused on building imaginative immediate settings–the rooms, buildings, and streets where the characters in your stories interact. In this exercise, we’ll explore environmental and temporal settings, where you’ll craft the wider world in which your story takes place.
Before we dive in, let's review from the previous exercises.
Every Wednesday from March 6 - March 27, a new challenge exercise has been released along with an essay and assignment that encourages you to use your imagination to craft a creative, memorable setting description. The challenge is open to all, including free subscribers! Future challenges will be available only to paid subscribers so I encourage you not to miss out on this opportunity.
You can find all exercises in the challenge in the archive, where they appear once they’re released.
A Little Background
As explained in previous exercises, setting is the place where events in your story occur. The best setting descriptions convey place, mood, time period, and more. Your responsibility as the writer is to bring your settings to life so that readers can imagine themselves in the world of your characters.
During this challenge we’re exploring the following three types of settings that may appear in your novels and stories—
Immediate settings - the immediate area where a scene takes place, such as a room, a house, or a city street. This setting type appears most often in fiction, and we spent most of our time working on this type during the challenge.
Environmental settings - the larger geographical area in which a scene or story takes place such as a town, a state, a country. Or even outer space.
Temporal setting - the time period during which the story takes place. Examples are the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, the modern era, or an imagined time in the distant future.
In Exercise 3, you crafted an immediate setting description from the character’s point of view using your imagination rather than a photograph, as done in previous exercises. You also gave your character a conflict or challenge.
Exercise 4
In this exercise your assignment is to create an environmental setting description. You may also include descriptions of the time period or era in which your story takes place.
Again, an environmental setting is the larger geographical area where a story or scene takes place, such as a city, country or perhaps outer space. Temporal setting refers to the era or period of time in which your setting takes place. This can be historical, contemporary, or futuristic. Think of both environmental and temporal settings as the backdrop for your story. They are present throughout, in every scene (although they can change over time), even when not actually mentioned.
Environmental and temporal settings can be described in detail all at once. This is often done at the beginning of a story (see the Queen Sugar excerpt below) or when a new geographical area is introduced (see the excerpt from the final chapter of Game of Thrones below). The descriptions can also be woven throughout the story (see The Great Gatsby excerpt below).
For this exercise, your settings can be based on a real geographical location and time period or an imagined one. As with immediate settings, you want to use environmental and temporal settings that support the plot and characters in your story. For example, you probably wouldn’t plant a farmer in the middle of a sprawling metropolis.
Remember, though, this is your story to tell. Be imaginative. Be inventive. Use the setting types as needed. To make your descriptions compelling and believable don’t hesitate to do some research. This may be especially be needed if your setting is historical or futuristic. You can search Google and books for photographs to get a real feel for your chosen place and time period.
Following are environmental and temporal setting descriptions from a few widely read novels representing a variety of genres.
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald—
I lived at West Egg, the—well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them. My house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season. The one on my right was a colossal affair by any standard—it was a factual imitation of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool and more than forty acres of lawn and garden. It was Gatsby’s mansion.
Here the narrator describes the environment where his house is located by contrasting it to another more desirable area nearby (East Egg). He refers to the distinction between the two areas as “superficial” because they’re both obviously very wealthy neighborhoods; it’s just that those who live in West Egg are “new money,” whereas those in East Egg are more discreet about their wealth.
Readers are aware by this point that the novel takes place on Long Island, New York, during the Jazz Age or Roaring Twenties. The mood and opulence of that era continues in this paragraph through the language and some of the references.
Queen Sugar, by Natalie Baszille—
Three days ago, Charley Bordelon and her eleven-year-old daughter Micah, locked up the rented Spanish bungalow with its cracked tile roof and tumble of punch-colored bougainvillea and left Los Angeles for good. In an old Volvo wagon with balding tires and a broken air conditioner, they followed the black vein of highway–first skirting the edge of Joshua Tree, where the roasted wind roared in their faces, then braving the Mojave Desert. They pushed through Arizona and New Mexico, and sailed over the Texas prairie.
Twenty-four hours ago, they crossed into Louisiana where the cotton and rice fields stretched away in a lavish patchwork of pale greens and browns, and a hundred miles after that, where the rice and cotton fields yielded to the tropical landscape of sugarcane country.
Now it was the next morning, their first full day in Saint Josephine Parish. They hadn’t seen a house or car since they turned off the Old Spanish Trail . . .
In this description we learn about the changing environment as Charley departs Los Angeles by car, drives across the Southwest, and heads on to the rural south with her daughter. We also get an approximate sense of the time period (temporal descriptions), such as with references to a “Volvo” and an “air conditioner.”
Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin—
The shore was all sharp rocks and glowering cliffs, and the castle seemed one with the rest, its towers and walls and bridges quarried from the same grey-black stone, wet by the same salt waves, festooned with the same spreading patches of dark green lichen, speckled by the dropping of the same seabirds. The point of land on which the Greyjoys had raised their fortress had once thrust like a sword into the bowels of the ocean, but the waves had hammered at it day and night until the land broke and shattered, thousands of years past.
All that remained were three bare and barren islands and a dozen towering stacks of rock that rose from the water like the pillars of some sea god’s temple, while the angry waves foamed and crashed among them.
From this environmental description, as one of the main characters approaches the region from the sea, we get a fantasy setting and time period (“thousands of years past”; “sea god’s temple”). We also sense that the location has seen better days.
To Summarize Your Assignment for Exercise 4—
Come up with your own geographical setting and describe the environment. You can also include descriptions of the time period if you wish.
Keep your description under 150 words.
Share it with the rest of us if you’d like feedback.
Feel free to provide considerate, constructive comments on the shared work of others.
When you’re done, if you want feedback, I encourage you to share what you’ve written in the comment section. That way others can benefit from my comments as well as the comments of other challenge participants. We are here to learn and grow as writers.
I’m really looking forward to reading your environmental and temporal descriptions. If you have questions feel free to post them in the comments or respond via email. And please, share this newsletter/post with anyone you think might like to join the challenge.
Looking forward to the next challenge.
Thank you for this, especially the examples!