Settings are left over from the days when you had to have hunted an enormous mammoth (who only just got away) over on the other side of the mountain that nobody's ever been to - purely to keep everybody's brains in the story They know you didn't go there, but part of the story is always that you left the cave yesterday and walked across all the familiar places. So it must be true - and the pretense of truth is what makes fiction It's not the characters that need to be in a place - they're quite happy wherever the book's left, so long as there's no silverfish or coffee. It's readers need place - they won't risk opening the mind's eye until a pretense is started I won't talk about my WIP till that other thread reaches a conclusion, so instead:- YOU ARE STANDING AT THE END OF A ROAD BEFORE A SMALL BRICK BUILDING. AROUND YOU IS A FOREST. A SMALL STREAM FLOWS OUT OF THE BUILDING AND DOWN A GULLY. (Colossal Cave, 1976) I like this example because they remembered that all of this is just a precursory ritual to get the listeners to open their minds-eyes Road. Brick building. Forest. Small stream. Gully. No description required: make your own picture or we can add that in when graphics are invented And this is a modern, 1970s fantasy-genre, so the reader can interact - and it's even more minimalist than it first appears There wouldn't even be a gully unless you could use it to FILL BUCKET or somesuch It was all based on an actual cave, but nobody has ever been there and it closed up and ceased to exist once it was in a story It's only 10,00 words - a short story, but nearly all of it consists of GO EAST, GO WEST and the main character is off-screen Maybe an opposite in video games is Papers, Please (2013). The characters in that are like the settings in an adventure, but they come to you. I don't think it matters if there is lots of movement between places or none, since it's all false anyway For me, that's the only fun in writing places - the reader working out that the characters are only ever in kitchens, which are the same kitchen. Or that space and time have been verbally switched round. Or that tiny people are carrying the scenery around and it's a stage Another non-book example to close with: Tarkovsky's Stalker (1979) - which is obviously set in a field, but it becomes 'The Zone' thanks only to the character-writing
For avoiding the white room...I make it part of the plot and give it a personality. It's themed to match the tone of the main characters or story. Like a goudy, coveted building that the character is in love with and wants to own because they are greedy and want more. My favorite so far involved an unreliable narrator where the setting seems to shift, showing her things from the depths of her psyche or she watches as things come alive that shouldn't. Having something like that also forced me to push more solid descriptions so that readers wouldn't float away with the unreliable. I have to have their feet grounded and their head dizzy, if you know what I mean? I was little more wordy than normal about intimate sensual descriptions--going on about the sounds, smells, specific colors, textures, and the decoration scheme--I wanted a really strong vibe of the space before it starts to melt. Or at least, that was the goal haha. I've always worked with limited settings. Or perhaps I just think of all my settings as limited? So like if it's a city I consider that city to have its own specific overall personality and to me, that is "closed" even if the characters move around the city and see different parts of it. I like giving it a sense of just being different rooms in a house or something like that. You never forget you are in the city, even when in the stores or streets or etc.
Ooh, that's a great approach! I did that with my haunted house story, and having specific personalities in mind (a seductive but terrifying incubus and succubus pair) really helped me bring the place to life. It gave my characters something to react to emotionally. I haven't really visualized my other, less speculative settings that way, though, so it might be interesting to try. Thanks for bringing it up!
