Setting Description Quotes

I don't think I could set a book in a place without knowing it really well.

However appalling to consider, however tedious to enact, every novel requires furniture, whether it is to be named or unnamed, for the characters will be unable to remain in standing position for the duration of the story.

Apparently, the city of Delhi is a 'character' in my novels. I'd argue that it's a ... city... in my novels.

When I work on a novel, I usually have one character and a setting in mind.

You just write about things that happen.

I always pity people who have to write my plot synopses.

Plot and scene are still the hardest things for me, though I think they're the building blocks of what makes a story work.

You can really help support a character if you understand the setting. So for that reason I generally write about Philadelphia.

In a novel, you have space to develop a character or a scene. You don't have that luxury in a 700-800-word picture book.

As the character talks and moves, the world around him is slowly revealed, just like dollying a camera back for a wider look at things. So all my stories start with a character, and that character introduces setting, culture, conflict, government, economy... all of it, through his or her eyes.

Yeah, in my scripts, I don't tend to describe landscape too clearly because I like to keep it really basic and sort of let people paint their own picture. I don't find it helpful to spend a page describing a setting, except for maybe a few key things.

Even if your novel occurs in an unfamiliar setting in which all the customs and surroundings will seem strange to your reader, it's still better to start with action. The reason for this is simple. If the reader wanted an explanation of milieu, he would read nonfiction. He doesn't want information. He wants a story.

I can't do fiction unless I visualize what's going on. When I began to write science fiction, one of the things I found lacking in it was visual specificity. It seemed there was a lot of lazy imagining, a lot of shorthand.

The Little Friend is a long book. It's also completely different from my first novel: different landscape, different characters, different use of language and diction, different approach to story.

I believe that every character is a setting, a world with moving parts, and on the other hand, every setting is, in fact, a character - a living breathing thing with personality and backstory. The way stories come to life, at least for me, is when these elements commune in relationship to one another.

I've always set my stories in places I know well. It frees me up to spend more imaginative time on the characters if I'm not worrying about the logistics.

Basically, fiction is people. You can't write fiction about ideas.

In the same way in which music is made of notes and a painting is made of lines of colors, the matter of literature are words.

I don't know how else to tell the story except to utilise that vocabulary: the rain, the darkness, the mansions, the framing, etc, the lighting and that sort of thing.

I have another Russian idea, too, with a place and a period, so I guess I have enough to keep me busy for quite some time, especially considering that I'm such a slow writer.

Any question about narrative storytelling is answered by Dickens.

Rule one: Write about settings you're familiar with.

In fiction, it's a big challenge to keep the reader in one place for so long.

Exposition has legitimate uses. It's the most efficient way to summarize background information, including necessary information about a character's history. It can set the stage well for a major dramatized event.

I can move my characters through it easily, because I understand the background; I've really studied it.