Setting

1. Setting Feature Menu Setting Setting, Mood, and Tone Setting and Character Setting and relationships/plot movement Practice

2. Setting Setting draws us into the world of a story. Details of setting tell us • where and when events are happening • how the situation feels • who the characters are • what challenges the characters face

3. Setting Details about a place usually are an essential part of a story. • The setting may include people’s customs—how they live, dress, eat, and behave.

4. Setting Setting also may reveal a time frame. era time of day season [End of Section]

5. Setting, Mood, and Tone Setting can add to a story’s emotional effect—its mood or atmosphere. relaxed, carefree foreboding, mysterious lonely, sad

6. Setting, Mood, and Tone Details of setting also help express tone—the writer’s attitude toward a subject or character. Listen to this passage. What is Mark Twain’s tone? What details help create that tone? The furniture of the hut was neither gorgeous nor much in the way. The rocking-chairs and sofas were not present, and never had been, but they were represented by two three- legged stools, a pine-board bench four feet long, and two empty candle-boxes. The table was a greasy board on stilts, and the table-cloth and napkins had not come—and they were not looking for them, either. from Roughing It by Mark Twain

7. Setting, Mood, and Tone Quick Check The water is now just below my windows on the ninth floor. There is nothing to do but watch. The water is filthy—there had been the six-week garbage strike, and all the city’s garbage is awash—and the seagulls are everywhere, feasting. from Notes from a Bottle by James Stevenson What details reveal the location? What details reveal the situation? What mood do they create? [End of Section]

8. Setting and Character Setting also can reveal character. • What do these details tell you about Meg? Meg sat back in the stylish chair and chatted on her cell phone. The shopping bags at her feet bore the colorful labels of many different stores—but each seemed to have “fashionable” and “expensive” written all over it. [End of Section]

9. Setting and relationships/plot movement In some stories, the characters’ environment • reveals relationships/plot movement • directly affects the story’s meaning [End of Section]

10. What does this setting tell you? A few months after my twenty-first birthday, a stranger called to give me the news. I was living in New York at the time, on Ninety-fourth between Second and First, part of that unnamed, shifting border between East Harlem and the rest of Manhattan. It was an uninviting block, treeless and barren, lined with soot-colored walk-ups that cast heavy shadows for most of the day. The apartment was small, with slanting floors and irregular heat and a buzzer downstairs that didn’t work, so that visitors had to call ahead from a pay phone at the corner gas station, where a black Doberman the size of a wolf paced through the night in vigilant patrol, its jaws clamped around an empty beer bottle.

11. What does this setting tell you? The hospital bed and other equipment had been brought the day before. Two taciturn men rang the doorbell, brought the metal contraption in as if they were delivering a table or sofa, and put it together in the bedroom. Then came the IV equipment—which had been ordered just in case—and diapers, lying coyly in the corner in a cardboard box. The medications were in packets on the dresser. “Splendid,” Elsa said from the bed. “More splendid than any hotel I’ve been in.” “Glad you like it,” [Martti answered] “But,” she said, lowering her voice as if she thought the movers were still outside the door listening and she did not want to offend them, “I still intend to sleep with you.”

12. The End