setting

The place and time in which the action of a narrative takes place.

See also:

• Model Place Descriptions
• Comparison in Sarah Vowell's Place Description
• Joseph Mitchell's Place Description: McSorley's Saloon
• The Land of Little Rain, by Mary Austin
• Lists in William Least Heat-Moon's Place Description
• Mood (Composition and Literature)
• Parenthetical Details in Capote's Place Description

Examples and Observations:

• "The first den was a rock cavity in a lichen-covered sandstone outcrop near the top of a slope, a couple of hundred yards from a road in Hawley. It was on posted property of the Scrub Oak Hunting Club--dry hardwood forest underlain by laurel and patches of snow--in the northern Pocono woods. Up in the sky was Buck Alt. Not long ago, he was a dairy farmer, and now he was working for the Keystone State, with directional antennae on his wing struts angled in the direction of bears."
  (John McPhee, "Under the Snow." Table of Contents, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1985)



• "Nonfiction has done a much better job in terms of setting the scene, I think. . . . Think of all the splendid nature writing, and adventure writing--from Thoreau to Muir to Dillard, . . . where we have fine settings of scenes. Setting the scene precisely and well is too often overlooked in memoir. I'm not sure exactly why. But we--the readers--want to be grounded. We want to know where we are. What kind of world we're in. Not only that, but it is so often the case in nonfiction that the scene itself is a kind of character. Take the Kansas of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, for example. Capote takes pains right at the beginning of his book to set the scene of his multiple murders on the plains and wheat fields of the Midwest."
  (Richard Goodman, The Soul of Creative Writing. Transaction, 2008)