writing tips Archives ⋆ Be the Cat

Setting: From the Mountains to the City Streets

Liana Gardner — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 12:00:55 +0000

Setting can be far more than a pretty description. Last week, we talked about how Mark Twain and Kate DiCamillo use their setting to influence their stories. Depending on the storyline, I sometimes struggle with how to make setting work at a deeper level than mere decoration. Sometimes that is the point. The author might want the reader to feel the familiarity of the events of the story taking place where it might be anywhere, including their own backyard.

More frequently, the author is unable to wrap their arms around how to make the setting work for them to the point where the story couldn’t take place anywhere else. I’d like to review two of my works as examples of where the setting is integral to the events, so that should it be set elsewhere, it wouldn’t be the same story.

Washington Academy — When the Building Has Secrets

Washington Academy in 7th Grade Revolution isn’t a generic school. It’s a charter school housed in a post-Civil War mansion in Spruce Pine, North Carolina. The building has tunnels, secret passages, and a cavern no one knew existed until seventh graders had a reason to find it.

The setting does something specific: it makes the students’ rebellion plausible. An ordinary school building offers nowhere to hide, no secrets to uncover, no historical mystery to anchor a plot. But a nineteenth-century mansion with hidden rooms and underground passages? The building itself is practically asking to be explored by curious twelve-year-olds who’ve declared independence from adult authority.

The Blue Ridge Mountains visible from the classroom window are also doing quiet work throughout the book. Dennis looks out at them and feels the pull of something beyond the walls that contain him. The mountains aren’t described at length, but their presence, and the contrast between their wildness and the school’s rigid structures, says something about what Dennis is fighting for.

The setting isn’t just where the story happens. It’s why the story can happen.

Los Angeles as Living Landscape

Secret of the Red Key (Homeless Myths, Book 1), a work in progress, uses Los Angeles in a way worth examining because the city isn’t interchangeable with any other American setting.

Los Angeles is specifically the right place for a story about homeless children who are also warriors destined to give mankind a second chance. Skid Row, the largest concentration of homeless population in the United States, grounds the children’s reality in something undeniably true. Little Tokyo, where the annual Obon Festival takes place, becomes the backdrop for supernatural encounters. Los Angeles sprawls from ocean to mountains, its districts laid out like a patchwork quilt with the Music Center bordered by a cathedral, Skid Row, a park, and the superior courthouse, each piece distinct in texture and character yet somehow cohesive. The tunnel system beneath the streets even becomes both sanctuary and danger as the series progresses.

Each location is doing character work. Skid Row establishes the stakes of the children’s daily survival. Little Tokyo opens a window into a cultural tradition the story needs. The ocean’s edge provides the mythological resonance of a liminal space—neither land nor sea. The tunnels mirror the children’s own hidden existence, invisible to the city above.

Remove Los Angeles and you don’t just lose a backdrop. You lose the framework within which the story operates.

How to Make Your Setting Work

If you want your setting to function as a character rather than decoration, start by asking these questions:

Could this story happen anywhere else? If the answer is yes without significant loss, dig deeper into what makes your specific place unique, its history, geography, social texture, and secrets.
What does the setting want? A place with strong character has something like an agenda; it rewards certain behaviors and punishes others. The Mississippi River rewards Tom’s wildness and punishes his attempts at conventional respectability. Naomi rewards vulnerability and connection. Washington Academy rewards curiosity and resourcefulness.

What does the setting know? Old places have history. That history can be a resource, a threat, or both. McDougal’s Cave knows where Injun Joe hides. Washington Academy’s tunnels know where the treasure is. The Los Angeles sewer system knows what lurks beneath the streets.
What does the setting hide? Secrets are one of the most powerful tools a setting offers. The cave, the tunnel, the hidden room, the thing in the water aren’t just plot devices. They’re the setting revealing itself to characters willing to look.

Your setting was there before your characters arrived and it will be there after they leave. Give it the weight it deserves.

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Setting — Not Just a Pretty Place

Liana Gardner — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 13:21:09 +0000

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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Strong Emotions and Situations in Stories and in Life

Liana Gardner — Thu, 15 Jun 2023 15:05:33 +0000

Have you ever read a book that made you feel like you were living the story along with the characters? A book that made you think about your own life and how you would handle the challenges they faced?

Novels are powerful. They help us understand ourselves and others better. Reading helps us cope with difficult emotions and situations, such as grief, bullying, and survival, which are common themes in middle grade and young adult books. They are also common experiences in many people's lives. If you haven’t faced some of these issues yourself, you probably know someone who has.

So how can reading novels or writing stories help us deal with these issues? And how can we use these issues to create our own stories? Here are some tips and ideas:

How Stories Help Us Deal with Strong Emotions and Situations

We feel less alone. When we read about characters who are going through the same things as we are, we relate to them and feel like we have a friend who understands us. We learn from their experiences and see how they cope with their problems.
Reading helps us process our emotions. When characters are feeling sad, angry, scared, or happy, we can empathize with them and feel those emotions too. This can help us release our own feelings and process them in a healthy way. We can also share the books we like to communicate our feelings to others.
We find hope and inspiration. When characters overcome their difficulties and achieve their goals, we feel hopeful and motivated. We admire their courage, resilience, and creativity, and try to emulate them in our own lives. And sometimes we find ideas and solutions for our own problems.

How to Use Strong Emotions and Situations to Create Our Own Stories

We use our own experiences as inspiration. If we have faced an issue in our own lives, we can use those memories as a starting point. We write about how we felt, what we did, and what we learned from those situations. We use our experiences as a springboard for the imagination by changing some details or adding fictional elements.
We use our imagination to create new scenarios. If we have not faced a scenario the character in our story is facing in our own lives, we can still write about them by using our imagination. We can think of what-if questions, such as "What if I lost my best friend?" or "What if I was stranded on an island?" or "What if I was bullied at school?" We can then imagine how we would react and what would happen next.
Research—research—research. Whether we use our own experiences or our imagination, research is essential to make our stories more authentic and accurate. Read books and articles about whatever situation has arisen in your story. Talk to people who have gone through those issues or are experts on them. Then use what you’ve learned to drop in a detail here or there which evokes emotions in those who read the story.

Writing novels or stories is challenging but rewarding. Rain Falling on Embers deals with the themes of grief, bullying, survival, and love, to name a few. A challenge to write, but I am so glad I did. It turned out to be a gripping and inspiring story that shows how Katie McCabe overcomes her challenges and grows as a person, finding hope and happiness in her new surroundings.

So next time you read a book, think about how it makes you feel and what you learn from it. And next time you write a story, think about how you can use your experiences, imagination, and research to make it engaging and meaningful.

Happy reading and writing!

This post is part of the Young Writers Series: for more tips, click here.

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