One of the best ways to incorporate descriptions of your setting into your story is by making the setting itself feel like a character in the book. There are several ways to do this:

Use culture to describe your setting. Books set in the Deep South but written by someone who’s never lived in the South may get all of the details right when describing what things look like, but they aren’t going to be able to describe what the air smells like after a rainstorm; how in the height of summer, the clouds roll in during the hottest part of the afternoon and release a quick, drenching downpour that does nothing to lower the temperature, but raises the humidity to armpit-of-Satan levels; when the azaleas start to bloom—and what they look like lining most residential streets and the campus of LSU; the electric anticipation of the entire campus on Saturday afternoon as everyone makes their way to Tiger Stadium; the way that 50 degrees with 75% humidity can be bone-chilling; or local idioms like, “How y’all are?” or “’Preciate ya!” or that we don’t all walk around calling each other “Hon’” all the time. Incorporating the local culture—the flavor, the uniqueness of social customs, language, and the “this is how things have always been done here”-ness—pulls it into the forefront of the writing without its overwelming the characters or the story.

Use specific, unique details. Did you know that in Baton Rouge, almost all of the main streets are concrete and not asphalt—and that the longitudinal grooves and the latitudinal cracks between blocks of concrete create a unique-to-Baton-Rouge sound and rhythm when driving? Whereas in Nashville, almost all of the roads are asphalt—a major exception being the I-440 loop that bypasses downtown (although they patch it with asphalt, which really just makes it worse). When you think of azaleas, do you picture a small bush with little blossoms? Then you’ve never seen Louisiana-style azaleas. Springtime in Baton Rouge was one of my favorite times of year when these huge shrubs that lined most residential streets (and the LSU campus, as mentioned above) burst into large white, pink, and fuscia blossoms.

Use specific locations/names. Use street names, names of local businesses, or names of national chains you know exist in that location. To add local flavor to my fictional city in Louisiana, I don’t have them go to Starbucks for coffee. They go to Beignets s’il Vou Plait (like Cafe DuMond in New Orleans). I don’t have them shop at Kroger or Publix. They shop at Bordelon’s. They don’t eat at Olive Garden, they eat at Palermo’s Italian Grill—which serves Cajun-inspired pasta dishes like crawfish ravioli. The sister of my heroine in Menu for Romance owns a seafood restaurant that has a pirogue (PEE-ro) hanging from the ceiling. The bookstore where my characters like to go to read and have coffee is Blanchard LeBlanc, not Barnes & Noble. One of the main residential areas of my city features names of Louisiana plantations such as Oak Alley, Destrehan, and Rosedown. The tallest building in downtown is Boudreaux Tower, and the glass-enclosed, huge event venue at the top of it is Vue de Ceil, not the Skyview. If you are using a real location, you must make sure you do your research really well. Nothing will betray your lack of familiarity with a place than getting something out of place which is familiar to locals. For example, I read something supposed to be set in Nashville which had the character looking out of the Bluebird Cafe onto Music Row. I immediately knew the author had never been to Nashville—nor had he or she even looked at the location of the Bluebird on a map—because it’s several miles away from Music Row and looks across at a strip shopping center in Green Hills.

Finally, the setting can affect the mood of the scene. In the first two Bourne movies, the weather reflects the emotions of what’s happening: it’s usually either raining, snowy, or cloudy for most of the movie. The three main scenes that are bright and sunny are (a) the end of the first film when he joins Marie at her shop on the beach, (b) the opening of the second film when they’re happy together in India (before the assassin shows up), and (c) the end of the second film when Bourne calls Landy and she tells him his real name and where he was born—emphasizing the happiness, the optimism of those scenes. In the third movie, however, the scene from the end of the second movie is replayed—and the sky is overcast, because in the third movie, that happens during the height of the conflict. It doesn’t have to be the weather—it can be the dilapidated state of a building that reflects the broken-down feeling of someone who’s just experienced a loss. Or it can be the opposite—the character is euphoric despite the foul weather, bad traffic, dirty kitchen. How the character bounces around washing dishes, singing while she scrubs at the crusty spots on the floor can emphasize just how happy she is.

The easiest way to start incorporating Setting as Character is to have the character interact physically and emotionally with the setting. Your POV characters’ emotions should add energy and keep up the pace of the action as well as set the scene. Use the adjectives and descriptions of emotions to “paint” the landscape of the ongoing scene. If your scene takes place at night, use your character’s emotional vocabulary to set the mood:

• The hostile moon glared over the jagged wolf’s teeth of the mountains.
• The incandescent moon dangled like a diamond ring in the rosy remains of the breathtaking sunset.

Look at some scenes you’ve already written. Can you add a phrase here, a sentence there where the character interacts with the setting—picks something up, dusts off a windowsill, sees a new restaurant—without pulling the character out of the forward momentum (and without adding anything unnecessary)? Is there a way you can use the location of your setting—weather, climate, geography, topography—to create conflict for the characters?

Writing description of setting is where we really get into using all five senses and showing vs. telling—which anyone who entered the Genesis contest (or other writing contests) will be judged on. In Setting, Jack Bickham wrote:

Psychologists have repeatedly shown that sight is the dominant sense for most normal people. Therefore, it stands to reason that your sense descriptions most often will be dominated by how things appear. Hearing impressions usually rank second, but one can easily imagine circumstances in which tactile impressions might rank higher in story importance.

Obviously, our characters are going to “see” the setting. But the worst way for them to do this is to walk into a room and immediately mentally inventory everything about the room. For example:

She entered the front parlor. The parquet floors gleamed in the midday light. Blue chintz fabric covered the settee, arm chairs, and chaise lounge which sat in a conversation circle near the exquisite, enormous, Egyptian-marble fireplace. The ceiling soared twenty feet above, painted a deep salmon accented by the white coving that ran along the junction of the wall and ceiling. The windows at the far end extended nearly floor to ceiling . . .

We’ve completely stopped the forward movement of the story to describe the room—to TELL what it looks like—just like when we describe our characters by having them look at themselves in a mirror. Instead, have the characters interact with the setting:

She entered the front parlor. Lady MacDougall sat enthroned like Queen Victoria on a blue chintz-covered settee and motioned Elizabeth to take the matching arm chair opposite. The salmon-painted walls made the duchess’s white hair glow pink. Elizabeth flinched when a log shifted in the blazing fire in the enormous fireplace surrounded by the marble the previous Lord MacDougall had brought back from Egypt himself. Elizabeth looked past the duchess at the promise of freedom beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows on the distant end of the room. . . .

Both paragraphs describe the same room. But which one gives more of a sense of setting—more of a feeling that you’re there in the room with the character? (And notice, I also incorporated a second sense in this example: her hearing the log shifting in the fireplace to draw her attention to it.)

The description of the scene shouldn’t all come at once . . . unless there is something vastly important about the look of the setting—such as a pauper entering a palace for the first time, but even then, be sure to tie emotion and the five senses to the experience of the setting.

Here’s an example of showing a setting through the sense of smell and touch:

The heavenly aroma of garlic, basil, and oregano mixed with the unmistakable yeasty scent of fresh bread and wafted on the cool air that blew in her face when she opened the door. Anne’s salivary glands kicked into overdrive and her stomach growled. She really needed to stop skipping lunch. (Kaye Dacus, Stand-In Groom)

From that description, where has she just walked into?

Try this exercise at home. Close your eyes and concentrate only on what you can hear. Make a list. Then, do the same thing again, but focus only on smell. Breathe through your mouth a few times. What does the air taste like (or what does the gum you have in your mouth taste like? or the coffee you’re drinking?)? Open your eyes and write down these descriptions of your current setting. Then, stand up and close your eyes again. Carefully walk around the room and feel things. What does the upholstery on your desk chair feel like? Is it a hard wooden chair, a firm ergonomic chair, or a cushy papasan chair? Don’t think about what it looks like—describe what it feels like.

Using only sight and sound senses to develop your setting is like watching the Lord of the Rings or Star Wars movies in “fullscreen” mode versus in “widescreen” mode. TBS runs the LOTR movies quite often. I’ve had the extended editions of these films since their release, therefore, I’m used to watching them in the widescreen version. Just watching a few minutes of it on TBS in fullscreen mode, I felt like I was missing important pieces of the movie, simply because I was losing 50% of the setting—and that was just visual. If, as Emeril Lagasse would say, we had “smell-o-vision” and could smell the setting as well as seeing and hearing it when we watch movies, how much deeper into the world of the film would we be? Therefore, if you include smell, taste, and touch sensations in your story, you’re drawing your reader deeper into your world.

Now, what can you do to incorporate the setting without stopping to describe it?

LONDON. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if the day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.

What would Charles Dickens’s work be without a description like that of London? The above quote are the first two paragraphs of Dickens’s Bleak House which I am currently slogging through. (One caveat when extolling Dickens as an example of picturesque, poetic description: most of his books were published serially, and he was paid by the word; so the more verbose he was, the more money he made.)

Before we can talk about describing a setting, we need to ask some important questions:

• Where is the story going to be set? Geography? Time? Real? Fictional?
• Does the setting have an impact on the story?
  –Sure, I could have chosen to set Stand-In Groom in Nashville. But would the idea of a local guy going off to Hollywood and making it big in the film industry have as much of an impact on Nashville when he comes back for his wedding? Not in a city teaming with celebrities. But in a smaller town that isn’t known as a repository for big-name stars, it makes a big difference.
• How important will the specific pieces of the setting be to the story? Will weather, climate, geographic features, etc., play roles in what happens in the story? If you need a desert, don’t set your story in Georgia. If your character climbs mountains every weekend for fun, make sure to put her somewhere within easy driving distance of mountains—probably not Kansas or Nebraska. What about the character’s house or workplace? How important are the different “set pieces” that you’ll use?
• What does the location of your setting (geography, regionality, size of the city/town) say about your character(s)? If you hear that a character has a huge family that she has Sunday dinner with every week after church, what area of the country are you most likely going to assume she lives in? If you want a fish-out-of-water situation, put someone in a region totally unfamiliar to them (like a Brit in Louisiana).
• Can you use your chosen setting to create conflict for your characters? A blizzard that shuts down all the roads when your character needs to get somewhere. A drenching downpour on the day of the outdoor wedding your wedding planner has been killing herself to plan. A tornado that carries your heroine off to the merry old land of Oz. A house that’s falling apart necessitating your very cultivated male character hire a contractor—and the only one willing to take the job is a woman.
• Which characters will be viewing, interacting with, and thinking about the setting? What do they know about it? Is it a city they’ve lived in their whole life? Somewhere new? Keep in mind—the more familiar you are with a place, the more you tend to overlook things. Someone new in town is going to notice a lot more things like statues, historical landmarks, unusual buildings, etc.
• What POV will you be using? Description of the setting in deep 3rd POV is going to be different than a more omniscient POV where it’s the narrator who’s describing the setting. Does the character like or dislike the setting? That will make a great deal of difference in what adjectives and verbs you choose to use in your description.

For Discussion:
What is your setting? How do you choose where your stories will be set? How important is the location of your setting to your story?