by Peggy Bechko
If you don’t think much about it and just sort of throw settings in as you need there, just for color and background, then maybe you need to pause and think about that again….
Okay, done thinking? Hope you’ve come to some good conclusions, namely just how important settings can be to novel or script. In fact, setting can become so central to a story that it’s almost another character. Think about it – Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Martian series – he created his own Mars. Settings and characters to go with it. There were precise and detailed settings full of color and life on their own. And when the movie was made all that detail became real on the screen. And, the director didn’t need to have pages and pages of written instruction to get there.
He also didn’t need a lot of those pages when he has at his fingertips the ability to project lots and lots of images for the ‘reader/watcher’ to absorb.