Setting is something that is important to every novel. It helps the reader to become immersed in the world, and it's something my editor often points out to me during my editing rounds with him. Since I see everything so vividly in my head as I write, I sometimes forget to put it on the page. But setting is far more than crafting a pretty description … it can influence the direction of the story.

When finishing a book you love, can you picture where it took place? Not just a vague sense, but the specific texture of the place—the smell of it, the way light falls, whether it feels safe or threatening, and where it keeps its secrets.

If the answer is yes, the author made the setting work. Not as wallpaper or stage dressing, but as a character.

What Setting as Character Actually Means

Setting becomes a character when it does what characters do: act, change, create pressure, reveal truth. A setting functioning at this level doesn’t just contain the story, it shapes it. Remove it and you don’t have the same story. You have a different story entirely, or no story at all.

This is different from vivid description. A writer can describe a place beautifully without making it matter. Setting as character means the place has stakes. It has personality. It pushes back.

The test is simple: could this story happen anywhere else? If yes, the setting is decoration. If no, it’s doing the work of a character.

A Look at a Classic

Decades before anyone coined the term middle grade, Mark Twain published The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. It remains one of the most instructive examples of setting as character in all American literature aimed at young readers.

Setting as character doesn’t merely surround the action. It participates in it, makes things happen, reveals who characters are under pressure, and sometimes determines their fate entirely. Twain understood this instinctively, and every significant location in Tom Sawyer proves it.

Consider Aunt Polly’s thirty-foot fence. It functions as a social statement representing the respectability Aunt Polly and her neighbors prize above almost everything else. As punishment for Tom’s unruly behavior, the fence becomes a burden of duty, the whitewashing a task designed to discipline him into conformity. But Tom manipulates his friends into paying for the privilege of doing his chore. The fence reveals Tom’s cunning precisely because it applies social pressure.

Jackson’s Island works differently. Where the fence represents confinement and social obligation, the island represents everything the town cannot reach. When Tom, Huck, and Joe Harper escape there to play pirates, they aren’t simply going somewhere. They’re going somewhere the rules of St. Petersburg don’t apply—where Aunt Polly’s respectability, the schoolmaster’s authority, and the town’s suffocating expectations have no jurisdiction. The island doesn’t just offer freedom. It defines freedom by contrast with everything left behind on the shore.

The Most Powerful Example

The setting of McDougal’s Cave acts as a character with genuine consequences. The cave is the refuge where Injun Joe hides, the place the town cannot reach him. But when the townspeople seal the cave’s entrance as a protective measure after Tom and Becky’s ordeal, they inadvertently transform his sanctuary into his tomb. The cave doesn’t change. The townspeople’s relationship to it does, and Injun Joe dies in the dark, starved, in the place he used as protection.

The cave acts. It receives Injun Joe in the guise of a haven and keeps him as a prisoner. No character made that decision. The setting did.

Twain’s genius was understanding the physical world his characters inhabited wasn’t neutral. St. Petersburg has rules, order, and suffocating respectability. The fence, the river, the island, and the cave each exist in a specific relationship to those rules—some enforcing them, some escaping them, one absorbing their consequences entirely.

Tom isn’t just a mischievous boy. He’s a boy in constant negotiation with what his specific place allows, forbids, and ultimately determines.

Could Tom Sawyer happen in a landlocked city without a cave or a river? Technically, perhaps, but it wouldn’t be the same story. The Mississippi river and its surroundings are as much a character as Aunt Polly.

Kate DiCamillo and the Town That Heals

Because of Winn-Dixie takes place in Naomi, Florida, a small town baking in the summer heat, slightly faded, full of people carrying losses they haven’t finished grieving. Opal’s mother left. Gloria Dump carries her past mistakes in the whiskey bottles hanging from the tree in her backyard, emptied before she got sober. Otis, who works at Gertrude’s Pets, has a complicated history with the law. Miss Franny Block, the librarian, has outlived almost everyone she ever loved.

DiCamillo uses Naomi’s specific locations as emotional containers, and this is where setting begins doing the work of a character. The library is where Opal finds knowledge and connection to history. The pet store is where she finds a kind of unconditional love, listening to Otis play his guitar for the animals after hours. Gloria Dump’s backyard—enclosed, private, full of the evidence of a life fully lived—is where she finds the comfort and wisdom she’s been missing since her mother left.

Each of these places does something the others can’t. They aren’t interchangeable locations within the town. Instead, they’re distinct spaces with distinct emotional functions, and Opal needs all three. DiCamillo also understands the setting’s larger function: Naomi is small enough that everyone knows everyone, which means every person Opal meets has a story connecting to every other story. The community is woven together by shared history and shared loss in a way a city couldn’t replicate.

The hot, humid Florida weather isn’t decorative either. Summer heat creates a languid, slightly suspended atmosphere in which the story’s slow healing can take place. Sudden thunderstorms pierce the somnolent tone revealing Winn-Dixie’s storm phobia, which becomes a pivotal plot point.

Transplant Opal to a suburb of Chicago and the story evaporates. The town itself is what makes the healing possible.

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For those out there who take the stance that since the book is available somewhere in the world, then it can not possibly be banned, let me say hogwash! Banning has historically been done by location, hence the phrase Banned in Boston. Banning is the restriction to an item, whether it be music, books, art, or anything else for that matter, within a locale. The decision as to whether or not I should read a particular book or not should not be decided by anyone other than me or (when I was young) my parents. The decision should be made from a position of knowledge and looking at the context of the work rather than simply an overview of the words which may be objectionable. A current example of the absurdity of banning is what has happened to Ellen Hopkins because of her bestselling novels Crank and Glass which are loosely based on her daughter’s struggle with methamphetamine abuse. Ellen was scheduled to give a talk at a middle school in Norman, OK and because a child’s parents objected to the books and they were being reviewed, the superintendent also cancelled the talk. This is outrageous. Even though the books were going through a review process, what possible harm did they think Ellen would do in a few hours chat with school children, keeping in mind she has given talks across the nation with no adverse incidents. This is a woman who wrote about something intensely personal to her, and would be the last person on earth to glamourize addiction. The books were written with the aim of potentially stopping a child from going down that path, if possible. Again, context seems to be the issue. Do the child’s parents who objected to the books have every right to object to their child reading them? Absolutely. Do they have the right to keep them from being read by other children? Absolutely not!

Several of the groups who seem to speak out against books and want them to be removed, tend to do so from the high ground of morality, or so they think. While not all calls for banning stem from religious zealots, quite a number do, which to me becomes ironic. Most religions have suffered over the years of having been banned or have been the focus of persecution at some point in their history, even in to current day. You would think somewhere along the line we would learn from history and develop some tolerance. But tolerance of the right for others to hold beliefs different to ours still seems to be a long way off.

Let’s continue the fight against intolerance and celebrate Banned Book Week by reading a banned or challenged book. I’m going to support Ellen Hopkins by reading one of her books. Ellen is also the writer of the Manifesto adopted for Banned Book Week. Banned Books Week is September 26–October 3, 2009.

Posted for the LL Book Review

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So, of course, on my way to work, what do I think about? The young adult genre and the opinions and perceptions from the outside. Having long been a fan of young adult literature, as well as writing it, I am sometimes taken aback by some of the statements of people who consider the genre to be less than. My thoughts immediately flew back in time to reading Little Women and being completely immersed in the March family triumphs and tragedies. Louisa May Alcott inspired me, through her characterization of Jo March, to want to write my own stories. I know that I am not alone in this. While Little Women is a heartwarming tale, does heartwarming automatically make it less than? Would we have missed out on some of the best writers of today had there been no Little Women to inspire? I could go into example after example of young adult books which are considered classics and a must read. Some of my favorites are Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I understand that Tom Sawyer is a much more light-weight story than Huckleberry Finn, but I happen to enjoy Tom Sawyer more because I identified with Tom a little more, and I like mischief makers in my stories. Another favorite is Dickens’s Oliver Twist.

While I have focused on the early classics of young adult literature, the list doesn’t stop there (and I am very tempted to keep naming titles, but will stop – otherwise I’ll never be done with this post). There is an important gap between children’s books and adult literature, and young adult books fill that gap. Children’s books are highly colorful, with few words and lots of illustrations. This helps capture the attention of the child and assists them in imagining the action, thoughts, and feelings of the characters in the story. The next step is to have stories without all of the colorful illustrations and more words to describe the action, thoughts and feelings of the characters in the story to allow the reader to initiate the imaginative process.

Children usually love books, and smart parents encourage this love as it gives them a basis upon which to build for their education. However, as the pictures start falling away, so do the readers. Young adult books serve the purpose of keeping the young reader hooked and growing their love of reading. Without young adult books to provide characters and story lines with which the reader can identify, will the reader search out books as an adult? Without readers, is any written work important?

There are two reasons people read:

1. To obtain information.
2. To be entertained

As far as point one is concerned, it contains all of the manuals, how to books, news articles, internet blogs on a topic, and so forth. The reading to obtain information is primarily non-fiction in nature. For point two, in addition to some non-fiction, such as memoirs, the bulk of the reading activity is in the fiction realm. Young adult books are simply stories which have a protagonist in the young adult age group. Some of the stories are fairly straightforward, however, some story lines become very complex, the same as you will find in adult fiction.

Since I read to be entertained in my leisure hours (few and far between) and read to help my mind focus at night to help me fall asleep, I will continue to read young adult fiction. I think some very exciting work is coming out of the young adult genre, and enjoy this genre along with many others. I write young adult fiction because those are the characters that keep coming to me with their stories. While not entirely true, I like to say that I don’t think I’ll ever be old enough to write adult fiction. My claim is not that I write great literature (sounds a little stuffy to me), but that I write an entertaining tale, which is something I value pretty highly.

If you’ve made it down this far, listen to what Jackson Pearce has to say. She’s quite entertaining. Enjoy.

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