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The Magic of Worldbuilding in Fiction
What imagined worlds teach us about setting, place, and atmosphere.
Setting, Place, and Atmosphere
A wonderland chocolate factory, a high-tech arena where teenagers fight to the death, a sprawling haunted hotel in the Colorado mountains — each of these settings immediately conjures recognition in our minds. These are the landscapes in which authors have told great stories, and each is the product of pure creative invention.
While characters are crucial to great fiction, so is the world where the story unfolds. Humans, except in extreme cases, don’t live entirely internal lives. Our environment constantly shapes our thoughts, feelings, and actions. For this reason, the world you create shapes your story as much as your characters do. This is true for any genre. Imagine Yann Martel’s The Life of Pi without the ocean, or Stephen King’s Misery without Annie Wilkes’s remote cabin.
An imagined world is comprised of many parts, but it requires at least three things: setting, place, and atmosphere.
Setting refers to the location and time period of a story, much like the backdrop behind a stage. In The Great Gatsby, the setting is 1920s Long Island. In The Hunger Games, it’s the dystopian world of Panem.